805: What's Driving the College Value Debate - with Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale, Director & Research Professor, Georgetown University Center on Education & the Workforce

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, is a month... my phone is ringing. My Teams is ringing. So you probably hear that in the background all simultaneously as the wind blows here in St. Louis, Missouri to the tune of about minus 20 windchill. So I did come to work, but the wind hit me once and I almost did fall over. I'll be quite honest. I almost froze to death.

But what kept me going was my interview today with the gentleman who I'm going to interview. Do you see how these segues work and how I pull all this together? But before I get to the guest co-host and the guest today, I do want to remind the audience, and I know I'm not supposed to do this. My producer and co-founder, Alvin Freitas, always yells at me that I make these time bound. But we're literally, when this episode comes out, we'll have passed our four-year anniversary of the EdUp Experience podcast.

You have no idea how excited we are to get to that 40th anniversary. What have we done? We've done live podcasting across the world. We've been to Doha, Qatar twice podcasting. We've been at higher ed conferences all across the country. We've written a book called "Commencement: The Beginning of a New Era in Higher Education" that is based on the first 125 presidents that we interviewed on this podcast that has sold thousands of copies across the world. And, it's just been an honor, ladies and gentlemen, to interview our amazing guests to have incredible co-hosts come back after they've been a guest to co-host and interview others and that's what this is all about - organic conversation about the state of higher education today and how we can do better for students because that's what it's all about. Or else none of us have jobs. Let's be quite honest. 

Coming back again and really without notice because he emailed me this morning. I was like, what are you doing in ten minutes? He has one of the most distinctive voices in higher education. When you hear him, you kind of know it's him, right? And he's in an underground bunker right now. I'm giving him a hard time. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. The one and only Dr. Chuck Ambrose. He is a senior education consultant at Husch Blackwell and the author of "Colleges on the Brink: The Case for Financial Exigency", which I can never say. Chuck, how's it going?

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Joe, good to be with you. The short notice is determined and I know I've messed this up every time I've co-hosted. So I'm not going to do it today. The short notice was dictated by there's nobody better in higher ed that I would want to talk to, and at least listen to them than our guest. So, thanks for inviting me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Before we get to the guest, cause he does have a lot to say. So I could see, the work that he's done and I follow his work too, but you've written a book "Colleges on the Brink". And I don't think there's been a better time for this book to hit. And so I want you to use this as a platform to plug your book so intentionally and, you know, just tell everybody about your book and how it's going and why you wrote it.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Yeah, you know, again, our guest today, right, has illustrated where we are in regards to the value prop of college. And unfortunately, right, the systemic disparities that the pandemic have kind of illuminated. We're in that inflection point for higher ed. Maybe some would argue we're beyond it. But at the end of the day, the impact, right, how well we do our work affects the generational mobility of students. You know, four decades ago, we decided that college should work for all and it doesn't.

Right, and our responsibility is to provide the skills, competencies, talents required to be competitive. And we're gonna figure it out, but "Colleges on the Brink" is a playbook to get from where we've been to where we should go. And Joe, your projection of energy and future focus and leadership through EdUp helps a lot of people do that. So again, every time I have a chance to be in the conversation. But again, with this guest today, talking about ROI and kind of changing the narrative, that's great to be with you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, thank you. And I would encourage the audience to go buy Chuck's book and his co-author, Mike Neitzel. They're good guys. That's the reason why you should go do it. They've done a lot of great work in higher ed. And it's important that we support each other as well.

But let's get to our guest because I think there's just a few questions that we have for him. Just a few. I don't think we have enough time in the day, actually, to get all the questions out. Ladies and gentlemen, you know his work because you probably follow him whether you know it or not. If you're reading anything about higher education, he is the one and only Tony Carnevale. He is a director and researcher at the Center for Education and Workforce at Georgetown University. How are you?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I'm good. Glad to be here. Thanks for asking.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Carnevale. It feels good to say your last name, I gotta tell you.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I got 50 cents when I learned to spell it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, well, my last name's Sallustio, so I'm still working on that sucker. Good to see you, brother. How are you? How are things?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Things are good. I mean, this is a, I have a dream job. I used to work really hard and had lots of restraints on my work. When I came to Georgetown, I, well, Jack DeGioia, the president of Georgetown and I go way back, but I asked him, you know, I, every job I've ever had, there are things you can't say. And if you stumble and say them, you're in trouble. So I asked him, well, just tell me, Jack, I don't want to stumble here. What is it I'm not supposed to say? And he said, you can say anything you want. I got a lot worse people than you around here. Tell them like it is.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I love it. I love it. Well, that's great because we need you to say the things that you're saying. You know, Tony, you're one of the individuals out there that is doing, let me restart that. There's so much narrative around college value, supported by facts, not supported by facts. And what makes you, I think, a leader in the space is the fact that it's always fact supported. You're doing research to prove a theory or a hypothesis.

But there's so much anti-college, college is not worth it, college, you know, I joke, I see this ad, it keeps coming up on my Instagram and it's a picture of Elon Musk and he's got like a Superman suit on and he's flexing and it says, you can learn more on YouTube than you can with a college degree. And you think, who's getting impressed by this and the dangers of some of the narrative out there?

What's the general sense of this conversation, Tony? That's where I wanna start. Why do you do the work that you're doing and what is being said out there about college?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: We have entered a bad season for American colleges. My own bias about this, a lot of my work over the years prior to coming to Georgetown was political. And a lot of this is politics, that we have a culture war going on that pits college against what I think are center-right kinds of views and center-left. And the difficulty in specific terms lately is both political parties are depending on the working class to win. That is, Biden needs the blue wall in the middle of the country, north, the Republican party has to maintain the loyalty of the white working class. And so that sets up in combination with the culture war, a powerful incentive to degrade the value of college. You know, one of my favorites is Joe Biden says all the time that, you know, you can get a job at $130,000 a year because of our infrastructure bill with only a high school degree.

What he doesn't tell you is that even with the infrastructure bill, that is less than one-tenth of 1% of the high school working class. So we're in a moment when college is taking a beating and I don't think it will end anytime soon.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We've really politicized college. It's a what? It's a lightning rod for political aspirations. Is that?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: And it has been before, of course. I mean, we know, and there are debates within the higher education community about value versus economic value versus non-economic value, which are very healthy debates because both are real. And what we know, incidentally, in the literature, in the data is that the general education you get with a degree in combination with the specific education is where in your major is where you get the highest return. Now, a lot of it depends on what your major is because some majors pay a lot more than others, but there is a, it's a fractious time. I mean, our sort of knee-jerk response to this at my center, which is somewhat self-serving, but our knee-jerk response to this is just be transparent. I mean, just present the facts.

Defend general education, defend specific education, be willing to train people as well as educate them. I think that's the world we're headed for, but transparency is really, I think, crucial along the way. If the public doubts you, give them the facts. In some ways, it's the only defense you have.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you know, I think the danger of the narrative sometimes is... and we talk about equity in higher education all the time. How do we create more access and equity within college? And you wonder who is the person that is saying to their kid or what adult is thinking themselves? College is not worth it. And what is that? I don't think it's the middle upper white class. It's your underprivileged students. You know, somebody's going, hey, college is not worth it. You saw this article where the employers, the employers are dropping college degrees and you go, yeah, I mean, maybe a couple, but who are the employees, who are they? And what does that do to the generational wealth that education builds? What does that do to those that are trying to move up within to get to the middle class even? Is it dangerous? Is it as dangerous as, and I say it's dangerous because I hear it from so many college leaders. Is it as dangerous as I'm saying for those that are looking to better themselves that they're being dissuaded?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Well, we know who's listening. That is if you're a middle-class or upper middle-class family in America, college is part of your cultural heritage. It is the way we have, we're approaching, I think it's 20% of American families have two BA parents, right? Both parents have a BA. We know that those folks, you can... The one way, unless they're Bill Gates or somebody, the one way you can pass on your middle-class status or give middle-class status to your kids is to send them to college. Now that's not universally true, but it's 70% true. So there is a, those people aren't listening. They're going to do it anyway. So it's almost a cultural, I think little kids know from the time they're in first decade that they're supposed to go on to college. Other kids don't. And those are the, we know in the data, incidentally, those are the ones who listen. 

And then we have a policy debate which relates to this, which gets complicated, which is to what extent do we do training versus education? I think we should do both. And I understand there's a dilemma there because we know who's going to get the training and it's going to be lower income, minority. And then the end, we've got to do something about that. So as we move into training, which the government is doing fairly fast, I think that's a good thing. But there is an issue there about who gets training and who gets education. That's a fact. That's a fact.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Somebody we talked about listening, somebody that never listens to anything I say is my guest co-host, Dr. Chuck Ambrose. I'll just pass it over to you. I know, Chuck, we're getting you today pretty good.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Tony, again, just humbled to be in this conversation with you because as you know, we've relied on the center, your voice, the data in so many vital ways, right, to make the case. And I actually have two questions, one related to those external forces, but one related to what we've done to ourselves, right, as an industry and as an enterprise.

Those disincentives, right, from a policy standpoint, when a state actually incentivizes students to go to work when they're 16 years old, to basically give certs and training within a secondary environment that, let's say in a state that already has a low college going rate, have you extrapolated out what the economic loss is, right, the lack of college, right? Because when you start talking about $14.2 trillion of generational earnings, there's gotta be almost an equal amount of losses when we put college in the vortex of this battle.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: We've just done a report that I think you're quoting from that we went and looked because we do projections of jobs in demand for education, right? Those projections out to 2031, which we dropped maybe three weeks ago, I forget. They show that in future by 2031, there'll be 171 million jobs. You can quibble over the one, but the, of those jobs, 40% will require either a BA or a graduate degree. Another 30% will require either a two-year degree or a certificate, and another 30% will require only high school. On the other hand, 75% of the BA plus or BA graduate degree jobs are good jobs. They pay more than 55 at a minimum between the ages of 30 and 45, and they pay 75 at a minimum between the ages of 45 and 64. So in the end, you can get a good job without college. The odds are just much lower. 

And the other thing is you need to be careful when you're talking about middle skilled jobs, it's maybe 38%, that is two-year degrees and certificates, let's say, almost 40% are good jobs, especially now with infrastructure and some other things that are going on. But only less than 20% of the jobs that require high school are good jobs. There are different, and a lot of those are in the data, are males over the age of 40. So anyway, it's our, not for me, but it's our dads and granddads for younger people. So the story is clear. When we released the projections, we really get, this time, first time, we really got saying, well, that's not true. College is no longer necessary, et cetera, et cetera. We've done it many times before. I mean, we've done this for 15 years. This is the first time that I'm really biting attacks because it's just in the air at the moment. I mean, that's okay. I mean, we're not immune to criticism, but in the end, what is most striking about it is the fact that this bias is damn near universal.

I think the number we came up with in this latest study is that it would add another 13 or so trillion dollars to the economy if everybody got some college, that is all the people who didn't. And I think that's where the number is. I'm tempted somewhere between 11 and 13 trillion dollars. Now there are issues there is could the economy actually create that many good jobs? The answer at the moment is no.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: You know, Tony, we came into contact through Lumen and I think, and when we were doing the Innovation Campus in Missouri, I know you've been in the space of kind of blending work, training, and college as we tried to do through P20 work.

But the factors within, right, that are structural, let me give you three or four that I've always kind of considered are deficits. And then tell me which ones have had a bigger impact. Cost, right, just the cost of college, the time it takes to get a degree, right, which for most people today is way too long. Skills gap, right, between the degrees we produce and the talents required. And then debt, right? Because this report coming out of Clearinghouse last week that said a third of those who shoulder debt don't have a degree. To me, that's our that's our responsibilities, right? So of those, right? Which ones contribute the most right to not recognizing or listening or being drawn in? I mean, you know, I think we've got to figure this out.

Time, money, outcomes. And aren't we a little bit like healthcare where we're moving to more of a funding model on outcomes and that's ultimately where the economics of this is going?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Well, it's an interesting question because truthfully with fancy econometrics, we could probably sort through that. Frankly, we never have. You give me an idea here how you would weight these things. They're all destructive of college attainment or post-secondary education and or training attainment and more and more it's both. That's one of the things that's striking about the last decade. So for example, more than 75% of people with industry-based certifications of which there are now 40 million, I think in the American workforce, things like in the old days, it would have been a Microsoft network certification. You have to pass an exam to get the certification.

70% of people who have certifications also have degrees. So more and more, it's not training or college or training or degrees. It's both, more and more. And I think that, you know, we think about things like AI, this sort of fantastic rate of technology change. It's gonna be both for a lot of people. I think that's the cost issue has always been the core of the angst over college.

It's something that most people didn't have to do for their kids. For example, many years ago when I went to college, I think I was one of three kids in my senior high school class that went to college. Really? Yes. I'm from Northern Maine, so I don't mean for that to be the explanation, but truthfully it is. So this has changed and suddenly the public had to confront this. That is, if you're going to do well by your children, you had to get them to college.

Not to do so became a sign of failure. So we put enormous pressure on American families when the economy moved us in this direction. It's not some arbitrary, I won't go on and on about that, but people keep saying, well, you don't need a college degree to do these jobs or some post-secondary or training, et cetera. The answer is yes, you do. And the business literature will show you why. Anyway, so cost is the root of all this.

The question is how we deal with costs. And there's an important policy and political question there that's very dicey. But the second thing is time. And yes, I have a, and this is sort of a working class critique and it's not fair. That is, I remember I had to go through 12 years of history, English, et cetera, to get a high school degree. I wasn't particularly enamored of any of it, frankly. I was going to work. It didn't have much to do with my life. And then when I went to a four-year college, so the first two years, it was more general education, 14 years. And then I got to take a major. 

Time, it is one of the great enemies here in the sense that I think we've built a pathway that makes a lot of kids, the skill they need or the quality they need is perseverance. We don't get them interested very early. Now, a lot of people are interested in the academic subjects. In the end, I majored in intellectual and cultural history in college, then went to graduate school, so I had to get a job. So, you know, there is a time is, and time, the other element of time that I mention quickly, which I think is maybe even more important, and that is the age at which young people reach what economists used to think of as financial independence. In the 1970s, average, the median young person, male and female, when they achieved the average wage for their gender, right? And the female wage was lower, of course, the male wage was higher. Economists would say they were ready for family formation. That is, they had achieved a certain level of independence. That age was 25 years old. That age is now 32 years old. So there is this other time dimension in which you need work experience, you need more education and you got to pay for it. You need work experience. Generally you need three jobs to get a firm, real traction. 

And then debt, of course, we know directly that is... There are lots of studies about this and they all say the same thing. They show that lower earning families, especially families where you don't have two BAs at the head of the household or no BAs at the head of the household, these people don't make a lot of money and they are debt averse. It scares them. That is they got enough with the car and maybe if they're lucky, they got the house and then suddenly Junior's got to go to college. I mean, it is crushing. So in the end, they are debt averse. And we know directly that debt relates directly to choices young people make. And you can feel one way or the other about that. That is, I really love to major in English, but I'm going to major in education so I can be a school teacher. Do we want people to have fewer choices? Debt has a lot to do with that.

It's all three. They're kind of the three horsemen that keep people from getting the education they need. One other point I would make, and to me, it's a fundamental point, and that is beginning in the 19th century in Western would-be democracies, because we weren't then, a lot of us weren't, you had a great debate between anarchists, monarchists, and people who are in favor of Republicans and Democratic governments. They're all kind of conflicting with each other. In the end, in our world, in the West, capitalism and democracy or republics won. And the deal always, among those economists, and these are in the middle 1800s, they agreed that in a capitalist society, people were going to be unequal.

For all kinds of reasons, like who your daddy was and how much money your mother had. People are gonna be unequal, but in a republic or a democracy, everybody was equal. That is before the law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those two ideas were in conflict. One major part of our system created inequality, but benefited all of us. I still think that's true. And that is capitalism. And then secondly, we had a governmental system that demanded equality. What they came up with back in those days was education. They thought education was something that had to be done because in the end, education would make people, in those days they used to say gentlemen, because they were sexist as hell, but you know, education would give you choice. That is, it would make you a capable citizen to decide what the appropriate balance was between democracy and capitalism. And those issues were gonna constantly come up.

But then those days education had nothing to do with getting a job. After 19, progressively it did. And after 1980, 1985 really, we saw that it was post-secondary education or training. That's when we tipped over into the very modern era.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do you... I want to go back to what you said about time. I got two questions and I'll pass back to Chuck. What do you make of the three-year degree? The beginnings of the three-year bachelor degree movement here in the US, right? There's right now two schools, Ensign College and American Public University system that will be offering a 90-unit bachelor's degree. Positive negative. Is this a watershed moment for higher ed where we're going to see more of this catch on? Is it... What do you... What do you make of...

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Well, I'm not, I work in a university and I taught one year in high school way back in the day, which was the most exhausting job I've ever had. And so I don't know. I mean, I'm not somebody who, there's a depth, there's an answer to that curriculum that goes way beyond my depth. I mean, I think the point is if you can give people a good education, offer them both general and specific. The specific gets easy. You can give somebody a good specific education in a year or less. So there are people who think, well, for instance, I hear an argument from a lot of people. The example I often hear is, why can't we create two to three year engineers? Because if you took the whole curriculum, matched it all together, why does everybody have to wait four years to get that?

Part of the answer is we do know, and the literature says this over and over again, it's not much talked about in public, but the combinations of general and specific education, let's say the humanities and your engineering major, they give you the most leverage in the labor market, both for individuals in terms of... There is more important in America than in Europe, for example, because we're a much more loose, unregulated economy. It gives people the ability to move from job to job. It makes them more prone to get training or take training or go back to school. And in the end, the uber economists, which I'm not one of the people, the people who are so very good with numbers, they've demonstrated over and over again that that idea, which is very American, the idea of the degree actually makes the economy itself more flexible. 

So it is a, but it's not something people generally know. It is a, you know, it's a national Bureau of economic research papers. There are half equations and one summary at the front, but that's been known for a long time. It, it's very hard to, because when you try to sell that to the public, you know, there's a lot of it all depends there that it all depends on your specific major. It all depends on the quality of your general major, it all depends on the occupation you go into, the industry, what geographic area you're coming from or working in. It's complicated. In the end, the combination that's most powerful, the most powerful combination, by the way, at the BA level is petroleum engineer. So if you get a petroleum engineering degree in America, and I think this is still true, it was true two years ago, and it's been true for a long time. If you get a petroleum engineer degree, you can make between 120 and 140 right off the bat. And then you go up from there. So, and interestingly, the graduate degree doesn't do that much good. But we know that generally, but it is a complicated set of choices. And part of the problem we have here and one of my sort of smug solutions, cause it is a little smug with the higher ed people is just be transparent.

You know, quit, quit hiding the ball. Let's, you know, just be transparent. People will want to take history. I did in the end. It was the most interesting thing. And I wasn't smart enough to think about my future truth. But yeah, no, I, it was, you know, it was a wonderful experience for me. So I, we need to be... And we need, I think we need to sell general education harder because it's not only about, it's about a lot of things. It's about the proper functioning of a republic as I think we're learning the hard way now. And we know we did a study with the European union. We were the designated American group to study the United States on the impact of education on the development of authoritarian attitudes, long title.

And what we find, to my surprise, because usually my experience with data is you always go in thinking one thing and you come out thinking something else because the data won't support your bias. But in this case, I was surprised. It turns out in the United States, access to degrees and the humanities have a dampening effect on the development of authoritarian attitudes more than in corresponding European nations.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Boy I so many questions. It's gonna... I don't know what you're doing today Tony, but you're stuck with me until about four o'clock central. The... No matter what you do and no matter what data you put out. There's always this... I have a hard time believing you. Right. There's that... Does that affect you at all? Do you just put out the data because you're a researcher and you're just gonna produce the data? Or do you get to the point where you're trying to prove something because... because you want to? I mean, I feel that way. Sometimes I'm like, you know, I'm going to interview these people about the positive effects of higher education because nobody else is championing it in a certain way. So I'll just put it up, put them on the podcast and say, tell me all the great things about higher ed. And no matter how many great things we say, there's always somebody that says, I have a hard time believing you. And it doesn't matter whether it's data informed or not.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Yes, as I might. My children there. But anyway, and they do, I am convinced that they'll someday find out that I was right. But anyway, in the end, the reason we exist, my center, is because in the American case, the foundations, which is where we get our money, if not from Georgetown, Georgetown helps us too. But the foundations in the United States, a large share of them believe, and the ones that believe in upward mobility and trying to push opportunity, and that's most of them I know of, but their answer is almost always education, education, education. So the opportunity I had, because I'm not an educator, I mean, I was a high school teacher for a year, but in the end, the reason we got funded was because their presumption, which is we're going to use education to get this done, which dates all the way back to the early industrial conversations about the role of education with an updated story that says, it matters in terms of your earnings, which is what's new, because it didn't always matter.

The reason we got funded literally was because there were no projections of education demand in the... The Department of Education refused to do it. The Department of Labor refused to do it. I'm still mystified by that because they should have taken us out of the business a long time ago. But the combination of labor and education, there's a mall between those two departments and it all falls on the mall and nothing happens.

In the end, the reason we got funded was because we were investigating the premise of these foundations. They wanted to know they were right. Now we didn't set out to prove them right because what happened when we started doing work of this kind, we found that not every job requires a college degree. And we found out what happened. There's an evolution in the data here. And the data came to the point with the college scorecard that we now know the value of individual programs, not just colleges here. And one of two things that's happened since the eighties in America is the value of education beyond high school in general, that is your attainment level increased. And that's something that college presidents like to say, and they're right. But what they don't say as much is what changed even more were the differences in value of different programs.

So there's huge variation now in the earnings returns to different programs. So it's interesting for me because we've been on both sides of this, I don't believe what you say, which is first of all, the educators didn't like what we said because we started talking about programs. And now with this tide, and I think it's political and cultural against education, especially degree education, now we're being criticized because somebody who criticized us very sharply a couple, two months ago when we released the said, you know, every college president ought to have your study up on their wall, but I don't believe it's true because it says they're important. So we've been on both sides of this back in the early days, say the first seven or eight years we did this work, we were regarded as an annoying problem by the higher education community. That's what we prove they're valuable. So now the other people are saying, actually they say we're part of some sort of higher education industrial complex is one of the phrases.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It's the higher ed Illuminati. Sorry guys, I can't tell you about it. Chuck might be able to tell you about it.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Are you kidding me? No, I'm not.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, I'm with Joe. I think we could end this sometime later this afternoon over some adult beverages or something. But Tony, I mean, you, so your work and Joe's question about, you know, people just disagreeing and arguing with data and especially underlining kind of the need for transparency. You know, you've been such a, I think the work of the center and your voice has been kind of us frame, right, outcomes, value. Yes, right, when it tells us we're a value, we like it, right, when we think differently about an alternative path to mobility, maybe not so much. But, you know, there's a narrative that's been created.

You know, internal of the institution, you know, the raw fact that we've got way too many people who cost too much that students who are willing to pay or able to pay can resource, right? So you said we kind of go back to the core of cost. And I actually thought the recession and part of the work we did in Missouri, you know, I thought really a disruptive model for blending the lines between high school and college from school to work, the P20 work. You know, I thought cost was going to, I thought we were going to have to change. We haven't really even figured it out through a pandemic, right? So if a recession wasn't enough for an economic disruption, a pandemic, do you see, right? Do you see a, if you were taking the outcome data and value, what would you tell a college president to respond to first and most?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I think if you're the leader of any institution, and boy, I don't envy a lot of college presidents now in what they're asked to do. If you're leader of any institution in this economy and society, it is very much a capitalist system. And the bottom line is your business model.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Broke. Yeah, the bottom line is the bottom line.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: In the end, the power of that is lost, I think, on the general public or people who talk about this. In the end, colleges and churches have business models. They're not... Bulls are. They're not... So I feel sorry, frankly, for a lot of college presidents. Now, I have some... biases about the business model. And a lot of this comes up in the recent affirmative action decision. That is people are pushing very hard saying, let's not use race anymore, let's use class for affirmative action sake. And we'll get race that way. But that is a statistically debatable proposition. The bottom line on that in my experience with people who tried to do that and I've been involved in this through a couple of foundations sort of in an advisory role. What you run into immediately in a room full of college presidents is they will say to you, if you want me to get 20% Pell, if you want me to get a high percentage of low income kids in my school, the bottom line is I can't afford it. And now, in some cases, if you're talking to somebody who's the president of a college with a 60 gazillion bank account on the side, the answer there is, if I touch that money, I get fired. So my only course to get more lower income kids in is I will never be home. I'll be on the road all year long. And if I've got enough leverage to raise money.

And that's what's coming out after this decision. All the studies are showing that. That is that we don't, the system doesn't work. Pell grants will not cover completion of a college degree in anything like a selective college. That is because of the cost. And now we've got this bill on the Hill for training, which I like very much, but I try to stay away from the pay-fors as they call them, the way they're going to finance it. Because they're going to tax college endowments. That's what they want to do. I don't want to be part of that conversation. After a while, you get tired of being beaten about the head and ears. But I think that is a reality here. That is your business model dictates your possibility, and then after that, it's your values.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Let me drill down that real quick, because there's a core, again, truth in what you're saying. And you underlined, right, the value of the humanities. You underlined the synthesis and creativity and the breadth of learning that you take through general ed as it contributes to a major. You know, Tony, the data internally would say, and again, you underlined this, those programs that have been really productive, their outcomes in regards to debt to earnings or gainful employment or all those kinds of things. But you know, we don't resource that way, right? The humanities as a discipline, you know, as a collection of disciplines are not broken, but how we've allocated the resources to the humanities is, right? You just can't afford the way that we have elected to deliver, right? So, you know, there's as much internal data that can align right outcomes to value as you're illustrating externally to once you, you know, kind of equate that to the degree. What's your take right on the department's financial transparency and gainful employment requirements that are coming to really provide value statements on programmatic level?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I think we should be doing that. Yeah, I think it is inevitable in some ways it's already arrived. That is the college scorecard, the recent gainful employment regulations, and I keep forgetting it, the DVT, is - 

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Financial transparency, right?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: FTP. V? V? V? Anyway, I can never remember. There's too many acronyms out there. So there is a lot of data coming. And I think the gainful employment rates and this new website they're going to build that the Department of Education with a lot more data. And then there's the possibility of the College Transparency Act, which just blows the top off, which is a bill that is stuck on the hill. It's become a political football. It'll eventually pass. I have a feeling by the time it passes, we won't need it anymore because the department is being quite aggressive about this, surprisingly to me. I'm the sort of person that would rather duck than get his. So I think we're gonna have all that information. I don't, what I hear people say, and I'm not an educator, I have never tried to run an education institution. Nobody would be dumb enough to allow me to do that.

But what I do hear from legislators more and more is this set of questions. One of them who I remember because he said it and nobody really had an answer for, including me. From a big state and he said, you know, we've got 20, I've forgotten the number, I'm making these up. We've got 20 places where we're funding an English literature major across our system. Why not five? And if you want to do English Lit as part of your BA, you can take it online from one of those five campuses. If you really want to major in English Lit, you should probably go to one of those campuses. Now, yes, that causes some inconvenience for people, but this so-called cafeteria model, which is, I think, lot of higher ed, the four-year schools are, is if somebody gets a new program, in environmental music. Everybody's got to get that program because you want to be able to offer it as like in a big cafeteria. We got everything with cheeseburgers, hamburgers, no meat, hamburger. We got it all. I think that model is inherently expensive and not sensible in economic terms. Specialization is one of the geniuses at least in terms of the ideas in economics. 

I think this issue, I think the states especially are gonna deal with this. Feds are not gonna, Feds never gonna, I think. The Feds never gonna touch this. If I were them, I wouldn't leave it to the states. On the other hand, the Fed is more and more responsible on the funding side at some point. The federal government, the Congress and the administration and several administrations now since George Bush started this with the hooking up wage records to curriculums, he did it first in high school and that's grown. And that system is going to be the system at least from, and I think the consensus on the way we'll use that system is that, because I hear this all the time, is we want transparency for degrees. The first bill on this was called Know Before You Go. And if you want to major in, because I remember this specifically in one conversation, if you want to major in archeology, somebody raised their hand in the room said, Senator, are you saying I'm not going to be able to major in archeology? Well, the senator who's not an idiot said, of course, I'm not gonna stop you from majoring in archeology, but I'm gonna tell you what's likely to happen to you if you did, and then you make up your own mind. We'll make you eligible for federal funds and so on. We're not gonna start determining what people take in school. 

And then we're gonna have accountability for training. And the transparency will be, of course, if we ever get a counseling system, which we don't have, will be a way to start to help people make the economic decision along with the education decision. But we have no counseling system in America. Our estimates is that it would cost about $25 billion. So I don't see, although this administration and others are focusing on counseling now, because we now have the data. So people are saying we shouldn't just rely on one-off searches to the college scorecard. We need to provide a service here and it needs to start in high school. That's similar.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: You know, the personalized learning movement within K-12, right? You can customize how you learn, what you learn and the outcomes, you know, get advanced. You know, as you say that those elements of transparency and of course it goes to borrowed defense, right? Stewardship of Title IV funds, right. And the recipients, you know, of title for fragile, as you mentioned, and just loans and borrowing, you have to be stewards to those dollars and have outcomes that present mobility. So it's, couldn't do it though, Tony, without the center, right, to help illuminate the story.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, we a lot of us rely on on your data to tell a story and higher ed needs to tell a better story about its value. I think we've talked about the repackaging of the way we talk about higher education. I want to leave you just a few minutes, Tony, to talk about learning and earning by degrees, a new report that you put out. Can you give us a two minute summary of the report and some of the key themes that came out of it?

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: So the reason we did this is we have a recurrent, we feel, responsibility to do projections because the labor department, the education department won't do it. We thought along the way that they would do it because we kept doing it using their data. But in the end, one of the things that began to happen, it was really this time most notably, is we kept saying things that the public didn't believe. That is the trajectory on this since 1983 has been very clear, which is more and more occupations and jobs require education beyond high school and the engine on the train are the degrees. Now you can have a movement and there is one, skill-based hiring. It's very hard to disagree with it. If somebody doesn't have a degree and they can do the job, I think most Americans were all individualists in the end, would say, well, damn it, they ought to get the job. Not just the person with the degree.

On other hand, that's going to get very complicated, lawyers are going to be involved. I think what we then did is, OK, we've always done retrospective work, because by definition, if you're not doing projections, your data is retrospective. So we've always looked backwards to see. That's how you find out what's going on currently. What we did is we looked backwards and said, okay, over the past 10 years, and we stopped at COVID, because that would have really screwed up the data. We said, how much has post-secondary education contributed both to, in general, state GDP and national GDP and a variety of other things, differences among women, minorities. We tried to do disability, but the data didn't help. So retrospectively, how have we done? This is of interest to a lot of governors, for example, because a lot of them have set goals and so on and so on. Although they're coming off that and going more to training now, in my experience, which I don't think is unhealthy. 

So in the end, what we discovered is the contributions are huge. We did the most complicated econometrics we could think of to do this. In the end, the benefits are huge. What we also found that is equally important is the differences by race, class, and gender have essentially not changed over the past decade, even though everybody has benefited. That is, there are numbers for every group, the worst numbers, and I must say this in the last decade or so as the data has become available, Indigenous people in America, they come out dead last by a lot to the point where it's sort of striking to me. The data gets better and better and I keep thinking, well, there's something wrong with this data. But it's pretty clear now in the last several years, there's nothing wrong with the data. It's true. 

There is a very American conclusion. Everybody has benefited. Everybody has moved up, but nobody's changed their position in the race because the people at the front of the line with more money, the white kids, all the sort of things we don't like to talk about in the United States, that still governs. Everybody's running faster. So everybody holds their position. On the other hand, everybody's been, that is the benefits are broadly distributed across different groups, but nobody changes their position in the race.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I'm glad to hear you talk about indigenous people. One of the things we're doing here at EdUp, and I'm just doing a quick plug, Dr. Erica Moore, she's a VP over at AHAC, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. We're having her do a mini series within the EdUp experience, highlighting today's tribal colleges and university presidents. So we can get those presidents on in mass to tell their story and use this platform to do so. We're trying to do something about that to give a louder microphone to those presidents to talk about some of the issues that they have. 

But this report is really incredible. I mean, if you go through it, you talk about college degree attainment. This finding was really interesting that women with graduate degrees earn a medium lifetime income of around 2.1 million while men with a bachelor's degree earn 2.5. And so that's driving a huge gender wage gap, is as important to solve as the educational attainment gap. So there's a lot of data in here. This one blew my mind, that you estimated that if 11.3 million adults who would need college degrees to close the attainment gaps with white adults earned equal pay, there would be 6.3 trillion more in lifetime earning gains.

I mean, I got that number wrong before.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: Yeah. Well, I wanted to say I had it in front of me and then I didn't put you. Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You. Six point three trillion more in lifetime earning gains if if more people earned a degree at the same rate as white adults and earned equal pay. Pretty amazing stats, Tony, and your work's incredible. I have to close the episode or else I will keep you here all day. But I have to ask you what you see for the future of higher education before I let you go.

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I think higher education is in trouble. I think to some extent, apart from its rightful rise as an institution in American life and most notably in American economic life, it's starting to stumble. And I don't think it's higher ed's fault. That is people are turning against these, yeah, sure there are all sorts of issues in higher education, all sorts of things that need to be done. Part of my shtick these days is we not only need an education system, we need a training system. We've got to find a way to unify the two. Because we are the worst training nation among the more developed countries in the world by far. In the end, I think it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while and it's nasty.

I mean, that's the other thing. It's personal. It's gotten personal. And that's what I say. I mean, it is a job, unless you're going to go someplace that's sitting pretty with the demographic decline in the college age population, with rising costs, with ill repute among the public for higher ed, distrust, which is common among lots of institutions now, but higher aid is coming in for its share of that, clearly. I just think it's a tough time. I think in the end, I think the system is, takes time. I think the system is gradually moving in very healthy directions. It takes a long time to do these things. And I think the politicians have done the right thing. That is they hopefully not gonna interfere with what you learn or what you choose to learn. That's none of their business in my view. And I think most of them agree with that. But they've done the one thing they could do without overstepping their bounds, which is transparency. We want this to be, we're not gonna pull. The other thing about this is we're not gonna pull the money out of higher ed because since Jimmy Carter, he was the first guy to figure this out with his focus groups. And back in those days, I did political work. So I know about this intimately. The focus groups began saying, what do you want? And they wanted aid for higher education for their kids. And since Carter, Clinton made a false step on this. That is he proposed school to work, which was a way to get vocational education sort of back into high school after we kicked vocational education out of high school and replace it with career and technical education, which I think is better and doesn't track like voced did by race, class and gender. 

So Clinton, by the time the second term came around, he stopped saying school work because I've checked all the records and he never said it in the second campaign. He moved on to aid for higher education and that gave him a part of his margin was that. And ever since then, Democrats have known this and glommed onto it, which is why you got, you know, first Obama saying you need one more year after high school. You got that from the Council of Economic Advisers. I thought that wasn't a very good rhetorical statement because it was a literal interpretation of the data. You needed one more year. Well, what does that mean? Anyway, so the George Bush said first, he said, his commission on higher ed said, people don't need college degrees, but they need some kind of education or training after high school. Then you get the full-blown version, which is free college. And now with Biden, free community college. I think that's where we're going. I think it's a good thing, but it's gotta be accountable and it's gotta be transparent.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, we'll count on you to hold us all accountable with all of your work and data that you're doing at Georgetown so, you know Accountability comes around it doesn't it? We're all accountable to something and somebody that's accountable for making this episode even better than it would have been with Tony and Myself is my guest co-host today. He's the one and only Dr. Chuck Ambrose best-selling author. He is an amazing higher-ed consultant for Husch Blackwell. Chuck, what'd you think of this episode? Tony just...

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: So grateful, right, to be able to say thank you to the center and your leadership. I think what's next is exciting, right? As a lot of this continues to blend, I think a lot of the things that you illuminate says that time is going to accelerate for change because we are more transparent and data can move us forward. Not only keep doing what you're doing, but again, I hope we can connect and maybe think together on a few things. 

Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale: I'll reach out to you. Yeah, I look forward to it. It's good to see you and good to meet you.

Dr. Chuck Ambrose: Good to meet you too.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I did. It was nice and positive. Thank you for that. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped.