[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] We're here because people across the country understand that
in this day and age,
college is hardly optional.
It is incredibly hard to get and keep and hold a job 
today without some sort of college degree.
Like it or not, that's the America that 
we now live in. Like it or not,
that's the decision that we made, in many ways 
without any sort of public discussion
or debate about whether 
this is where we wanted to end up.
The high price of college, even at public institutions, 
is inhibiting college attainment.
Research on this point is quite clear. We are losing talent on a daily basis, and we are losing
and disenfranchising young people and parents 
of young children all over the country
because the price of college is simply too high.
[Richard Vedder] Hillary Clinton, 
last month, said, and I quote,
"I'm not in favor of making college free 
for Donald Trump's kids." I completely agree,
as do twenty of the twenty-one candidates in 
the two major political parties
who ran or who are running for President
this year -- everyone by Bernie Sanders.
We can argue about whether some of the benefits 
of college spillover to non-students,
what economists call 'positive externalities,' that might 
justify some public subsidy of higher education.
But what is simply not disputable, however, 
is that a huge part of the benefit
of going to college goes to the students themselves, 
and then a large portion -- and, indeed,
I would suggest a majority of college students come 
from families with above-average incomes.
Taxpayers don't finance financial
investments of their fellow citizens,
so why should they pay for 
their human capital investments?
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] Donald Trump's
 children didn't go to public institutions,
nor would anyone of Donald Trump's level of 
wealth ever attend a public institution,
let alone will they attend those schools when they are 
flooded with people from "regular" America --
let's be honest. "Is college worth it?" I've heard this 
nonsense, frankly, about college not being worth it.
Let's just go over the unemployment 
rate of people who didn't attend college --
it's currently 5.4 percent, if you finished a high school degree. If you got an associate's degree, it's 3.8
percent. If you got a bachelor's degree,
it's 2.6. percent.
Let's talk about the African
American unemployment rate.
Folks who are being priced out of college left and right by the decimation of wealth under the
Great Recession: it's 9.7 percent 
if you only have a high school degree;
it's 4 percent if you have a bachelor's degree. These
are very important facts, and the fear that people
around us will go to college, that our own
 wage benefits will decline -- well,
that's just fear-mongering, frankly, 
deciding to try to keep people out.
These arguments have been around for a very long time,
and I want you to know they were used to ensure 
that we would never have public high school either.
[Richard Vedder] We provided incentives for people to 
exploit their potential, their talents, for gain.
They had skin in the game and, for the most part, throughout most of history, they financed it on their own.
So, I think to call it racist or classist, whatever that is,
to have to talk about skin in the game is
somewhat disingenuous. I do not think it is 
quite fair to say that all of the gains that we attain --
of, say, low-income people attain -- come from going to college, nor do I think we have to- What about the costs
associated with forty percent of the
students who enter college
not graduating in six years, who go to a
four-year college? What about those costs?
What, why-. And, if we lower the price
of going to college,
we are encouraging more and more people who 
have been, who are marginal academically.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] What I would say is that the
number of people that are going to college today
has increased partly through the effective role 
of government in encouraging people to
go to college, by making college more affordable 
than it otherwise would have been.
That's a movement that was 
begun in the mid-1960s.
[Richard Vedder] The reality is, intercollegiate 
athletic subsidies are in the
five-to-ten billion dollar-a-year magnitude, which are 
not inconsequential, but they're not substantial.
The real issue is it costs twenty-five or thirty thousand
dollars -- or, whatever -- to educate a college student in the US, on average;
whereas, in most parts of Europe, and elsewhere in 
the world, it's ten or fifteen thousands much less.
We are a high-cost country for educating.
Intercollegiate athletics are part of it.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] What will be at risk if we don't allow 
other people's children to go to college? And, for that,
I want you to think about the fire department.
Think about your house, right now; think about 
what your house is doing right now --
it's sitting there nice and quietly. And, think about what 
you would do if your neighbor next door to your house
had a fire this evening, and they thought
about calling the fire department,
but they don't have enough money to
pay for it, and it costs money.
Because, of course, you know, why should we take care 
of each other? They might as well just charge for the fires.
What would happen to your house tonight?
Your house would burn down.
We know something about how fires spread, 
and we know about the contagions
of these sorts of things, and it's why we pay, together, for 
the fire department to be free;
because we wouldn't want our neighbors to hesitate for 
one moment about calling their fire department.
[Richard Vedder] The correlation between spending 
on colleges and reputation is positive. That is,
the more you spend, the better your reputation. And, a lot of schools are going for reputation, rightly or wrongly.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] If we continue to rank people,
rank schools, based on inputs or outputs,
we're going to get gaming. We can 
say we want high graduation rates,
and then we'll do what I know one
institution just did, which is to get the
African American graduation
rate up, to start taking the right ones --
meaning, the wealthy, out-of-state ones.
It got an award for doing that. 
We have to understand the process
through which people become educated, and why they 
really leave, in order to hold them accountable
for that process. The GI Bill conservative
estimates indicate it produced a return on investment
of six dollars for every dollar spent. 
It had effects across generations.
We saw similar effects that accrued when the City University of New York opened its doors in the early
1970s, and Paul Attewell and David Lavin trapped those effects over the following 30 years;
effects on the women who went to college 
during that time and on their children. These are
intergenerational effects. I absolutely would not be 
standing here today, and wouldn't be who I am,
if my grandfather hadn't gone to college on the GI Bill, and I challenge you to try to measure that.
[Richard Vedder] People are different.
For some people, college is an exciting experience,
an important experience, a transformative 
experience, an income-creating experience.
There are other students, forty percent by some 
measures, who don't make it through college at all,
and for whom? College today, particularly if they borrow 
money to finance this less successful experience,
is sometimes something of a misery. 
It's a risky investment.
Now, that isn't say we shouldn't have college, nor 
does it say we shouldn't support college publicly.
But, it says we need to take this into account.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] You would have this problem 
if the states had pulled back the way they did,
which is the cause of the rising prices in a public 
higher education; these are very different
causes. The loans are driving the behavior in private institutions, along with the arms race that we've been talking about in the public sector.
Community college prices were never rising until the 
states abandoned their commitment, and left people
high and dry precisely at a time when they needed the community colleges more than ever.
[Richard Vedder] The gaps between colleges  
themselves have grown over time. There's growing
educational inequality. And, in 1988, eight schools out of 
the top 25 in the US News ra-
the hated US News rankings,
eight out of the top 25 schools in 1988, this was the 
first year the modern US News rankings,
were public universities.
Last year, two were.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] It isn't some great thing to pat Harvard on the back for graduating students.
They took students who would graduate if they did 
nothing with them, okay. It's a much more difficult
thing to take the kinds of students who enter LaGuardia 
Community College every year and provide them with
the level of resources that LaGuardia gets for educating 
those students, and get them to graduation.
So, I think that there are two things that would happen. 
First of all, we're gonna remove the price barrier
in a much more sincere way; not entirely, but in a much more sincere way than we have right now, okay?
And, I think we're going to see graduation
rates go up. And, in fact, I think
there's pretty good evidence that 
they will, in fact, rise.
Maybe more so, Richard, than we've been able to do in our empirical models,
which only include observed variables,
right, that we can actually measure; and price is often badly measured in those models right now.
[Richard Vedder] But the notion that somehow going to pre-college is going to improve the financial
condition of public schools vis-a-vis private 
ones, I think is, simply, not the case.
[Sarah Goldrick-Rab] We're going to increase the efficiency. When students are graduating at higher rates,
which they will be when they're not having to work such long hours because they are trying to pay for school,
they will be more efficient. 
And, the schools will recoup those dollars
That's number one. Number two, you read any 
free college plan out there. It is never
just about lowering the price. It's been reduced to 
that in public discussion, which is unfortunate,
but it's always about resources, it's always about 
accountability, and it's always about state investment.
And, under those conditions, we would see more resources.
