The State of the Schools: Higher Education

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Student Loan Forgiveness and The Cost of Higher Education

  • The Case for Affirmative Action

  • The College Admissions Process

  • Outside of Politics: Graduation Gifts

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EPISODE RESOURCES

THE COST OF HIGHER EDUCATION

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:00:26] Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. This week, we're talking about the state of the schools beginning today with higher education and then talking K-12 on Friday. We know we can't cover the full state of the schools in two episodes, and that conversations will continue far beyond what we do this week. But we have realized lately in our team meetings that education related issues just keep surfacing for us. So we wanted to put all of those together this week to see what we learn from it. Today we're talking higher education, beginning with student loans and the cost of college. Then we're going to talk about affirmative action in college admissions and what the goal of these systems are. Outside of Politics, we are going to talk about all of the graduations from high school and college that are coming up and happening right now and what appropriate gifts look like for those graduates.

Sarah [00:01:14] Before we jump in, we wanted to remind you that we are in the midst of our bi-annual premium drive. At the end of every show, you hear a list of executive producers. These are our listeners who support our work at the $100 a month level. Now, we talked to our executive producers and they get quarterly updates and they give incredibly valuable feedback. For example, one of our long time executive producers, Martha, suggested that we share a little more about what our day to day work looks like and how the support from listeners enables us to do that work. So we wanted you to hear directly from Alise today in what her job as managing director involves.

Alise [00:01:45] This is Alise, the managing director of Pantsuit Politics. Great title, right? But what does managing director actually mean? My typical partly small talk explanation is that I keep all the trains running here at the show. What that actually looks like is different every day, which is part of why I love my job. I get to work with our guests to get them scheduled and prepped for their interviews. I manage Sarah and Beth's speaking events. I collaborate with our various partners, our network, our accountant, our audio team and more to manage the day to day work of both creating the show and running the business. I really am the central hub through which all the trains run. Think of me as our project manager, or as Beth likes to say, the COO of Pantsuit Politics. The support of our premium members makes everything I do not only possible, but easier. It's because of premium support that Sarah and Beth were able to bring me on full time in 2021 and then also bring Maggie on full time last year. And having Maggie on the team as a partner for me has been life changing. In the same way Sarah and Beth complement each other so well, Maggie and I do the same. We have different strengths and we work together wonderfully. Not a day goes by without me giving thanks to have her working with us. In addition to personnel, premium support also helps us pay for software and resources that allow our team to be more efficient and the best stewards of your financial support as possible. We use tools like Asana and Airtable and Missive to streamline our workflow and collaborate effectively. We're so thankful for your support and for what it allows us to do. We work really hard to bring you this show twice a week, as well as the vast amount of content we create for those premium members. We truly couldn't do any of that without you. If you're not a supporter already, we really hope you'll consider joining us. Thank you so much.

Sarah [00:03:19] We couldn't do it without Alise. Thanks to all of our premium members who allow us to have a team. If you haven't joined our premium community yet, we hope you'll consider it today by signing up through Patreon or Apple Podcast subscription. All the information you need to do that will be available in the show notes.

Beth [00:03:34] Next up, we're going to talk about student loans, debt cancellation and the cost of college. It's hard to have a conversation about the state of higher education without talking about how very, very expensive it is. So, we're going to start today by discussing two major changes to the federal student loan program since the COVID 19 pandemic hit in March 2020. The first thing that I had kind of forgotten about until I started preparing for this episode, is that there has been a really significant pause on student loan repayments. That pause has been in effect since March of 2020, so a whole lot of people have gotten huge relief from the pressure of monthly student loan payments. We have an effort to end that pause via a lawsuit from a conservative think tank. They argue that after that initial six month pause that was authorized by Congress and the CARES Act, everything else has been an improper extension. And this extension has cost about $5 billion in foregone federal revenue. But that lawsuit seems like it's unnecessary because last week the education secretary, Miguel Cardona, announced that pause is going to end no later than June 30th. Why June 30th? Because they are waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision about student loan forgiveness, which we'll talk about in just a second. But in addition to that pause ending by June 30th, the Department of Education is working on making student loans more transparent and affordable and income driven repayment plan and expanding access to forgiveness programs. So that's what's going on with student loan repayments. So that drifted from your consciousness too Sarah, or is that more present for you in your circles of people?

Sarah [00:05:23] No, I definitely knew that the payments had been paused and continued to be pause. I pay pretty close attention to the student loan overall discussion because I think it's just become something we've absorbed. While I was getting ready for this show, I read a really great piece that just talked about we just shifted to loans. It didn't used to be this way. The largest way people used to pay for college was grants and then, of course, the expense was just lower. For example, Pell Grants covered 84% of tuition at four year public universities in 1976. Eighty four percent, that's wild to me. But by 2002, they covered only 39% and that ratio is probably going to continue to shrink. And so, because we went from grants to loans, it just became a part of that water that we all swim in when it comes to higher ed and particularly how people pay for it. And those payment freezes over COVID, I just think had a massive impact and really gave people that disruption we talk about with COVID all the time. A disruption to the status quo where people are like, "Oh my God, look at the difference in my life when these payments are not hanging over me all the time."

Beth [00:06:37] I do you think you have to view it as one piece of our ability to get through COVID with more of a soft landing than that crash into the recession. When you talk about how consumer spending remained so high over the pandemic, one factor had to be how many people haven't been making these monthly payments. The second big issue is President Biden's proposed debt cancellation. He announced last August his plan to forgive up to $10,000 for borrowers earning less than 125,000 a year for individuals, less than 250,000 for households. We talked about it at the time, we'll put that episode in the show notes. Just a reminder, we are talking about loans held by the federal government. Private student loans are not eligible for this forgiveness, and private student loans are a huge component of talking about college affordability and how people are paying for this and how the debt impacts them after they receive their degrees or stop taking classes. We don't know how much this program is going to cost, but it looks like it could be up to 400 billion over 10 years. So, the Supreme Court heard arguments in February about whether this was a legal program. And there are two major issues in these cases. The first one is standing, can a bunch of states get together and say, "We don't like this. We want to invalidate it." Do they have an injury that can be redressed by the court system in the way that we have traditionally defined standing in order to challenge these programs? And the second issue is whether the executive branch exceeded its authority in creating this program. Experts are predicting that we'll get a 6-3 decision on this, that the conservative justices will say it was not within the power of the executive branch to do something at this scale, even though the Department of Education has some authority in emergencies to waive or modify student loan debt.

Sarah [00:08:31] The Supreme Court is looking to dial back the power of the executive branch and the administrative state. That's another episode. To me, the issue is the cost of education. I think there's like two things we're talking about. We're talking about how people are paying. We shifted from grants to loans, and we're talking about how much it costs. I mean, the average tuition for a single year at the U.S. most elite universities is more than the average annual income of American citizens. It's very expensive. But I think the thing I want to talk about as we talk about the state of higher education generally, both in this conversation about debt and student loans and in the conversation in the next segment about admissions, is I wrote a really great piece in academics that talked about we just have a bifurcated system. We have a system of elite universities that perpetuate the system of status in this country. And then we have this other system of universities, community college, for profit universities, and they are just getting further and further and further apart. Brookings had a really great thing about the net cost of college. So you see these tuition costs, these like sticker prices for Georgetown and George Washington and Harvard and they're so high, but most people don't pay just full tuition, right? There's loans, there's grants, there's scholarships. And so, what is the net price? And for that bifurcated system for the lower end, obviously, it's very different, but it's still higher than most people can afford.

[00:10:07] And I just think we get into these conversations about big issues like this debt cancellation, which I agree with, and we forget that it's almost like we're talking about two different things. And I think you can see that a little more clearly with the debt cancellation when they're targeting income levels. And we're saying a lot of people are taking a year or two classes at very expensive for profit universities under very confusing financial arrangements and then getting saddled with debt for diaries they didn't get. But then it's almost like the animosity is all about like, well, we're going to be forgiving debt from people who went to Harvard to become lawyers. I think we talk past each other, really, because there's this hidden bifurcation and we're talking about almost two completely different universes. When you talk about higher ed, these elite universities with endowments of billions of dollars and Western Kentucky Community College, what do they have in common? Almost nothing.

Beth [00:11:08] And you can understand why the political discourse is biased in the direction of the elite universities, because all the media coverage is written about elite universities by people largely who attended school at elite universities. So, the information shooting out is not talking about what's happening at community colleges in Western Kentucky University. And the vast majority of colleges experiences that people are having are unrepresented when you're reading about what's going on with college. And it is hard to get your arms around what a program that would help the majority of people who really need the help looks like.

Sarah [00:11:47] Like I read in this piece, the typical U.S. college student today is 26 years old, has a domestic partner and works 30 hours a week. And so, that person I want debt cancellation for. That person, I want to talk about increasing Pell Grants for. But I don't know if shifting the policy and just accepting the reality of this bifurcation is what we want. I don't really want a higher education system that is driven by for profit universities that are basically just handing out occupational licenses. That's not what I want. That's not the public good I'd like to invest in as an American citizen, but it seems like we're stuck. And they keep getting further and further and further away from each other. And the universities in the middle, like the one we attended, are getting smaller and more strained and having to make hard choices when it comes to admissions, when it comes to tuition costs. And I hate that. I don't I don't want that. And I don't know if this debate, particularly around the student loan cancellation, really captures that reality.

Beth [00:12:55] You can tell how messed up all the incentives are when you focus on all the writing in higher education about the demographic cliff. There's this freak out-- and I think we've touched on this before-- about the fact that fewer children were born in a period of years, so that a few years from now enrollment is expected to drop in a major way almost across the board. And compounding that concern is the fact that fewer students from foreign nations, including China, are seeking to come to the United States for a lot of reasons, but gun violence is a big one. So this pressure on admissions and enrollment dropping tells you that even nonprofit universities have to think like for profit universities. They have to think about what are these tuition dollars going to look like? It can't just be we are here to serve the students that we have. It has to be we always need more students because we need those tuition dollars to do more things. And so, even in a nonprofit model, you're in sort of a cost pressure reality all the time. And I think that's why we're never talking about one thing. Even if we got rid of that bifurcated system, we're never talking about one thing around higher education because people want to have content discussions and they want to have is this about enriching your sort of liberal arts perspective versus an occupational license? And all the time we have like maybe we just need to build nicer dorms so more kids want to come here.

Sarah [00:14:26] Yeah, but again, it's not like Harvard's over there concerned about enrollment and the demographic cliff. That's what's so weird about these conversations we have is there's just this huge entire subset of institutions that have a completely different set of concerns. And that's why when things like the U.S. News and World Report rankings bubble up and you see colleges-- particularly when several of the highest ranking law schools and med schools were like, we're out, we're not doing this anymore. When I see those elite institutions changing their policies and being pressured to abandon the rankings or abandon testing and going test optional, which we'll talk about the next segment, that's what's really interesting to me because they are at the top of the heap. And so, if they're being pressured to make some changes, what does that mean? There's definitely [inaudible] in the affirmative action conversation. But when it just comes to this debt cancellation and the debt freeze, whether we get to the bifurcation of the system, higher education is a civic good I want to invest in as a taxpayer. I don't want it to be market driven all the time. One, because I don't think the market works well here. I think it's driven by weird motivations and rewards, and so I'd much rather invest in higher education. I'd much rather see this proliferation of amazing attendance like we saw with something like the G.I. Bill where you get my favorite Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens. I just think when you really can make it affordable and diversify the applicant pool, it is a societal good. This is not just an institution self-contained. It really does matter to the rest of society. That's why I support the cancellation. I just really think this has tentacles, including stuff that we talk about all the time, like the teacher shortage that are so much wider than we really want to admit to ourselves.

Beth [00:16:24] Well, the diversification of the applicant pool seems like a good transition to talking about affirmative action, which is one of the most contentious issues that the Supreme Court has on its docket this term. And that's saying something because there are a lot of contentious issues on its docket this term. So we're going to talk about that next. Affirmative action has been such a part of the backdrop of my life that I never thought to consider how do we get that name for it? And it came from President John F Kennedy in 1961. He issued an executive order telling government contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunities in employment. This was expanded in the Johnson administration. The Nixon administration was the first to really start to implement affirmative action policy. And so, sixties and seventies we see lots of efforts to expand diverse employment, diverse attendance at colleges and universities. And the goal has always been to improve opportunities for underrepresented groups. We're trying to level the playing field here. More recently, you see affirmative action policies extended to gender representation, people with disabilities, and some veterans.

Sarah [00:17:40] Important to note that you and I are both absolute beneficiaries of affirmative action. White women are like one of the most rewarded groups, particularly in the eighties and nineties.

Beth [00:17:50] Yes, if you look at all of the statistics, white women both have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group. And white women have been the tip of the spear against affirmative action policy. And the cases that are pending before the Supreme Court right now are from a group that has cease on Abigail Fisher, who has been an affirmative action plaintiff from Texas for many, many years now. She wanted to go to the University of Texas where her family members had gone. She thought she did everything right. She got good test scores. She barely missed this automatic admission that Texas provides to the top 10% of all high school classes. And she sued and she lost. And she has been working on this since then. But white women as plaintiffs is a favorite.

Sarah [00:18:38] Has she ever actually gone to college? Where is she at in her higher education journey?

Beth [00:18:44] She went to LSU. She's doing fine, I think.

Sarah [00:18:46] All right.

Beth [00:18:46] But she is a leader of Students for Fair Admission. And that's the group that has brought the two cases pending before the Supreme Court right now. These aren't the first cases that the Supreme Court has had about affirmative action. We had our first challenge in 1978, and at that time we got what is basically the law now, which is that universities can consider race in admissions as part of a holistic process. You cannot admit someone only because of race or deny them admission only because of race. But the reason the court says this is okay is to foster a diverse student body for all students. Instead of saying we're trying to right past wrongs or create more justice because of the institution of slavery or any number of reasons that you might do this, what the Supreme Court has said is that it is good for all students to have a diverse student body. We allow affirmative action because it's good for white students also to have students of color. It's good for men as well as women. It just has to benefit everybody in order to work. Now, we have had states ban the use of affirmative action. California went first on this 1996 through a proposition. California voted to ban any preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin in public education, employment and contracting. Eight other states followed suit. And now we see the effect of that. Studies have shown that the enrollment of students of color dropped in each state after these bans, especially in California, especially at UCLA and Berkeley. The number of black students enrolled at Berkeley is like low single digits now.

Sarah [00:20:29] Well, California and their proposition system, bless them. But I think that's interesting. And I think it would be surprising to most Americans if they understood that. I'm not sure that's commonly known or understood that it's illegal in California. And I just think that decision in 1978-- it reminds me of Roe v Wade. I like the outcome, but the way y'all propped it up was so problematic. It's not that I don't think diversity is beneficial, but I think if you want to continue a policy, you should probably continue it under the auspices of the original motivation. That to me is always the strongest legal foundation, and I don't know why they shied away from saying we are trying to right or wrong. Probably because it would open up the argument that we see even still, which is when are we going to be done? When have we righted that wrong and when can we move on?

Beth [00:21:18] And it's weird. It seems contradictory that they have said, well, the reason that this is legal is because it's good for everybody to have a diverse body. But all of the cases since then have been about that question of when is this over? And the justices keep bringing up an oral argument Sandra Day O'Connor's paragraph from one of the biggest cases in this line where she speculated about 25 years from now, we won't need this anymore. And it's hard to know what that was based on or what she intended in writing that paragraph, but that was a deadline or what it means that someone like Clarence Thomas has kind of waded that out now and is saying we should end this. But you can tell that what the intention of these policies is animates a lot of this conversation, even though what makes it into the court's opinions about this doesn't seem to have anything to do with what they've said is a compelling interest.

Sarah [00:22:13] Yeah, and I think that's the problem with the way progressives talk about affirmative action. First, I think there is an unwillingness to admit or follow any type of reasoning that says this is a limited in time exercise, or at least it was originally thought of that way instead of acknowledging, yes, things are different than the 1960s. We do not have the same dramatic problem with racial admissions. Doesn't mean we don't have any problem. It just means it's changed. And it's like there's no willingness to admit. No things have gotten better because it feels like we do this with so many arguments I think on the progressive side. If we give an inch, they'll take a mile. So if we admit things have improved, we're weakening our argument. I don't necessarily think that's true, and I think it just becomes this very convoluted argument that is not only built on refusing to admit that things have improved, but also weirdly and paradoxically also refusing to admit that admissions is jacked for lots of reasons. So you get stuck in this position. It feels like where you're defending a system that everybody knows is not doing what we wanted to do, even if we have improved some of the outcomes.

Beth [00:23:23] I read a great piece in The Atlantic making the point that you're making about how admissions are a strange soup of factors no matter what, and a lot of them lead to bad outcomes and how diverse the conversation is about affirmative action from the reality of college admissions. There's a sociologist who's written a book about this, and we'll put all this information in the show notes. But she says, look, we talk about affirmative action like each individual who's applying to college is being assessed and they're being ranked and put in order. Instead of realizing that colleges like businesses, like any kind of organization, are filling needs. Does the orchestra need a new bassoon player because their bassoon player graduated? What positions on the football team are coaches trying to recruit for? Do we have too many STEM students and not enough humanities students now? She said It's more like a lottery than a merit competition. And that is a completely different universe then these affirmative action cases are happening in. And almost all of these cases sound like Abigail Fisher's original complaint. I did everything right. Why didn't I get into the school that I really wanted to go to? And so, conservatives who have long wanted the conversation around race to quiet down and for race to not be such a prominent factor in our public life, have kind of pivoted in strategy and how they want to bring these cases. And you see that in the Harvard case. The two cases in front of the court right now are against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. And the Harvard case says that Asian-American students are being discriminated against because of affirmative action policies, and that violates the Civil Rights Act. The North Carolina case, this group, same plaintiff says, violates the 14th Amendment equal protection clause, because UNC now can have a diverse student body without affirmative action in its admissions process. They say basically at UNC it's over now. We've reached that magical endpoint where we don't need this anymore to achieve what we say is the compelling goal.

Sarah [00:25:34] I think it's just frustrating and this is a terrible venue in which to have this debate and this policy conversation. One, because it really orients the conversation, like you said, around the individual applicant. Frank Bruni had a great column where he said the process isn't about the applicants. Their needs are what's fair because admissions is a business for college. And to me, that's the issue. Why are we not talking about that? Why are we not talking about that admissions is a business decision for college, and if we're not happy with the decisions they're making then we probably need to change the business model and discuss that. But, again, we're also having two different conversations because we're having this conversation around elite colleges, which is like a totally different universe than admissions when you're talking about community colleges or for profit institutions. And so, we're just we're talking past each other. I think the other issue, particularly when you're thinking about just the cultural moment and the conversation that people are ready, willing, capable of having around affirmative action, is that admissions right now is bananas. I was looking at some of the statistics and I've been hearing this from my friends whose kids are in high school and are going through this process. One of the biggest changes was the common application. How many colleges did you apply to we applied in 1998?

Beth [00:26:59] I think I only applied to three.

Sarah [00:27:01] I applied to two. And the average is like 10 to 15 because you can just do the common application. You don't have to have the wherewithal to sit and fill out 16 different applications. And so, they're reporting a jump of 30%. It was already going up, but since COVID has gone up 30% over the last three years. Listen to this. "The State University of New York system reported that applications for the fall 2023 term increased 110% from the previous year." What? Then, of course, applications rise and what happens? The admission rate drops and that feeds that anger and the discourse around fairness and just the frustration because particularly around elite universities, they're just getting harder and harder to get into. And it's not even those, I read about the sort of safe school, the middle range schools. Auburn University's admission rate dropped from 85% to 24%. I think that is feeding that, not even getting into like early admissions test optional. So, you have a system that wasn't functioning great. Then you had all these dramatic changes from the common application to the test optional that just juiced all the terrible factors that were already at play. And then you had the Supreme Court wonder in, and we think this is how we're going to really work this out and solve this. Come on.

Beth [00:28:24] I was reading through some summaries of the oral argument in these two cases, which happened back in October. There were about 5 hours of argument. All of the justices had strong perspectives and lots of quotable snippets. As I was reading them, I really did have that sense, though, of how we are all so biased by our own higher ed experiences that it's hard to imagine that anything else exists. And I was particularly thinking about that idea of creating diverse student bodies and how that's good for all students and wondering whether that's even true across the board. Now so many people attend college mostly through online classes. I don't know that you can have the same rationale about an online class that you can at a college like the one we attended, where you would very fairly be thinking a lot about how were these thousand students who were going to share this campus together going to interact with each other? And what's represented here? And what did they need to hear when they all take foundations of liberal arts together in their first year? That's just a different set of factors than a place that is primarily about occupational licensing and has a ton of students who will never meet each other. So forget just the elite/non-elite bifurcation. It's also the online/in-person bifurcation, the residential versus nonresidential campus bifurcation. There's just too much here for the Supreme Court to be able to meaningfully say anything about what the goal of affirmative action should be.

[00:30:04] And so, what we're going to get, I think, is either an enormously consequential set of decisions on procedural issues where they try to dodge the constitutional stuff for another day or constitutional decisions that just really try to pronounce that the era of attempting to make up for past racial wrongs is over. And I think that's mostly what the conservative justices are interested in doing. They're interested in calling it and saying it's been long enough. We've talked about this long enough. We're done. But that has the most bizarre consequence ever, because you really cannot put this back in the bottle. Once President Kennedy signed that executive order, it did what executive orders do, which is go way beyond government contractors. It told all of society, we value diverse employed populations, we value diverse classes. No one's going to stop valuing diversity and the student body, no one's going to stop considering race. It's just how is it going to be considered and accounted for and talked about? And if they cannot consider race and like section it off now, what does that mean? This is what Justice Jackson has been widely quoted for from these arguments. She gave an example of two students with all the same qualifications applying to UNC. And one of them is a student whose family has gone to UNC for several generations. And one has a family who could not go to UNC for generations because they're a black family. And she said, "So one student gets to tell their whole family story in context and the other student now can't because it would involve race? That seems like a perverse result of saying we want race to mean something different than we think it means now."

Sarah [00:31:56] I thought that argument from her was so brilliant, but also touched on the fact that it's more complicated. It's just so intensely complicated. And the reason I won't feel like the sky is falling should the conservative justices undo this, is I think and I hope it will set off and continue what has been to me one of the most interesting aspects of this, which is just talking about legacy admissions and how that plays into race. Because if we get rid of affirmative action and nothing changes with legacy admissions, I'm going to be real mad because to me that is like-- particularly when you're talking about elite institutions-- the point at which we're just ignoring the actual problem and the actual flow of status inside the admission process. I was reading about this in an article, and listen, this was the one that just set my hair on fire. Harvard's Committee on University Resources is generally restricted to those who have given the university at least $1 million. On the 340 committee members who have children who are college age or past college age, 336 children are currently are enrolled or have been enrolled at Harvard. That's a hell of an admissions rate right there. What's that, 90%? To me, if we don't get to that, if we don't talk about that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, then we don't really care about diversity. Whatever the talking points are, we don't really care about righting the wrongs of the past. Because if you continue to center so much of your admissions process on legacy admissions, then you're just doubling down on the past in a way that I think her argument really gets to.

Beth [00:33:43] This is a problem in the debate about affirmative action as well. Are we talking now about race or are we talking about social class and wealth inequality? What are we even talking about when we're talking about race? Because we have lived now as a multiracial society for decades since these policies were originally enacted. So we have so many more people of multiracial heritage. Are we talking about colourism? Are we talking about where your family of origin? I mean, what are we talking about when we're talking about race? I just read all of this feeling frustrated that the court is going to make a decision, because I think it is obvious that the affirmative action policies of the sixties and seventies have evolved, will continue to evolve, need to continue to evolve. And I don't know what the court can say that is of value in that process. I think it needs to be done one college and university at a time based on what's going on there and what their goals are. If most of this is market driven, which it clearly is, then why would the court come in and issue a sweeping proclamation that applies to all of these different schools that are operating in very different markets?

Sarah [00:35:06] Well, and I just think the orientation and the way whatever the original motivation for the policy, the way it is evolved in our language and culture and society is just gross. I don't know another word to use. Like when we talk about diversity, it's like, "Oh, we'll hear a person of color or diverse background come here and be this real resource to your fellow students and student body? Oh, I don't love that." The most encouraging trend to me when it comes to racial diversity and righting the wrongs of the past over the last couple years has been the incredible investment in historically black colleges and universities. That's what I think is so incredible that their enrollment is surging, that their investment is surging, that you see the president of the United States at Howard University doing the commencement address. I think to me that gets at actually righting the wrongs, that gets to righting the wrongs that the people who need to be served, not asking them to come in and right the wrongs of these institutions by their presence. To me, this is a more positive, encouraging, flourishing that we want to see in higher education. It's to see some of the billion dollar endowment at Harvard going to Howard. That's what I think is really encouraging. And I think there are other positive trends, like I think the re-evaluation of the rankings and going test optional, even though that's playing out with unintended consequences, and so will this. So has affirmative action. We did not anticipate all the ways this would play out. And we will not be able to anticipate all the ways that will play out, whatever the Supreme Court's decision will be.

Beth [00:36:56] There's a good editorial in The New York Times from a Yale student who is Asian-American about the Harvard case. And I thought that it just finally was like at last the fact. Like, it got to the point. No individual student is entitled to admission at any university, regardless of what that student has in their portfolio. And that is the problem. We fight about all of this and we feel it and we live it through the individual lens. But everybody is not going to have a good experience applying to college. Everybody's not going to have a good experience once they attend college. Everybody is not going to have every test graded by a fair and unbiased professor. And Lord knows, once you are out of college in the working world, not every experience that you have there is going to be fair. And that to me is the issue. We are trying to decide on such a macro level what fairness means, and then have that macro definition really work for every single student in the process. And it just won't.

Sarah [00:37:59] Well, because to me, we've retained the sense of fairness from when we treated higher education like a civic responsibility, even though we have moved into a market system where you are not a citizen inside the system, you are a consumer and you will be treated accordingly. There's a justification of cost. There's these business decisions inside the admission process. Like, that's what I want to see. I want to see college be less of a business and be more of a civic institution because I think it serves the entire populace. I also think not that there's no entitlement or bad attitude when people are just acting like tax payers. Lord knows that's not true. But I do think when it is seen as an institution that we all participate, there's just an adjustment of expectations. But when you start treating people like consumers and you ask them to pay more and more and more money, well then, yeah, this is what you get. And I wish that was like the bigger, broader conversation. Is this an institution that we believe is essential for our civic society, and do we want to invest in it as taxpayers instead of continuing to offload the expense and all that comes with it onto the individual?

Beth [00:39:19] I hear you with that. I'm skeptical of that argument because I don't think college should be one thing for everybody. I think there should be lots of different ways to get higher education. I don't think the experience that you and I had as good as it was, is one that everybody would benefit from. I have a hard time caring about what the admissions process at Harvard looks like because I had no interest myself in going to an elite institution like that. And I have no interest for my children. I don't want them to spend the next five, 10 years of life thinking solely about how they make themselves a perfect candidate for admission into an elite university. It's just not what I want for them. If they want it for themselves, I'll do my best to support them in it. But that doesn't look like a great life to me. And so, I want there to be lots of options. And I'm not we did what you're saying where we have this sort of bigger public conversation, which I'm not even sure what that would look like, to say this is a public good that we want to invest in. Maybe that just means spending more on state universities, which I support and community colleges which I support. But I hope that we can still maintain a really diverse marketplace of those options so that people can invest the amount of time and money and life energy that makes sense to them in this experience.

Sarah [00:40:47] I think treating higher education as a civic institution we want to invest in would absolutely lead to a healthier and more diverse ecosystem of options to people. Community colleges are underfunded for public institutions that are clearly like there is a need for this, but they're being propped up by like adjuncts who get paid nothing. It's not just the students that are getting mistreated inside this bifurcated system that we've decided we'll all just try to navigate individually as opposed to treating it like a civic institution, it's the employees within the systems. We don't go to a college at any end of the spectrum where we don't feel and hear the pressure from administrators, from teachers, from students. It's not working. We tried this sort of private market. It sucks. I don't like it. I don't want my kids to participate in the way it currently stands. I wrote a piece when I was a mommy blogger about this that went viral for me on Huffington Post because I said, I don't know if I want my kids to do this or not because I just think it's so broken. And I think the investment and the discussion of the taxpayer, of the citizen that says, what do we want from this institution? We want, in the pursuit of happiness, for people to have the option to better themselves in a way that does not permanently cripple them financially and expands the realm of options in a way that they think can best lead to flourishing inside their lives. Be that a license, be that becoming a nurse or a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer or the next Jeff Bezos, I don't care.

[00:42:29] But I just think that the way we're doing it now, it just lets the rich get richer and it's not leading to the outcomes that we want. And it has to have some investment that says we're going to put money in this because we think it has value and it doesn't have to be because we're trying to turn a profit there. I don't remember who said it, but there was a really great line I read somewhere that was like even at the elite institutions, like, this is an investment in further financial earnings. It's not even that that's being seen. Harvard is this like expansion of your mind. You read the memoirs of people who go to Harvard. I'm thinking even about Marie Yovanovitch has a memoir where she talks about there's just all this pressure to go into the private sector and earn money. It's like this one sort of career path, even though I think we would think Harvard opens up all these career paths. But that's not even true at the higher education level. This isn't working. And I think if we invested in it and say what we want is an institution where people can pursue their path, whatever it is at all walks of life without crippling them financially and without creating these really messed up motivations within the system itself, I'm willing to try it because it's not working the way it is now.

Beth [00:43:48] I think there are lots of policies that could be experimented with to try to help us get there. I think it will take some cultural changes to get there. I think the way parents think about their kids and the scarcity of wealth and status are a big part of this conversation. And this is the thing the Supreme Court can't get to any of that. All the Supreme Court can do is say, what does the Constitution say about the way we think about race? And I think the Constitution has really nothing useful to say about the way we think about race in college admissions. And I wish that they could kind of put this in the category of issues that's just not justiciable because it is beyond what they can do well.

Sarah [00:44:26] Well, and let's not even talk about the fact that we're supposed to what? Trust this elite out of touch, completely lacking in accountability, institution filled with people who went to elite higher educational institutions. Get out of air with that bullshit.

Beth [00:44:47] Well, one bright light I will shine on that component of these cases is that Justice Jackson, our newest Supreme Court justice, recused herself from the Harvard case because she recently sat on a board of overseers at Harvard. And that is the level of self-awareness and self-policing that I would like to see from Supreme Court justices. And I appreciate that. But, yeah, again, we're all bringing our own baggage to every discussion we have about college. And it is very hard to see how the court is any different from that. Well, we'll continue to talk about this. This is a big conversation, cannot be contained with just us. We're very anxious to hear your thoughts, especially those of you who work in higher ed. And we will look forward to picking up with the state of the schools again on Friday. We always end the show talking about what's on our minds Outside of Politics. And today it is the fact that so many people are out there graduating from colleges and they need gifts. I'm wondering, Sarah, what your go to gifts are for college graduates?

Sarah [00:45:58] I don't have any. I didn't used to be this old. I didn't used to get high school graduation announcements because my kids were in preschool. And then I blinked. And now my oldest child is going to high school, and I had to figure out what my go to high school graduation present is going to be. I do not want to give money. I do not love that.

Beth [00:46:17] Why?

Sarah [00:46:17] I don't know. I just don't.

Beth [00:46:20] What is it that bothers you about it?

Sarah [00:46:22] I think it's impersonal. I think particularly what I see in my son's peer group and generation, the high selectivity of experience. And I just want to push back against that a little bit. Just this idea of like, well, this is what I want. I'll get everything I want and I want money, and then I can pick out exactly what I want. I don't know. I'm just don't love it and I don't want to participate in that. And I want there to be at least an element of you get some stuff. I also think it's fun to get gifts. It is not fun or celebratory to just have a stack of gift cards. I liked all my high school graduation presents. I thought it was fun to get different things. I will never forget Marilyn Cook gave me the most beautiful set of personalized stationery. I loved it. It made me feel like such a grown up. I never would have bought it myself. And that's experience I'm looking for. I want to get them something that they might not invest in or think of for themselves, but that is like a really important grown up thing to have.

Beth [00:47:29] I love stationery as an option. I did buy a set of tools for a college graduate once. That would be a helpful investment and getting started in the home. I think the problem is we give these gifts for a bunch of different reasons. Are we giving the gift because we know the parents and just want to be supportive of this young person as they begin their journey and say to the family we care. In those situations, for me, the answer is money, because it is the by far most useful thing that we can give them. And if I don't know the person, then how am I going to make a decision about what would be fun for them to open and have? I got a bunch of gifts for high school graduation that ended up many years later in a yard sale, and I don't want to participate in that either. So it's like, do I know this student well enough to do something that will be really fun and actually useful and like a treat that they would never allow themselves? And if not, then I don't mind at all being in the pile of gift cards.

Sarah [00:48:26] I just hate being in a pile of gift cards under really any scenario, especially like if I know their parents and they got plenty of money. That doesn't seem silly. These kids don't need money. They have money. They got plenty of money. I want to give them something that will get them off on the right track. It's just a lot of pressure.

Beth [00:48:45] Even if their parents have plenty of money, that doesn't mean they have plenty of money. We just talked about how expensive it is. I don't know many people coming out of college you have plenty of money, especially as you begin your life and you need everything. I remember when Chad and I bought this house, we signed the contract to build our house, and then we had to go buy appliances. And the signing of the mortgage was less intimidating for us than all those appliances. Just looking at like, how are we ever going to pay for all of these things that we have to have? So, I don't know. It doesn't bother me to be sort of lost in the stack if I can't truly do better than that because of how well I understand the person or what they're going to be doing next.

Sarah [00:49:27] Well, I guess when it's a graduation that it's not just about the person, it's about the life transition. So it's not like it's like a birthday where you're just trying to find something that fits their personality. Also, I pride myself on being a very good gift giver, so that's probably what's fueling this too. Because I don't think you need to know the person if you understand the life phase their in. And that's what graduation is all about.

Beth [00:49:47] How do you feel about receiving like an Amazon wish list from a graduate?

Sarah [00:49:51] Don't love that either.

Beth [00:49:53] If we're doing the life transition, then aren't we really more in like a registry kind of space? Like you tell me what it is that you're doing from here. What kind of situation are you living in? Where are you going to live? How many assumptions am I supposed to make about what's going on here.

Sarah [00:50:07] Yeah, I don't love that either. Even though I really don't like it when people go off the registry in certain situations, I think with weddings and births the registry doesn't bother me. But with young people it does because it's almost like you have to have some life experience where we're getting to what you said, like, life isn't fair. You don't always get what you want. It's not even that. It's not like I'm not trying to teach people life is unfair. I'm just trying to teach you the social skill of adapting to different incoming. You know what I mean? As you leave your parents house and you're going out on your own, there are going to be things that come at you that you cannot control and that your parents are no longer controlling for you. How are you going to deal with that? It seems like a high school graduation present is a really easy transition into learning that. Your aunt might give you something you'll never use. That's okay. Let's think about why that matters and learn to be grateful for that person in your life, even if it's not the thing off your Amazon wish list.

Beth [00:51:04] I guess I just think that there are lots of things people need to learn, but I don't need to be the teacher. That's how I feel about this.

Sarah [00:51:10] Well, I love to be the teacher because I'm a Enneagram one, and one of my healing attitudes is maybe people can learn for themselves.

Beth [00:51:16] Maybe they can. Maybe my gift card doesn't need to be part of their learning process.

Sarah [00:51:21] No, not in this situation. Not in high school graduation. I'm opting out on this one. I'm going to not repeat that healing attitude to myself.

Beth [00:51:27] Well, if you have great suggestions for truly useful, not junk, perhaps reinforces to people that they don't get to choose everything in life.

Sarah [00:51:36] Well, in that somebody can surprise you, that you can get a gift that meets a need you didn't even know you had that'll make you a better person. This is what I'm saying. Marilyn Cooke set the bar very high with my personal stationery, which I realize is not an applicable present now for teenagers who don't ever use handwriting. I'm not going to give that. I'm just saying that's the bar. It's very high.

Beth [00:51:55] Oh, I would still give stationery 100%. I think that's a really nice gift. And this is where I have a should. I think we should send things in the mail. I think it's really nice.

Sarah [00:52:02] I mean, I do.

Beth [00:52:03] If you think, listener, that you can join Marilyn on Sarah's list of acceptable college graduation and high school graduation gifts, we would love to hear from you and appreciate you being part of that conversation and any other that we have today. We hope you come back on Friday as we continue to talk about the state of the schools. We're going to get into K-12 education then. In the meantime, if you are not a premium supporter already, we would love for you to consider joining us in that community. You'll get all that information in the show notes. We'll see you back here on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Beth [00:52:51] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah [00:52:56] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.

Beth [00:53:02] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.

Executive Producers Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Danny Ozment.

Beth Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.

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