Sandy Baum:	It's great to be here in this community that I now know after a whole day first-hand. What a great community it is. I've had a chance to talk to a number of you during the day. I may repeat myself a little bit, but it's nice to see other faces here as well. I think that this project that you're undertaking is great. Just the fact that we're here talking about these issues is part of why it's great to be able to have the opportunity to be at a place like Swarthmore College, where we're not just thinking about how we can get through the daily tasks that we have at hand, but really trying to think together about big ideas. I think this question of higher education and inequality is critically important for the future of our society.
	I don't know how many of you follow everything that goes on in the press, but there has lately been a lot of dissatisfaction with higher education. Dissatisfaction that comes in different forms, depending on who you're talking about. Some people just say it's too expensive, but for some people, the concern is that we think of higher education as the path to mobility and as the path to how people can better their lives. There's a lot of concern that maybe higher education isn't doing that, that it's perpetuating inequality or that it is exacerbating inequality. What can we do about that? Nobody really knows quite what to do about it, but people come up with solutions. I think the important thing to do is to take a step back and ask some of these questions.
	Of course, a big concern is what can an institution like Swarthmore do. What I want to do is think a little bit about putting selective colleges into context because colleges like Swarthmore are incredibly important, both for the way they can transform people's lives and for their role in society -- a disproportionate role to the number of people who are educated in these institutions. But if you just think about your world as Swarthmore College or similar colleges, then you're not actually going to get very far with changing the world. You've got to put these colleges into context and ask about higher education as a whole. What is the role that higher education as a whole can play in terms of inequality and mobility, and what are the policies that might or might not help? It's really counterintuitive, but there are some policies that people propose seemingly in the interest of making a lot of people's lives better that probably wouldn't help very much, and other things that people might not think of. That's the ambitious agenda that I have. If you have questions while I'm talking, please feel free to ask me questions because that's fine.
	So first of all, just to think ... You know you're in a small college, but if you want to think about what can colleges like Swarthmore do -- a lot, but I think it's really important to realize what a small part of the world of higher education these institutions are. There's a lot of discussion about how can we get more low-income students to enroll in colleges like Swarthmore. That's an important thing because there are many low-income students who don't know about these colleges. Who, if they know about them, think it's not for them. They wouldn't be able to afford it; they wouldn't fit in -- they don't apply. Then, if they do, they might struggle to fit into the environment. But really, it's that people don't know about it and don't apply, and there's a lot more we could do and we should do more.
	That said, if you take the top 80 liberal arts colleges -- I'm sure those of you who are students here, when you were applying, you didn't go quite that far down the list of liberal arts colleges -- but the top 80 enroll 157 thousand students about. There are 18 million undergraduate students in this country, so 157 thousand is tiny. That's like 1% of all of the undergraduates. If you take all the schools -- liberal arts colleges, any kind of college that accept less than 50% of their applicants -- they enroll 3.2 million students. In other words, the vast majority of students go to colleges where almost everybody gets in. Community colleges are open access, lots of public universities -- they're not open access, but they accept very high percentage, almost all of their applicants. The question of what can selective colleges do affects a small percentage of the undergraduate students, and if you think about ...
	Swarthmore has something like 14% of its students are on Pell Grants. Pell Grants are federal grants for low- and moderate-income students. It's sort of an arbitrary measure; people come from all different backgrounds. Many people have financial strains and are not Pell Grant recipients. Some people are Pell Grant recipients and actually, for various reasons, got them even though they're not actually low-income, but it's a rough estimate. Suppose that all these top 80 liberal arts colleges got 25% of their students from that population. That's pretty dramatic. You have to have a family income of below 60 thousand dollars, pretty much, not always, but to get a Pell Grant. That's close to the median family income, but not to the median family income for families of college-age. Swarthmore and schools like Swarthmore are pretty ... They're not taking random groups of students, but suppose that they all upped it to 25%. That would be ... less than 1% of all the Pell Grant recipients would be going to these institutions, so where we educate low-income students is not there.
	In fact, if all of the schools accepting less than 50% of their applicants were to be 25% Pell Grant recipients, that would be around 10% of the Pell Grant recipients. When we think about how we're going to educate low-income students in this country, which is a huge and compelling task that we have, it's actually not going to be mostly at selective colleges. Which is not to say that selective colleges are not very important, or what they do for students from diverse backgrounds is not important. It is; it's very important, but it's not enough to really change the world. It's not enough to make a dent in the problem. If the only thing we pay attention to is what schools like yours can do, then we're going to be neglecting a big part of the problem. I don't want to suggest that it doesn't matter, but I do want to suggest that we need to think about much more than that.
	Students really, really are, that said, sorted very much by family background into different types of institutions. That is one of the big concerns and one of the things that leads people to say that higher education is perpetuating the social inequality. This table ... if you move across, it's got community colleges -- it's actually not in a good order -- but community colleges. Then, the four categories of four-year colleges: very selective, moderately selective, minimally selective, open admission. Then, there are other things. People go to for-profit institutions, or maybe they go to a private 2-year college, or maybe they went to 2 colleges in one year.
	Then, it looks at students -- independent and dependent. The distinction there is if you go to college when you're 24 years old or older, you're independent and nobody knows who your parents are. Or if you've been in the military, or you have kids of your own, or you're married, but mostly those are older students. 56% of those older students are going to community colleges. Dependent students are all under the age of 24, and 47% of them still go to community colleges. But if you divide them by income into four equal income groups, income quartiles, 52% of the lowest-income students go to community colleges. It goes down to 36% of the highest-income. Highest-income ... This is income quartiles, where we're talking about something like $100,000. We're not talking about real wealth; we're talking about the highest income quartile.
	As you move across, what you see is that the lowest-income students are ... Just 4% go to very selective institutions, whereas 17$ of the highest-income students do. If you're a low-income student, the chances of you going to a very selective school are tiny. If we could double that, from 4% to 8%, that would be terrific. It would be good for the schools, and it would be good for those students, but it wouldn't touch the fundamental problem of how we're going to educate all of these students. Just to understand, we really do have a lot of stratification, and by and large, the schools that people go to are highly correlated with their family backgrounds. That's a big issue; it's a big problem. The question of what we can or should do about it is one of the things that we want to talk about.
	But that's just the people who go to college. If we take a step back even farther, and we ask when people graduate from high school, do they continue on to college? The percentage of high school graduates who go to college immediately has increased pretty rapidly over time. We've really had big improvements. This graph shows you ... The bottom line is the lowest income quartile, the top line is the highest income quartile, and the middle line is the 50% in between. What this shows you is the path over time, and you can see all of those are going up. It starts in 1975, and it goes to 2012. Over time, the percentage from each income category who go to college in the year after high school has increased. But for the lowest-income students, it's now about 52%, and for the highest-income students, it's now about 82%.
	Now, a lot of these people go to college later, so it's not a full measure of who ever goes to college, but that's a big difference. The first thing is that where you come from has a lot to do with whether you're going to go to college at all, and then if you do go to college, where you go to college. I think it's really important to see that ... If you start in 1982, it was 34% versus 70%, and now, it's 52% versus 82%, so it's not that we're not making any progress. You could argue that that's huge progress, and we should pat ourselves on the back about it. But there's a huge gap, and that gap is not all about income, of course. That gap is about the lives that people have before they get to this point: where they went to school, what their parents' experiences have been, and so on. We have big problems that aren't going to be solved just by switching people around among colleges because they're not even going to college.
	Given that background, I think we really want to, ask what do we think that higher education can do, should do? What is the role of higher education in inequality and mobility. These are two different concepts. We have in our nation the most income inequality of any developed country. It's really remarkable. If you look at the difference in the incomes of people at the bottom and people at the top, huge differences in income, so we live in a very unequal society. One question is, what can we do to narrow the gaps, but another question is, what about mobility? Some people would argue that they don't care about inequality. What they care about is whether people have reasonable opportunities to end up in a good place, regardless of where they started out. In other words, what about mobility? One of the issues is that if you have more inequality, then to move up, you've got farther to go. It's like the rungs on the ladder are farther apart from each other, and it does become more challenging to move up.
	But thinking about higher education as an engine of social mobility because if you go to college, you can pull yourself up, get a good job, meet lots of different people, learn to live your life differently and think differently. Can we do this? I think that we're not doing enough of it, but the question of whether colleges can do this is a hard question. Because what we're basically saying is that we have all these people who never even get to the door of colleges. When they do get to the door of colleges, many of these people ..
	Half the students are going to community colleges. Open admission: it's not like they took the SAT and got some average score on it. Many of them are reading at the junior high level or lower. Many of them have not had any kind of educational opportunity up until this point. They are not really prepared for college-level work. We're sort of saying, why can't colleges take all these people and fix it? That's a really hard task for colleges. Everybody at Swarthmore comes in quite well-prepared to learn because you don't get into Swarthmore if you're not well-prepared to learn. But at many colleges, there are many students who are so far behind already that to suggest that colleges can solve the problem of catching them up is really putting a lot onto colleges. I think we have to think bigger about what the colleges can do.
	What we could do is we could think about the difference in going to a selective college and going to, say, a community college. The amount of resources that we put into different students varies dramatically. When you look around at the opportunities at Swarthmore ... Swarthmore is obviously an extreme example, but there is a lot of wealth here. There are great facilities; there are great faculty. There is an excellent financial aid budget so that if you don't have money, we're going to help you. If you're struggling, there are resources to help you. Go to a community college in your neighborhood and see how it looks. It is an entirely different situation. The amount that they spend per student educating students might be one-eighth or one-ninth of what is spent at Swarthmore.
	It's not just that, because Swarthmore is in a different situation, but compare the community college to the state flagship university. You will see that we put much more into educating students at the universities. This is complicated because it's cheaper to educate first- and second-year students than it is to educate upper-level students. Universities educate graduate students, which is even more expensive, and there are differences in the needs of different students. I think it's entirely possible to argue that we really want to make sure that we have enough resources devoted to the people who are going to end up really changing the world and being leaders and being scientists and so on. Maybe it shouldn't be equal, but we put a lot less resources into people who have had a lot less opportunity before they get there.
	Another thing that happens is that all those people who don't go to college so ... Many of the people who do go to college never graduate from college. That's a big problem. We say we really want everybody to go to college and everybody to graduate, but we also ... We have done a lot to make that happen. The fact that we don't have more people going to college and succeeding actually exacerbates the inequality because it means that the gap in earnings between college graduates and non-college graduates is larger. If you think about this from a supply-and-demand perspective, if ...
	People worry all the time. You read headlines about, maybe too many people are going to college. Look at these college graduates who are working at Starbucks or driving taxis or whatever, so we have underemployed college graduates. We do, particularly because of the weak economy, have some underemployed college graduates. But the reality is that the earnings of typical college graduates are much higher than those of high school graduates, and that gap has grown over time. If we had a surplus of college graduates running around, that would depress the wages of college graduates, and that just hasn't happened. The gap is really huge. Maybe, if we would educate more people, there would be fewer people who would be looking for low-skill jobs and more people qualified for the high-skill jobs, and the gap in wages would narrow to some extent. So one thing that perpetuates inequality is that we don't support enough students through to actually getting college degrees.
	And we sort them, as we saw, into very different types of institutions. It's just not the case that a degree is a degree is a degree. That's part of the reason why people come to Swarthmore College. It's because you believe that people are going to respect you in different ways or going to give you opportunities in different ways because you are at a college where everybody thinks you're smart just because you came here. The sorting of people is a huge problem.
	So maybe we really are perpetuating inequality. Maybe we are not fostering mobility as much as we could, but I think that we have to be really cautious about blaming higher education for this problem. Higher education could do more. Selective colleges could accept and support more students from less advantaged backgrounds. Colleges and universities that do educate a lot of students from disadvantaged backgrounds could do more with the limited resources that they have to make sure that they support them and teach them well and get them to graduate. That said, we're up against some huge, powerful forces that I think suggesting that colleges and universities could fix those things on their own is probably just not realistic. We should be ambitious but realistic about what we ask colleges and universities to do. We should think really hard about what's going on before people get to college and not separate out the role of higher education in inequality and mobility from what happens before college.
	I know many of you probably heard Robert Putnam when he was on campus. He's just written this book where he's talking about the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Charles Murray, who is in a very different ... He's a conservative political thinker, and he recently wrote a book that also said the difference. He didn't talk about it so much as the haves and the have-nots, but he's thinking about the people who drink white wine and eat brie cheese and the people who drink beer. He wrote a lot about how people watch different TV shows, people read different books, people go to different movies, people don't intersect, that we have an increasingly bifurcated society. Everybody is seeing this.
	There's a wonderful book by Dick Murnane and Greg Duncan called "Whither Opportunity?" that's actually a collection of research that poses the question that I'm trying to ask, which is, where is the inequality happening? Where is the lack of opportunity? How much of it happens early on in people's lives? How much of it happens in the schools? How much of it happens in colleges and universities, and then what about in the labor market? To just take one piece of that is a problem. There's not an answer to the breakdown, but what they do come out with is what happens to people early on in their lives is so important and has gotten more and more unequal. That means we're having a bigger and bigger task for higher education, and that asking higher education to take people and produce them equal to the circumstances that they need to compete with each other.
	Just looking a little bit about where is it that people are coming from when they come to the door of any college or of a college like Swarthmore. If you look at the distribution of family income, where is it that people are growing up, how unequal is it? This table shows you from 1983 every ten years until 2013. If you divide all families into five equal quintiles, five fifths, so that if income were totally equally distributed, each of them would have 20% of all of the income, and the top 5% of families would have 5% of the income, if everybody had -- it wouldn't be top 5%, but that would be equality.
	In 1983, the lowest fifth had only 4.9% of the income. Not 20%, 4.9%. The highest fifth had 42.4%, and the top 5% had 15.3% of all of the income. Now look at the bottom row in 2013. The lowest fifth share has declined from 4.9% of the total to 3.8%. The highest fifth share has risen from 42.4% to 48.8%, and the top 5% has gone from 15% of the total to 21% of the total. If I did the top 1%, you would see a big increase in the top 1%. That's the 99% versus 1% that people are talking about. Increasingly, people are growing up in households that have very different income levels. That is just a dramatic difference in the way that you would grow up if you grew up in families in different parts of this income distribution, and it's gotten much more extreme.
	If you look just at some of the things that characterize people's lives ... This is a measure of how much time mothers spend with their children. Now obviously, counting how many minutes people spend with their children ... Sure, these are not precise numbers, and I certainly couldn't tell you how many minutes a day I spend with my children, but it divides people by their level of education. In each of the three sets of bars, the blue bar on the left is people who didn't even graduate from high school, and the orange bar on the right is people who have a bachelor's degree or higher. You can see that it's divided first: employed people, unemployed people or people not in the labor force, and then everybody.
	Just look at people who are employed. This is important because you might think, if I work, and then I don't have time to spend with my kids or whatever. But among employed people, the amount of time that college graduates are spending with their kids is almost twice as much as the amount that high school graduates are spending with their kids. In every case, people who went to college and got a bachelor's degree spend more time with their kids. When you break this down, they read to their kids, they take their kids to extracurricular activities and music lessons, they actually engage more with their kids in religious activities now in every way. Again, this is how kids are growing up, is that some people are growing up in households where they get a lot of time and attention, and some kids are not.
	What about growing up in poverty? Again, the same categories of education for the parents. The first group of bars is female householders with kids. The second is married couples. Those are divided because, obviously, single-parent households are much more likely to be poor than married couples and because that could be correlated with education. But in every case, you see the steps going down. The more educated your parents are, the less likely you are to live in poverty. 58% of the kids who live in a single-parent household with a mother who did not graduate from high school -- 68% of them were living in poverty. High school diplomas, 40%. Even among married couples -- high school diplomas, 11%. But if you have a bachelor's degree or higher, almost nobody lives in poverty.
	Again, people are growing up in very, very different circumstances. So the idea that we're surprised that when it comes time to apply to Swarthmore College that it's not just equally represented from people from all different backgrounds -- this really shouldn't surprise us. If you look at the money that parents put into their kids, that difference has changed dramatically. Over the last 40 years, and this comes from the Duncan and Murnane book, they find that high-income families have gone from spending about four times as much on enrichment activities for their kids as lower-income families to spending seven times as much. That means piano lessons and sports activities and summer camp and ... Think of things that I'm sure many people in this room have done themselves or done with their kids.
	The solution is not that we're going to ask affluent parents to please hold back and not try to give their kids advantages. That's just not what's going to happen. What has happened is that everybody's has increased, but theirs has increased more. But we can't really ask parents not to do the best for their kids, so we're going to have to think really hard about what we do about the kids whose parents can't or don't know to do the same for them.
	All those differences mean that it's really, really hard to be mobile. You think about how you're growing up and what it takes to move up. I think people always think about, my parents were immigrants, and they came, and they didn't have any money, and they started out, and they worked in a factory. But they already maybe had backgrounds where they valued education. They read to their kids; they were going to work really hard to make sure that education was the thing that their kids got. We're talking about a whole segment of our society where they're just barely getting by from day-to-day. The idea that we just want to say, why don't you think about all these other things ... It's just not so simple as that, and there is just really, really limited mobility.
	If you talk about what income level were your parents and then where do you end up as an adult 25 years later, so people ... The data come from the Pew Foundation. Starting at the bottom row here, people who grew up with ... Their parents were in the bottom quintile. Their parents didn't have much money at all, so they were in the bottom row here. 43% of them end up as adults in the bottom two. Some of them get to the top: 9% to the fourth quintile and 4% to the top. But look at the people who grew up at the top. Some of them end up at the bottom, 8%, but 40% of them end up at the top. It's like the probability is pretty great that you're going to end up wherever you started out.
	One thing that I think people don't think a lot about is if a lot of people moved up from the bottom, somebody's going to have to move down. 20% of the people are going to be in the top income quintile. It's all well and good to say, let's help all those people help move up, but then you ask people for they're willing for their kids to be the ones who are going to move down a notch. Of course, nobody wants their kids to be the ones.
	I think that has something to do with limiting what we as a society are actually willing to do for people. When you talk about who should come to Swarthmore College, people might be, yeah, great, we should be open to lots of different kinds of people from different backgrounds, and let's make a real effort to get more students from more backgrounds to apply, and so on. Then, you have to say, okay, so who's not going to get in? Either you grow, and I understand you're talking about growing, but a lot of these goods are positional goods. It's great to say, we want other people to have, but in many cases, there is some sort of a trade-off. But one thing that's very clear is if you want to help people to move up, whatever the problems with higher education, whatever the stratification within higher education, getting people to and through college is the best thing we can do for them to help them to move up.
	This takes that table, and it divides the kids -- who are now adult children because we're finding out where they ended up as adults -- into, on the left, the people who do not have a bachelor's degree and, on the right, the people who do have a bachelor's degree. I know you can't see all these numbers from where you are. Again we have, at the bottom, people who started out with parents in the bottom. If you did not graduate from college, 47% of those low-income kids ended up low-income adults. But if you were a low-income kid, only 10% of those who have a bachelor's degree stayed in the bottom. In other words, a bachelor's degree got a lot of people out of the bottom.
	It's very hard ... If you grew up in the bottom, 3% end up at the top without a bachelor's degree, but 10% end up at the top if they do have a bachelor's degree. It certainly doesn't equalize things, but it makes a big difference. The reality is if you take people who grew up at the top, people with a bachelor's degree, over half of them are going to stay at the top. But if you grew up at the top and you don't get a bachelor's degree, you're half as likely to be at the top and much more likely to move down to the bottom.
	The reality is that going to college ... These are only four-your degrees, and many people who go to college don't get a four-year degree. In fact, over half of the undergraduate credentials that are awarded are either associate's degrees from community colleges or certificates. When they're shorter-term and you're learning some sort of a vocation, lots of people go to college and don't get a bachelor's degree. Those associate's degrees and certificates do pay off significantly and improve people's lives -- most of them, not all of them -- but not nearly as much a bachelor's degree. So this is about bachelor's degrees, and not all that may people growing up in low-income families get bachelor's degrees. In fact, a very small percentage of people growing up in the lowest income quintile actually end up getting a bachelor's degree, maybe 10%. Whereas at the top, lots of people get bachelor's degrees.
	But college is the answer for many people, so we can't say, okay, there's so much inequality, we have to give up. We have to do something, as colleges and universities, about this. Even though, as I said at the beginning, selective colleges and universities are tiny, relative not just to the population, but to the population of college students we have to ask what we can do to make things better. How can we give more people the opportunity to study at this type of institution? If you're talking about a school like Swarthmore where students are accepted at Swarthmore regardless of their financial circumstances -- it's not like you're turning away people because they can't pay -- and then when you accept them, you give them the financial aid that you think they need to make it affordable.
	That said, it's surely possible to search for more students. We know that there are ... It is much harder and much less likely that low-income students are going to be qualified -- and we can talk about what qualified means -- to come to Swarthmore than those students who grow up in affluent backgrounds are. It's not going to be equal representation, but we also know that there are more low-income students out there who, even if you take SAT scores as the measure, are qualified to come to these institutions. They just don't apply. So the admissions process has to work on how do we recruit these students, how do we make people aware of these opportunities, how can we get them into our pool, how can we ensure we give them enough financial aid to be able to succeed, how can we create a campus environment that will be conducive to helping to educate these students in a good way and making them part of the community?
	But still, that's not going to be enough for elite colleges to say we've done what we can do. We have to do more than just get more students onto these campuses. We have to reach out into the communities. Think about the many, many students for example who are in Philadelphia who are never going to get to Swarthmore. We know that, but does that mean we say, okay, we're not interested in those people, we are not going to use any of our resources to think about how our lives can interact and how we can maybe make life better and get more promise? In particular, how can we get more of those kids to go to college even if they don't come here for college?
	Actually, I think maybe the biggest contribution that places like this can make to this issue is in the people who graduate because ... The opportunity to shape lives, preferences, and values of people so that graduates are not out there just trying to make money, but are out there with values that appreciate that they've had a privilege that other people haven't had. Because no matter where you came from, if you came to Swarthmore College, you're having a privilege that other people don't have, and to think about how part of our educational process has to be how do we create people who are motivated to make the world a better place.
	But still, no matter what we do and no matter how great we are at it and no matter how much we improve, we are not really going to make a big dent in the inequality and the mobility until we reduce the inequality that people face before college and until we reduce the inequality in the labor market because if you think about it ... Now, if you don't college at all, it's almost impossible to get a middle-class wage, to get a job that's going to pay you -- I know Bill Gates didn't graduate from college, but most people who don't graduate from college have a really hard time. But it is possible to imagine a world in which we actually pay lots of occupations better and where there's less of a wage gap and where if you wanted to be in some sort of a trade, you could make enough money to support your family. Then, if you didn't want to go to college, in defining college as getting a really academic training, you wouldn't have to. In some Western countries, that is the case that you have a choice whereas here, you don't have that much of a choice because if you don't go to college, the wages are so bad.
	Those are huge tasks, and I'm not going to ... How are we going to ... That's another conversation about what are all the policies that we need to do that. But I just want to say that whatever I suggest for policies, they are not policies that are going to really solve the bigger problems before and after college. That said, what we do with higher education, we could do a lot more.
	We could think a lot harder about how we make sure that community colleges and broad access four-year institutions -- which is where most people from the bottom half of the income distribution go to school and will continue to be that -- how can we make those better places that support students better? Because these schools have incredibly low graduation rates. A lot of people are going to college, and they're spending a year or two. and maybe they're borrowing some money, and they don't graduate. We need to fund those institutions better. We need to make sure they have the resources. We need to make sure we figure out how to support people to get through those schools.
	We do sort of know how to do this. There's an experiment going on at the City University of New York called ASAP, where they are taking low-income students going to community college in New York City. They're saying, we're going to pay for all of your tuition and fees, we're going to buy your books for you. We're going to give you a subway pass; we're going to make sure your finances are okay. We're going to make you be part of a group of students who go through this program together; you're going to have lots of mentors who are going to help you and give you advice and support you when you have trouble. They are graduating at about twice the rate of other students going to this college. We know how to do it. It's very expensive. It's three times as expensive as what we give to the typical community college student. We have to make a choice about whether we're going to do that or not.
	But there are also bigger issues aside from what we can do on college campuses. I know you've heard about a lot of these issues, and I think it's important to ask questions about whether the big ideas ... Everybody wants to say, okay, I'm ... You're a politician, how are you going to solve this problem? The latest way we're going to solve this problem is Obama wants to make community college free. I'm sure everybody's heard about that, and that sounds great. Is this something people have thought about or talked about and does it sound like ... I don't know, does anybody have thoughts about that? Yeah.
Speaker 1:	[inaudible 00:39:15]
Sandy Baum:	Yeah. No, that's such an important question. Yeah, what's the quality? I mean, are we just going to say, great, you all go to community college, we'll make it free? How we're going to pay for it, that's an issue. In fact, there's nothing in this that is going to make these community colleges better. About a third of the students who go to a community college ever get a credential at all. Community colleges have terrible capacity constraints; They're very under-funded. If we push a lot more students into community colleges, they're going to have an even harder time. To say everybody should go ... All low-income students should go there ... Yeah.
Speaker 2:	[inaudible 00:39:57]
Sandy Baum:	Yeah, that's interesting. You're right. It's almost like people have given up on high school. We don't know what to do with students in high school, so let's get them through the 12 years, put them in a community college, and maybe we can do it there. It's true that we're graduating people from high school who can barely read, who have no skills for the labor market. Maybe we could do something about that, but there's no headline about how we're going to do that.
	This is the headline, but if you read the fine print, the how are we going to pay for it -- well, everybody isn't going to actually qualify. You're not going to qualify unless you go almost full-tine and have a 2.5 GPA. You're not going to qualify unless you go to a community college that actually has a very high graduation rate, and almost no community college has a high graduation rate. Anyway, if you're going to a community college, you're not doing a national search for a community college. It's not like picking Swarthmore. You're going to the community college that's nearby, and if your community college nearby doesn't qualify, it's not going to be free for you. So the headline it's going to be free ... I don't know, either you make it free or you don't make it free, and it would be much more expensive than proposed.
	But even so, why is community college free and four-year college isn't free? We know that if you take two similar young people, particularly low-income young people, and they have equal academic preparation and motivation, and one of them goes to a community college and one of them goes to a four-year college, and they both want to get a bachelor's degree, the probability is that the person who goes to the four-year college is much more likely to ever get a bachelor's degree. It's really hard to get through the community college and transfer and get a bachelor's degree. So we shouldn't really be pushing people into these institutions, which are great for many people, but which also have many problems.
	Free sounds great, and ... I don't know. If I could come up with something that sounds as good but that I thought would really solve the problems, it would make me really happy. Maybe somebody's good at coming up with things like that. But a lot of people are talking about free, and if they're not talking about free, they're talking about cheap and quick. Let's have $10,000 bachelor's degrees. Let's give people credit for prior learning so we can say, actually, you already know a lot. Let's just basically give you a test, and you probably by now have a college degree.
	That may exaggerate it a little bit, and ... If you want to get certified to be a carpenter and you already know how to be a carpenter, I don't think you should have to go to school to learn it. You should get certified for it. That doesn't mean that you're going to have a college degree. If you read a lot of history books ... There are obviously many people who know as much history through teaching themselves as people who graduate from here with a history major. But are we going to start giving tests and then saying, oh, well we're going to give you a degree, or do we really think that's what an education is? I feel like we're really in danger of losing track of what education means by saying we just want to give everybody a piece of paper.
	So those are the sorts of things that people are talking about ... there's a place for them, but they're probably not the solution. There's some much less glamorous things. The student aid system is really complicated, and people don't understand it, they don't know what's going to be there for them, it's hard to apply for. We could simplify the student aid system. That is a lot easier than making college free, and it would make a lot of difference for a lot of people.
	We could also do something about student debt. I'm sure everyone has heard about the student debt issues, and I can't stop without just saying something about student debt because student debt is a terrific problem for many people. Probably not many people in this room because Swarthmore does not require you to borrow, although I know many students do borrow, but the typical ... About two-thirds of bachelor's degree recipients graduate with debt, and they have on average about 30 thousand dollars in debt. 30 thousand dollars ... If you have a bachelor's degree or if you don't have a bachelor's degree, your earnings are going to be so much higher. 30 thousand dollars is not a lot of money, but if you read the paper you think everybody borrowed 100 thousand dollars because those are the people on the front of the paper. This is just not true, and I just have to take a minute to put the student debt crisis in perspective.
	If you look at people who got degrees in 2011, 12, all degree recipients, the green is no debt. That's 37%. The orange is 51% less than 50 thousand dollars, and then 12% had 50 thousand dollars or more in debt. But that's all degree recipients; it's not just undergraduates. Associate degrees, people going to a community college: 1% had 50 thousand or more. Bachelor's degrees: 10% had 50 thousand or more. Graduate degrees: 37% had 50 thousand or more. Most of the people who borrow a lot of money were going to graduate school. A lot of the student debt conversation, you would think it's all about undergraduate students. It's not; a lot of it's about graduate students.
	When it is about undergraduate students, it depends where they go to school. This has for-profit schools, private non-profit -- you're a private non-profit -- public colleges, and then everybody. The bottom has the 10% over there who borrowed 50 thousand dollars or more. At public colleges, only 6% of public college bachelor's degree recipients have 50 thousand dollars of debt. 12% at private non-profit colleges, and 26% at for-profit colleges. A very disproportionate amount of the high-debt levels among bachelor's degree recipients are in the for-profit sector.
	There are people who get on the front page of the paper who borrowed 100 thousand dollars and they went to NYU or they went to Northern Iowa University or whatever, but they are few and far between. Mostly, people have a pretty reasonable amount of debt. The people who are really struggling to repay their debt have borrowed a little bit of money and are working at minimum wage. They didn't graduate; they are really struggling. Yeah.
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:46:29]
Sandy Baum:	Some parents obviously borrow for college. The percentage of parents who take actual education loans is very small. Now, the people who do tend to borrow a lot. You might have -- I can't remember what the percentage is, it's less than 10% -- and they might borrow another 30, 40 thousand dollars. The thing is we don't know. If parents take a home equity loan, we have no idea. For a while that was a big thing, then for a while it wasn't a big thing. It's very difficult to quantify that.
	This also doesn't include credit card debt. If you just put it on your credit card, we wouldn't know about it. Student loans are easy enough to get that we don't think ... We know people use their credit cards. It's very hard to measure that. But there are people who can pay for this. There are people who work their way through college. It's not really that surprising. We have Pell Grants, and we have state grants. We give a lot of grant aid. We have tax credits, and 30 thousand dollars ... It's nine thousand dollars of tuition to go to a public four-year college approximately, and a lot of people live at home, so it's more if you have to pay for room and board. But no, there's going to be some debt that's not included, but not enough to change it really dramatically. Not many people are borrowing huge amounts of money, but some people are definitely borrowing more than they'll be able to pay back. That's mostly people who are not going to end up with a good job.
	There are real problems. We need to get people to not borrow excessively, we need to get people not to go to for-profit colleges and borrow a lot, we need to get people to go to programs where they have a good chance of graduating, and we need to get people insurance against bad things happening. We actually have that in the federal student loan program. I think thinking about who gets into trouble, who has trouble paying back their student loans and why is a better discussion than, student debt, let's forgive all student debt, or student borrowers are the most oppressed people in society.
	Part of the thing that bothers me is I feel like ... We looked at how many never go to college and how many people go to community colleges. If you go to a four-year college and get a bachelor's degree, you are already in really good shape relative to most people. If you have 30 thousand dollars or 40 thousand dollars of debt to pay off, you do have a big responsibility, and you'd be a happier person if your parents had had the money to pay for it, but think about where you could be. I feel like we have to help these people without making it seem like people with student debt are the people who are struggling the most in our society because we've just looked at the barriers that so many people face to even get to the point where they could consider having student debt. Somebody had a hand up over here. Yeah.
Speaker 4:	[inaudible 00:49:30]
Sandy Baum:	That's an interesting question, and I think ... so first of all, you can never really generalize about ... You can't say all for-profit colleges are bad and all non-profit colleges are good. Because there are some for-profit colleges that do a really good job and serve people very well and there are many ... If you want to get a certificate in some specific occupation, for-profit college could well be the place where you're most likely to succeed. That said for-profit colleges are expensive. They charge tuition of on average about 15 thousand dollars a year. Many of them don't do what they say they're going to do, and they are in business to make profits. They educate primarily older students and primarily low-income students and primarily ... actually, disproportionately African-American students. Hispanic students are disproportionately in community colleges relative to African-American students.
	They're educating a lot of people who are starting out with disadvantages, and they would argue that they are providing opportunities to people who don't have other opportunities. But the reality is that they're not providing opportunity to these people because for too many of them, they end up worse than they started out. People sign on the dotted line for these loans, and they end up owing money that they didn't really understand they were going to owe. Then the school may close, or they find out that the certificate is not actually valid. Almost half of the student loan defaults come from people who went to for-profit colleges, and about 10% of students go to those colleges.
	Now, they're low-income, and they tend to be adults, and they borrow a lot more money. But still, disproportionately I think it's a huge problem, and I think that we need to do better in giving people guidance about where to go to school. We just say, here's your financial aid, go. Have a good life. Find a school and go. People have no idea. They saw an advertisement on the bus, so they go to that school. I think we're responsible for giving them the money to do it because we should say money's not good at that school. It doesn't serve students well. Yeah.
Speaker 5:	[inaudible 00:51:46]
Sandy Baum:	Yeah, no, that's a good question because ... Actually, that's a really helpful thing. Too many students at community colleges don't apply for financial aid, and nobody tells them to. At for-profit colleges, they absolutely walk them through this because for-profit colleges get most of their revenues from federal financial aid. They're not allowed to get more than 90%, but it's pretty close to 90%. That doesn't include veterans' benefits. They make sure that you file your financial aid, but other colleges should make sure that people file their financial aid forms. Some people have argued that we should make people file the financial aid form as part of graduating from high school. Really, I think what we need is a simpler process. The IRS knows enough about you -- about your parents, if your parents file taxes and you're a dependent, or about you if you're an adult filing taxes -- that they could figure out your financial aid without making you fill out another form. We could do that. There are some bureaucratic barriers to that, but I really think we could.
	I wrote a paper with a colleague about reforming the Pell Grant system. We propose, and I don't think this is going to happen tomorrow, but that for every high school junior, automatically, we calculate their eligibility for federal student aid. They shouldn't have to apply; they shouldn't have to say they're going to college. Then we should tell them, if you go to college you're going to get a Pell Grant of this size. Then, not only would they not have had to do anything, but if they don't go to college they see themselves as leaving money on the table. It becomes a loss to them. It's not like, could I get money? There would be some less precise calculation, but we really could do that.
	I think it's going to become greatly simplified. I think simplification is a huge issue, and it appeals on both sides of the aisle, and you can do without spending a lot of money. So I think that the financial aid form -- it has already gotten simpler, it's going to get even simpler. Not simple enough, but it is getting easier and technology has a lot to do with that, but we need to give people better information about it and not just saying, if you go to this website you'll get information, but active information. It is a real problem that you've noted.
	So, I really think if we lived in a different society, if we had better neighborhoods and schools and better resources for families, and people were growing up in reasonably -- I'm not suggesting equal, but more reasonably equal outcomes -- then we would think differently about selective colleges. If we lived in a society where people had, not equal, but reasonably equal opportunities to prepare to go to selective colleges, then we could more easily say, you know what? For some people, working really hard in a competitive environment and getting a bachelor's degree in liberal arts is the right answer. For other people, going and learning to be a welder. For other people, taking three years and just going and working at Starbucks and then going to college, maybe if they want to, is the right answer.
	People have different capacities to learn people, and I think that ... It is great to have Swarthmore College and to have Swarthmore College educate people who are highly motivated and highly capable. If we lived in a society where more people could come to the door with those characteristics, regardless of where they came from then, we would be less worried about the selectivity. The problem is that almost anything we can select on is highly correlated to how people grew up. Test scores, musical ability, almost anything you can look at has to do with where people grew up.
	I feel like there's a lot of conversation about there about elite colleges being bad because they're elite, and I think we have to be really really careful about saying if what they do is select on family background, that's a big problem. If what they do is select on academic motivation and capacities and interests and where you're going to end up, that's great that we give a special group of students these opportunities. But somehow, we have to figure out not to make it so limited to people who grow up in privileged circumstances. That's what you're going to all do with the rest of your lives is figure out how to make our world a place where institutions like Swarthmore will have an easier time of creating equal opportunities because people will come to them that are prepared and will go out into a world that will treat them more equally.
	But we've got an uphill battle because getting people to understand about liberal education and the value of this is terrifically important and politically, this is not the way to go. These are just some quotes from leaders. Ronald Reagan: "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" More and more, we're talking about that higher education's role is to prepare people for the labor market. Rick Scott, "Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don't think so." Scott Walker ... This is not actually a quote, but he wanted to change the mission of the universities in Wisconsin from ... Let's get rid of search for truth, let's get rid of improve the human condition, let's meet the state's workforce needs. He's had to retract that because people fussed, but Barack Obama said, "I promise you folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." He got a lot of flack for that.
	More recent comment, and we know he believes in this, but politically, he more recently said "How do we make sure that everybody has the tools to succeed in an economy where they constantly have to adapt?" If you think about that, he's going with the workforce thing and succeeding in the economy, but he's recognizing that you need to be able to think and solve problems and change in order to be able to succeed. You need an education, and a liberal arts education is a really good kind of education to have by getting people to appreciate this and understand that the route to making the world a more equal place and to giving people better opportunities into upward mobility is not just through thinking about what their first job is going to be. [inaudible 00:58:55]