Tuesday, December 12, 2023 - New York Times columnist and author David Leonhardt discusses his new book, “Ours Was The Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." In his conversation with Michael and Jeff, they talk about the impact of the high-school movement on the U.S. economy last century, what a similar higher ed movement might look like in this century, and why the value of the college is being questioned. The episode is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ascendium Education Group.
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New York Times columnist and author David Leonhardt discusses his new book, “Ours Was The Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." In his conversation with Michael and Jeff, they talk about the impact of the high-school movement on the U.S. economy last century, what a similar higher ed movement might look like in this century, and why the value of the college is being questioned. The episode is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ascendium Education Group.
(0:00) - Intro
(6:18) - The evolution of high school education and its impact on society
(11:27) - Public higher education expansion and quality in the US
(15:10) - Higher education's role in society and political polarization
(21:34) - Economic inequality and political polarization in the US
(27:10) - Education after high school, including college and non-college pathways
(35:28) - Higher education growth and innovation
David Leonhardt:
And I think that's worth remembering today that in the past when other countries said, "Oh, come on, not everybody needs to go to high school." We said, "No. No, everyone does need to go to high school." And history suggests we were right and Europe was wrong. And in fact, Europe effectively acknowledged it was wrong by playing catch up to the United States.
Michael Horn:
That was David Leonhardt at The New York Times. He's the author of the new book Ours Was the Shining Future, and he's our guest on this episode of Future U.
Sponsor:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
This episode is brought to you by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy, and institutional transformation.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo. So Michael, I'm super excited to welcome David Leonhardt to today's episode of Future U. We both known him for quite some time and our listeners probably know him for his writing at The New York Times, both in the opinion section, in the business section, as well as more recently writing a regular newsletter as well.
In his new book, Ours Was the Shining Future is obviously about much more than education, but education is a strong and reoccurring theme from the book that he really researched deeply and what he's found and concluded has big implications for where we go in this country and higher ed policy and much else. I really couldn't put the book down when I first read it and so it's just really exciting to welcome David to the show and dive right into it. David, welcome to Future U.
David Leonhardt:
It's great to be here. Thanks, Jeff.
Michael Horn:
David, before we dive into the substance of your book and specifically around the education issues it touches upon. As Jeff and I both know well, coming up with the title of a book is both art and science, maybe a little bit more art. So what's the meaning of the title of yours Ours Was the Shining Future?
David Leonhardt:
Yeah. And I've been involved in new ventures at The Times and I tend to have a high degree of humility about my ability to name things. I love this title. I can't take credit for it. So the book that coined the phrase the American dream is a 1931 book by a historian named James Truslow Adams. It's pretty remarkable if you think about it that the phrase the American dream was coined in 1931 during the Great Depression.
And he defines the American dream. He says it's the United States' important contribution to the world and he defines it as that American dream of a better, richer, happier life for all our citizens of every rank. And I think that's such a nice definition. Progress is built into it, better, richer, happier, and so is social mobility, all our citizens of every rank.
And he ends the book by quoting an immigrant writer named Mary Antin and she is sitting on the steps of the Boston Library, the Boston Public Library. She moved here from Russia to escape anti-semitism with her family. She arrived here not knowing any English and she learned English through the Boston Public School systems and by reading at the Boston Public Library. And Mary Antin's own memoir, which is a tribute to the immigrant experience in America, she ends it by saying, "Mine is the shining future."
And so random house working also with my literary agent came up with the idea of tweaking it in two ways, not mine is the shining future, but Ours Was the Shining Future to describe a time when our country was a lot more optimistic about the future than it seems to be these days.
Jeff Selingo:
So David, I've always been fascinated by the high school movement in the US which you write about extensively in your book. And I guess, one thing I didn't appreciate until I read that chapter was just how far the US was ahead of the rest of the developed world on this front? You write in the book, "A high school became a competitive advantage for community." So why is that?
David Leonhardt:
I think it became a competitive advantage for a few reasons. And the high school movement, one of the most important places that it took off was in Iowa as Claudia Goldin, who's the most recent Nobel laureate in economics. And her co-author and husband Larry Katz, they're both Harvard professors, have documented in their own historical scholarship on this. And I think high schools became a competitive advantage for a few different reasons. One, it became clear pretty quickly that businesses can be more productive when people learn things. The canonical example is actually farms, right? If you have students going to high school and becoming educated, they can more easily make their farms more productive. And communities came to understand that, "Wait a second, this is an economic advantage."
It also meant this is the late 19th century and early 20th century, and there was a huge movement of Americans from rural America to urban America, which really creates problems for communities because it means young people aren't around to take care of old people. And so if you build a high school and then you're able to have your local economy be more productive and people think, "Wait a second. I want to raise my kids there so they can go to that school." You can see why for both economic and social reasons, communities would really want to have local high schools.
And there are some just lovely quotes from history on this just to give you a couple from the great 1929 book Middletown, which is the classic sociological examination of life in Indiana, the authors of that, Robert and Helen Lynd, they say that, "Education evoked 'the fervor' of a religion of means of salvation among a large section of the population."
Jeff Selingo:
So one other question on the high school movement, when we think about what followed the GI bill post World War II, and then the massive uptick in the college going rate in the 1960s. Do you think that would've been possible without having the high school movement at the turn of the 20th century?
David Leonhardt:
Absolutely not. That's exactly the right way to think about it, Jeff, which is the high school movement's a building block for the GI Bill, and I think you probably both would agree that today we celebrate the GI Bill more than the high school movement. It's better remembered, but one, the GI Bill can't happen without the high school movement. And it's pretty fascinating because right around the same time that the US is passing the GI Bill, the mid-1940s, Europe or England to be more particular, basically it starts to move toward universal high school education. And so you just think about how far behind England was.
And what I find so fascinating is we really do have echoes of some of the debates today in the United States. Back then, many elites in Europe were saying, "We don't need high schools." So this is before the '40s, this is the late 19th and early 20th century. "We don't need high schools. Our workers don't need to go to school and learn how to read literature and they don't need to learn math. They're workers. Just send them into the factories or send them to do their jobs. They don't need to be educated." And the United States took a fundamentally different route. It embraced this idea of mass education.
I think both for democratic reasons, there's a long history of people believing that education is important to democracy. It dates to John Adams, it dates to other founders, and also for economic reasons that we've already talked about. The United States saw this was an economic advantage, and I think that's worth remembering today that in the past when other countries said, "Oh, come on, not everybody needs to go to high school." We said, "No. No, everyone does need to go to high school." And history suggests we were right and Europe was wrong. And in fact, Europe effectively acknowledged it was wrong by playing catch up to the United States.
Michael Horn:
So I think that's actually the perfect lead in to the question I want to go to, which is what should the high school movement of our current time be? Clearly it's some post-high school education, some as you know have suggested free community college or college for all, but we also need mastery of skills. And so maybe that looks different in this day and age, I don't know. But I'd love to know from your perspective where you've concluded the high school movement of this century should look like.
David Leonhardt:
I want to start with, I think what is just an important frame on this. I understand why people say sometimes with a little bit of skepticism, "We don't always need to be getting more and more educated, do we? A high school degree was enough in the past. Why isn't it enough now?" And I actually think it's important really to take on that argument and say, "No. We do need to be getting more educated over time."
If in the late 19th century and the early 20th century Americans decided, "Hey, you know what, eight or nine years of public education isn't enough in this day and age, we need 13 years of education, which is what our country effectively decided." And then you think about just how much more technologically sophisticated and complex our economy is now. If 13 years was the right amount of mass education for this country and all of our citizens a century ago, surely 13 years cannot still be the right answer when you think about how different our economy is.
So yes, the norm should be that over time the amount of education our citizens gets goes up. Of course, at some point we're going to reach a limit, but it can't be 13, I don't think. And so I do think it's absolutely some post-high school education. I do think it needs to be more varied, more diverse than the high school movement was. The high school movement was essentially a one size fits all solution that really did work.
And I think today that it needs to be some mix of vocational education that puts people effective education, that puts people into very good jobs relatively quickly. Two-year colleges which overlap with vocational education and four-year colleges. And four-year colleges are not the full answer by any means. I'll repeat that for emphasis. Four-year colleges are not the full answer. But I also sometimes get a little bit nervous when people who have relatively privileged backgrounds like journalists and professors and people who work at think tanks say, "Well, college isn't for everyone." All the while making sure that their own kids go to college.
And so while four-year college may not be for everyone, the opportunity to go to a four-year college absolutely should be for everyone. It shouldn't just be for the children of relatively privileged people like all of us and many of the people listening to this podcast. The opportunity really should be there for everyone, even though many people understandably will decide, "You know what? That's not what I want. I want something different."
Michael Horn:
I love that frame, the opportunity to make that choice meaningfully. Let's jump more into higher ed. Then from there, as you note in the book, in California, the state went on a real building spree between 1945 and '65 opening almost this is a quote from the book, "40 new community colleges, 11 campuses in the Cal State system, four new outposts of the University of California." And then it basically stopped since the 1980s, only four new university campuses have built in California. And frankly, the same is true in many other states where the population though didn't stop growing.
And as Jeff and I know from our visit to UCLA recently on the Future U Podcast campus tour that we had, there's a lot of pressure on these campuses to expand, but the most selective campuses, I think it's fair to say, are a bit resistant to it or maybe a bit more than that, resistant to it. And we were just at University of Michigan, we heard the exact same thing. So we tend to equate small size with quality in this country when it comes to higher education. But how do you think about this? What should be our approach when it comes to public higher education and quality in this country?
David Leonhardt:
I think there should be pressure on these schools to expand. I understand there are limits, right? We can't have a situation, I don't think the University of Michigan works at 250,000 undergraduates to pick a number. That's outlandish. But I think many schools can afford to expand and keep the basic quality of what they are offering. And yes, we should also build new campuses. And I think I would love it if policymakers were creative about how to build new campuses that open with similar levels of resources and prestige as some of the existing ones rather than adding new campuses that tend to be the least desirable for students to go to.
But realistically, we're not immediately going to open in anything that matches the prestige of the universities you just named Michigan and UCLA, right? These are two of the greatest public institutions anywhere in the world. And so given that I think we really do want to get expansion at the universities that already have the best results, have the most resources per student, and look for creative ways to do that. And I would say that some of the elite private universities, by no means all, but some of them have done this recently.
I mean Columbia, Chicago, Yale, Cornell, they've done meaningful expansions, not doubling, but really meaningful expansions. And it has done nothing to diminish their prestige or how appealing they are to applicants. And not only that, but there's this nice little bonus you get when you expand, which is you can diversify your school by expanding. Not only are you educating more students, but many of the existing constituencies can be mostly absent from the expansion.
So you don't have to admit more athletes, right? You can admit a greater percentage of your students can be first generation students because you don't have the political pressures to admit other groups. And so I just think although expansion is expensive and it's much harder for public universities than for these highly, highly endowed private universities, I think Michael, it's exactly the kind of thing that should be on the policy agenda and we should be thinking about it.
Jeff Selingo:
So David, I want to zoom out here for a minute to higher ed in general because The New York Times ran a piece by Paul Tough in its magazine recently about growing skepticism over the value of higher ed. As we know, undergraduate enrollment is dropping nationwide and the percentage of high school graduates going to college is also falling. I was just talking to somebody recently from the UNC system who said in North Carolina that they're competing with employers, not just other colleges for students.
Many people who would've gone to college are getting jobs and sometimes working alongside people with degrees. Yet, so many stats in your book like elsewhere show the key to renewed prosperity is higher ed. In fact, there's a chart specifically I want to point out on page 285 that is so because it shows life expectancy for those with a bachelor's degree and those without, and of course, those lines are going in opposite directions. So how do we turn this narrative about college around in the opposite direction?
David Leonhardt:
And if you don't mind, Jeff, I mean just to go even further. So it's massive gaps in income between people with four-year college degrees and not very large gaps in wealth, gaps in unemployment, gaps in life expectancy. As you noted, gaps in self-reported life satisfaction, gaps in chronic pain, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, huge gaps in whether children grow up with two parents, if those parents have four-year college degrees and not, I know that some of that relationship is coincidental, but when you look at the most careful social science, as I'm sure you both know, some of it really is causal. I mean, there are these very clever studies. One of them, for example, looks at Florida and compares students just on either side of the cutoff to get into any four-year school. At the time, the least difficult one to get into was one of the ones in South Florida.
We're not talking about the University of Florida or Florida State, we're talking about the last four-year school you can get into. And students on either side of the line, the ones just over the line got into a four-year school and went, and the ones just under it didn't. And you saw real gaps in their outcomes a decade later. And these are basically otherwise identical students. So college really does matter. And it's a really tough question. I think, again, at the elite levels, even if people profess some skepticism about higher education, their behavior suggests no skepticism about it. Think about how hard people work to get into good suburban school districts, how hard they work to get into urban magnet schools, the amount of money parents pay to send their kids to private high schools, how much stress and focus they put on the college admissions process.
So all of that suggests that at the more elite levels that people really understand how valuable this is. Sometimes they probably exaggerate, almost certainly exaggerate how important it's where you go. But there is this really deep skepticism among many people, particularly working class people, particularly political conservatives, given our polarization about the value of a college education. And I don't have an easy solution to that. I think it's important to talk about these huge gaps as we're talking about it. And I guess I would also say one of the things I talk about in my book more broadly is I do think the political left in this country has alienated a lot of people with a set of views on a whole bunch of issues that are sometimes really quite unforgiving, right? If you don't agree with us, you're either stupid or you're hateful. And I think that on some of these issues that's really just unfair.
It's also politically self-defeating to tell someone if you're in favor of say border security, that you're stupid or ignorant. Many people can have different views on border security. Many people of color in our country would like us to see this country to have better border security than it now does. And the way in which I think this circles back to education is that much of higher education really is some of the most intense versions of American progressivism today. And I think if higher education could be a little bit more open-minded on a whole bunch of political issues, it might find that more Americans were interested in participating in higher education.
Michael Horn:
So David actually where you just left off there, I want to stay on it for a moment because the shift in individuals with college degrees moving from in the past, voting overwhelmingly for the GOP to now voting more than overwhelmingly for democratic candidates, that's a well-known story. The degree divide is perhaps the best predictor in the electorate these days. But in your view, David, is this phenomenon one that's really driven by Trump, as in if he's not on the ballot in the future, might there be a reversal or at least a move back to some balance between the two parties and college-educated voters, or is there something more structural and enduring in these shifts that we see?
David Leonhardt:
I think it's mostly structure, but Trump clearly turbocharged this phenomenon. And som, yes, Trump turbocharged this phenomenon in a way that is meaningful and significant and it's important to talk about. And in 2016, it was largely among white working-class voters. In 2018 and '20 and '22, we also saw a shift among Latino and Asian working-class voters quite meaningful from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Both Latino and Asian voters still vote democratic, but the shrinking share really was important. There's even been a couple percentage points shrinking in the Democratic share of the Black vote in the last five years. And so Trump played an important role of this, but it is by no means all Trump. This has been a phenomenon that's been developing for decades quite frankly. One of the things I do in the book is I tell the story of the shift of the Democratic Party toward a more upscale liberalism that starts in the 1960s, and I was so struck while reading newspaper articles and journals and oral histories from the '60s, how much of an echo from that time there is in our time?
And if people read the book, I think it's chapter five, my guess is you'll be reading about the '60s thinking, "Oh my goodness, this is so similar to today." And so it really does stretch back decades. It's also not unique to the United States. The economist Thomas Piketty has coined this phrase that I use and really called the Brahman left. It's also present in Europe. And so we really have seen in many parts of the western world a shift of left of center parties to be less focused on economics, more focused on social and cultural issues, and to increasingly become upscale parties. And while there are both benefits and drawbacks to these parties, I think the drawbacks are bigger than the benefits. It is still the case that most American adults do not have a four-year college degree by a fairly wide margin.
It's also the case that because of the way our political system works with the Senate and the electoral college and the way house districts are drawn, that people without college degree actually have outsized power because they are more likely to be out outside of major cities. And you could lament that, but it's reality. And so a party that is losing significant support from the 60 plus percent of American voters who don't have four year college degrees has a lot of problems. And it's the basic reason why the Democratic Party can barely win any statewide elections in about 20 different states, including states like North Carolina and Florida and Texas, that the party really thought that it would at least be competitive in by now.
Jeff Selingo:
David, let's end talking about your larger argument in the book. As you write in the book, progress begot progress until it didn't. You talk a lot about the Raj Chetty research, which we know from his team's latest findings last summer that there is a drop-off in higher ed outcomes between Americans who were born in 1980 and those since. So thinking about your whole book, what changed to make that progress stop and how can we get our back? And because Michael and I both have young kids and I know we think a lot about the future as a result, what are we preparing them for?
David Leonhardt:
So those are two great questions. I'll try to answer them both briefly. Look, I just said some critical things about the Democratic Party. So now I'll say some critical things about the Republican party. I mean, we really did have a huge shift in this country's economic policy. It happened quite rapidly between 1976 and 1980. The Republican Party went from basically embracing the model that we had had for decades that both Eisenhower and Nixon and Gerald Ford all embraced to the laissez-faire model that Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman and Robert Bork really believed and argued and pushed for would create prosperity for all. And one of the things I do in the book is I trace the promises that they made in the 1980s about what these changes, deregulation, allowing companies to become much bigger, cracking down on labor unions, cutting taxes, particularly for the, they said, "We do these things and we will have an economy that works better for all Americans and we just don't."
In 1980, the United States had a normal life expectancy for a rich country. Today we have the lowest life expectancy of any rich country in the world, and there are many reasons for that. But if you really go back and look at those promises about what that laissez-faire economy, more of a laissez-faire economy would deliver for Americans, it's failed to deliver on those promises. And so I think it's really worth asking. "Can we have an economy that does something different?" And for me, that looks like investing more in the future. Education is at the center of that, but so are roads. It takes longer to go from Los Angeles to New York today than it did 50 years ago. That's crazy. Other countries haven't stagnated in that way, so it's investing more in the future. I do think labor unions an important part of this in terms of lifting wages.
I think corporate culture is an important part of this. I think we have a less patriotic and more self-centered corporate culture than we used to have. And so to me, those are the big forces. You also asked, "Well, are we doomed?" And by nature, I'm an optimist, and so I'm not predicting that we are going to create an economy that's better, but I really do believe we have the tools to do it. And if you doubt that, I would encourage you to look at actually the profound and inspiring success of political movements in this country. Most recently, marriage equality became law much more rapidly than almost anyone expected. If you go back longer, the successes of the disability rights movement are amazing of the Women's Rights Movement of the Civil Rights Movement. You look at even the smaller movements that have tried to change our economy, like the Fight for 15 has gotten minimum wage raised even in red states.
And so I really do believe it is possible to use our political system to create a better economy and a fairer America and a more optimistic America. I think the central issue is that neither the organizations on the political right or the political left in recent decades have been focused on lifting the living standards of most Americans. They've been focused elsewhere. And I think if we had movements to make education more affordable and more accessible and better and movements to lift people's wages, I'm not saying they'd be guaranteed to succeed, but boy, I'd like to see what they might accomplish if we actually tried them. And that to me is the biggest reason, even in these dark times, to have some hope about what this country can do.
Michael Horn:
David, just terrific set of things for us to think and chew on. Congratulations again in the book and thanks for joining us and future you.
David Leonhardt:
Thank you Michael, and thank you, Jeff. It's really, it's a thrill to be on your podcast and I look forward to talking to you in the future.
Jeff Selingo:
David, thanks so much for joining us on Future You and we'll be right back. This episode of Future You is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non-profit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system-level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first-generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Michael Horn:
This episode is being brought to you by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They're workers, parents and caregivers and neighbors and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.
Welcome back to Future U. A terrific conversation from, yes, I'm going to say it, Jeff, another Yaley, and not just a Yaley. He's a Yale Daily News alum at that.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, I'm starting to think that if we focused on outcomes, if you just base it on Future U guests, then Yale must rank higher than Harvard or Princeton, right?
Michael Horn:
Hey, you've hit upon it finally. But in seriousness, I want to get into this, and I know you're intrigued by the point that David makes about how the US was so far ahead of the rest of the world with the high school for all movement, and frankly, college for many for a while. But now the US has really fallen behind so many places that have realized it's in the national interest to continue to invest in education beyond high school. But I'm just going to let listeners know a little bit about how we go back and forth as we plan for these shows.
You texted me this point that this doesn't have to mean free community college or free four year college. And indeed David said this doesn't necessarily mean college for all, but it might mean the opportunity for everyone to at least make a meaningful and informed choice if college is the right next step for them, and that there would be meaningful pathways that are other than college if they chose otherwise. So I'd love you to elaborate on your thinking there.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, of course this is not a new idea, but we really should stop thinking about college as a one size fits all. Just like 100 plus years ago when communities thought that children needed education after eighth grade, it's clear that education after 12th grade now is definitely needed no matter what the headlines say about states, for example, and employers dropping degree requirements. What we need to move away from is this idea that it's essentially four years or bust or two years or bust. It's one or the other. We should think of it something like a one to six year flex period after high school, which allows students to earn a credential at their own pace. And as Randy Bass who runs the Georgetown Red House Innovation Center, who we had on this podcast a long time ago, I think in season one, he likes to say, "We already have a flex system now by chaos and negligence, right?"
Some students go faster, some students go slower, but it's not with any intentionality at all. So let's build that intentional system now, just like we did for high school in the early 1900s, right? We didn't say back then, "Okay, kids, go find your own schooling after eighth grade and good luck." And that's essentially what we're doing now. So I personally would love to see two or three intentional pathways. One, let's channel what Ryan Craig is talking about now in his new book on registered apprenticeships and think of an apprenticeship pathway outside of the construction trades. I think Ryan makes a very good argument for why we can do that in the US and copy what is happening in the UK and Switzerland and Germany. That's number one.
Number two, really create short-term certificates that lead to jobs without necessarily having the college degree immediately, but having the option to return for a college degree within a few years of earning that certificate when you're already in the workforce. And then third, really figuring out this idea of dual enrollment, the two to four year transfer so that it's more seamless. We've had George Mason on this podcast. They should not be. They should be the rule, not the exception.
Michael Horn:
A lot I like in that answer, Jeff. I was looking for something to try to disagree with, but one thing that quickly jumps out at me is that you point out we don't need this to be a one size fits all pathway. What's interesting about high school when that first got introduced is that actually wasn't one size fits all either, right? It actually had lots of pathways in it. The mission of it was to compete with a fast rising Germany and make sure we prepared everyone for work. And it wasn't really until 1983 in a nation at risk that we narrowed down the pathways. And as you've written in your book along with technology automation and globalization said it's got to be college for all.
And what I think is so interesting against that backdrop, my cohost of my class disrupted podcast, Diane Tavner, she led some at public schools as you know for 20 years, and she stepped aside this past year and has started a new company called Point B, and it's solely around this problem she realized, which was Summit was founded to get 100% of its graduates into college. That was the guarantee that they made to you when you enrolled.
And at some point she stopped believing that was the right destination for every student. And what she instead started believing was we had to help students come up with a clear informed purpose and a clear map and pathway to get to fulfill that purpose. And that might be college in many cases, right? To the points you made, but it could be other pathways. And the point was it should be informed and they should be able to choose that. And I think that's a really interesting way to tackle it. And then you start measuring success, right? Based on did the individual fulfill this meaningful purpose, not just what Randy describes today, right? This happenstance, chaotic thing.
And I think it goes to something else which is it's much more a positive way of measuring attainment. It's mastery base, what have you accomplished and not time spent? And then I think we can get out of the debates we have of whether post high school is a total of 14 years instead of 13 or is it 15 and 16 all this time-based way of measuring educational attainment I think does not help us ultimately. So I think we largely agree there where we might differ. And I'm curious, your take is David, he started talking about how higher education though, the other thing that hurt it is that institutions like the University of Michigan's of the world, it hasn't expanded that much.
And he said his quote was, "University of Michigan probably doesn't work at say 250,000 students, but it could work at larger than it has." And so I'm just curious instead, should we be building new campuses and resourcing them at the same levels? Because that's what he suggested. He said the problem wasn't just that we're not building new campuses, but we haven't resourced them at the levels of a University of Michigan and that they shouldn't be lower quality or look meaningfully different and we should be doing some marginal expansions. I don't think I heard him say big expansion, so I'm just curious what your take is in all that.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, as you knew, as someone affiliated with Arizona State, this idea that you can't have quality at 250,000 students just isn't true. What you can't have is quality doing it just one way, and that's the classical way. So I agree it's hard to build a physical campus and educate 250,000 students or whatever the number is face-to-face. And so that's why at a place like ASU, you have a portion of students doing the traditional four-year residential experience because it works for them others who are hybrid and mixing and matching the two. And then of course, where the real growth is in the fully online students. And each of those segments of higher education is quality in my humble opinion, it's just delivered in different ways than I think many of us who were educated in the first way, meaning face-to-face residential experience. We always believe, well, anything else beyond that isn't good.
I'm not sure we want to build new campuses when we have some smaller ones already struggling, as we've talked about on this show many times. But we also know that resources matter. So who has the most resources? Well, some of the smallest colleges and universities in this country in terms of enrollment. So I think we should put it on them rather than build more campuses. Why don't we put it on the campuses that have the most resources but are tiny in terms of enrollment and say, "You have to figure out how to grow. Again, you don't have to grow face-to-face, but you have to figure out how to grow."
So why can't Michigan, for example? Think of a system where there are two or three ways into the university from community colleges to dual enrollment to gap years with an online component. Now, it doesn't mean that Michigan takes all of those students as undergraduates and gives them a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but certainly Michigan as well as the University of Washington and Arizona State, and you name institutions in every state, I think can prepare all of them for post high school education. And that's how they could "enroll" 250,000 students without growing to serve every single one of them for four years.
Michael Horn:
Okay. So I'm super intrigued by this, Jeff. And maybe actually agree with most of what you just said. I remember having conversations about what does Harvard look like if it expands? And my argument has been, let's be honest, Harvard University as it's currently constituted, they're not going to grow a lot. It's the same reason when David mentioned that Yale has grown in the last 15 years. In my mind, that's not real growth, right? It's a-
Jeff Selingo:
It's a couple hundred students, right?
Michael Horn:
A couple hundred students a class, and it was a half a billion dollars of Capex to grow. And yes, it's increased a lot of operational expenditures. It's the same cost structure, but like Harvard did with HBS Online where they're able to give credentials and grow significantly, I think I saw recently HBS Online is almost the same amount of revenue that Exec Ed brings in Harvard Business School now. Could Harvard University, right? Create a hybrid option that starts to expand the supply and looks like a very different program, so you're not violating faculty or alumni senses of what a Harvard University traditional degree looks like? But in the same way ASU has done frankly that they have multiple pathways through the university.
And I guess the second part of that though, I think is that we're not going to be replicating the cost structures of these existing institutions. And so you just said it that we might not be building traditional brick and mortar campuses. I strongly agree. I think what we need is much more disruptive innovations that fundamentally set the cost structure lower that are amenable to scale, and they might look lower quality by traditional metrics of performance, meaning they don't have all the research and dining halls and amenities and so on and so on, right? But they really help people better accomplish what they need. So the Western Governors Universities of the world, the Minerva Universities of the world may be at the elite end, but I think they need to scale those institutions and I think that they need to change the game fundamentally to make higher education more accessible, more valuable and less costly, which to me means less spending.
So I guess my push on David is I don't think we should be replicating and investing in outdated infrastructure. I don't think we should be judging these by the amount of dollars we spend, but instead the outcomes that it gets for students and really looking at next gen institutions that are measured based on the performance and the value for students not on research and amenities. How does that land, Jeff?
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. So I think that's where I might disagree with you, Michael, and we seem to not do enough of that on this show sometimes-
Michael Horn:
I'm searching. I'm searching
Jeff Selingo:
... in terms of disagreeing, is that it has to be what I would call the non-traditional or for-profit sector that are the innovators here. Now, I know WGU is probably more traditional now, but it's not as traditional as a Michigan or Yale, that's for sure. And Minerva certainly isn't. I just don't want to give up on the traditional players which have hundreds of years of history, a huge infrastructure, tens of billions of dollars, billions of dollars in the bank in some cases, and a wide and deep alumni base to outsource this growth to others. I just don't think it has to be necessarily the WGUs and the Minervas of the world.
Just like in the early-1900s, we didn't say to Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, "You go and build these high schools." I really do still want to see this as a public good. We took our kids to see the Maryland-Penn State game a couple of weeks ago, and every time I go to one of these big state universities, I'm just in awe of what we built in this country over the last couple hundred years in terms of these big public universities, which as we know have become more private-like in so many ways.
And I just feel like this is our moment to take these places of which we have one and many in some states and really turn them into really rethinking this pathway from high school through whatever we call this, and I hate to call it higher education or even post-secondary education, I guess we'll call it post-secondary education for the lack of a better term right now. I just feel like I don't want to give up on them being an integral part of doing this.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. So I hear you, Jeff, and we can wrap this up, this part of it here, but I guess my thought is in the late-1800s, when those traditional players, the Yales of the world and the Harvards, right? Became research universities, they didn't do so in a vacuum. They did so because there were entrants of MIT and so forth coming into the scene. And my sense is just we're going to need both, right? We're going to need new supply much more opened up than we have right now to put pressure. In the same way frankly, Phil Hill has written, their group has written. Online is the new international, all these institutions are going online, but they didn't do it in a vacuum. There was some outside pressure that caused them to look at it. And so I think it probably becomes a little bit of both and ultimately, but we'll keep coming back to this, I'm sure. Let me shift just to a last question because I know you've been particularly interested in this and the conversation we just had around the college degree being the biggest predictor of political party.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, that's the point I would like to dwell on, which is the electorate, as we noted, the voting trends are clear. The Republicans are now the party of no college and the Democrats are the party of college. Now, obviously there's variations within that, but generally that's what we see and it's really a shift from 50 or even 40 years ago. I also think it's really dangerous, one for higher ed and for both parties. For one, you can't get to a real majority by being one or the other. Despite what we said earlier about creating more pathways to higher ed, the fact is that we're likely to always have a sizable portion of the population that ends their education after high school.
So just focusing on college-educated voters and their issues is not a winnable path to a majority for the Democrats. And the same with the Republicans because we're largely sorting ourselves by education now. So there are going to be geographies that never vote for Republicans as a result. But more importantly here, I think for higher ed to get bipartisan support in Congress or bipartisan support in the state houses, they need not to be seen as hostile to Republicans and non-college voters. So we can't just continue on this track, in my opinion. Someone, some leader in the party really has to break this log jam as a choice between college and no college.
Michael Horn:
I couldn't agree more with where you're going there, but I also wonder if... I think higher ed has a big responsibility to help shift this as well, and I think they have to do so by... And look, I'm coming out of this right now as a jew watching what's gone on with Israel on campuses, and I will be the first to say I've been triggered by it, so I'm going to try to put that out there.
But I think they do that by not being so clearly partisan or eager to align with a particular and mostly the progressive cause, but instead by being places that are designed to cultivate difficult conversations with different perspectives by design and to dig for truth. And I think what's really challenging about that, Jeff, is that I think... This is my sense, I could be wrong, but I think a lot of the presidents of these institutions now want to go there. They realize what's happened and the faculty, and I'm just going to say it particularly in the humanities, have been so driven by ideology and who has gotten tenure that I don't know if they're ready to make that shift. And I think that's probably part of it just to be super blatant. And I don't know how you change that to create an environment that is welcoming of different perspectives again, on all these issues, frankly. I don't know how you do it.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, it's no doubt about the faculty, but looking at that Paul Tuff piece that was in The New York Times, he had some pretty damning statistics on also the administrators as well below the president and-
Michael Horn:
Good point.
Jeff Selingo:
... their political views. And I think the first thing that has to happen is that college campuses first admit that they have a problem, and I don't think they're willing to do that right now. And so when they admit they have a problem, then maybe we could start talking about fixes. But I think this is an issue that we're going to be talking about for quite some time. And I think, by the way, one of the things that they might admit they have a problem is when students stop coming to them, and you're starting to see this now, you're starting to see a lot of discussions. I see it in the work that I'm doing with prospective students and they're saying, "Do I want to go to a campus that's like fill in the blank?" And once colleges start losing students because they're not seen as open to different perspectives, that may be the first lever that people say, "Maybe we need to change."
Michael Horn:
Jeff, just to stay at it for two seconds. I know we've gone longer than we wanted, but I think where you just went as an interesting point because I think you're also seeing employers pull back from hiring some of these students. I'm not a big fan of the doxing. I don't think it's a good precedent, but nevertheless, if employers start to take some of the shine off elite institutions independent of the reasons that might be another moment that resets this a little bit and that might be healthy if we take a little bit of the edge off the elite institutions being such a pipeline into Wall Street.
Jeff Selingo:
That's a whole another topic. So I think we're going to end it there for today, Michael. And as always, thank you for joining us on Future U. Be sure to check out David Leonhardt's new book, Ours Was the Shining Future. And as always, let us know what you think by connecting on us through various platforms, Future U on your various social media channels like Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, futureupodcast.com, where you can sign up for newsletters and submit questions. And our personal channels, of course.
Michael's @michaelbhorn on the different social media platforms. I'm @jselingo, and our own newsletters, Michael's The Future of Education on Substack and I'm next which is available on my website jeffselingo.com. Until we see you next time, keep thinking about the future of higher education.
