Hey, grab your textbooks and your credit cards.
Tonight we're asking, is college still worth the price tag?
I'm Carlos Watson and this is "Point Taken."
(applause)
- Funding for Point Taken is provided in part
by The Pew Charitable Trusts,
by the WGBH Fund for Innovation,
and by viewers like you.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Carlos Watson.
Now young adults face a lot of tough questions--
Should I go to college?
Can I afford it?
And, oh, by the way, which filter should I use on Snapchat?
In the coming days a lot of high school seniors
are sending deposit slips to college
all around the country
and they're starting down the road to opportunity
but maybe, just maybe, also towards debt.
So today we're asking, is higher education worth
the even higher price?
Now we wanted to know what you think as well
so find us on our Facebook page
and live tweet us right about now at #PointTakenPBS.
Now remember, your point could end up being
on national television, so don't make any typos.
Let's meet our debaters.
Now Team Yes, who says college is worth the price tag.
Margaret Hoover is an activist and author,
and a Rocky Mountain native,
even though she's got California in her spirit.
And she's joined today by Randall Pinkston,
journalist and adjunct professor.
Welcome.
One of you guys is going to start us off
and give me your top point in 30 seconds.
30 seconds for real?
Okay.
Here's the point.
In general, absolutely I believe college is worth it,
if only because it is the surefire pathway
for social mobility for someone
who comes from lower economic circumstances, as I did.
- And there's real data that suggests this.
I mean, earnings are positively correlated with education.
The more education you have the more you earn
over the course of a lifetime--
as much as a half million dollars more
over the course of your lifetime.
Plus there are all these auxiliary benefits
that come from going to college
that you can't even put a price tag on it--
social networks that you gain, your study abroad,
your exposure to multi disciplines.
There's so much you can't even quantify in addition to that.
- 37 seconds.
WATSON: You guys are saying slam dunk.
Now the team that's saying no way,
that college is like, if you will, printer ink--
it's overpriced and gone too fast--
we've got Charlie Taibi, the COO of UnCollege,
which is an alternative to four-year universities.
And he's joined today by Seton Hall professor Robert Kelchen.
Welcome to you both.
So who's going to give me your 30-second elevator pitch?
- So, you know, we definitely can agree
that university has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades,
but what we want to highlight tonight
is that on front end, students are going into school
and we're reporting a little over 60%
are not socially, emotionally,
or academically ready for school.
And so that means that when they're getting
into the classroom, they're dropping out
at a rate right now that's hovering around 50%.
If students graduate, they tend to do pretty well
but debt and no degree is the worst possible outcome
and a outcome that students never think they will be in.
Ouch, okay.
You guys did a much better job at keeping it to 30 seconds
than I'm used to.
I love that, all right.
Now we asked our studio audience before the show,
is college worth the price tag?
57% say yes.
So they're with you guys to begin with,
43% for the moment saying no.
Now we're going to take a second vote
at the end of the show and see if any minds got changed.
Now you good folks at home, we want you to chime in as well.
Go online, pbs.org/PointTaken.
All right, let's start.
Team Yes, you guys say that college is worth the price tag.
And Margaret, I heard you making not only economic arguments
but you were making kind of other benefits.
Is it really that black and white, that clear to you,
in a world in which many people have, combined,
over a trillion dollars in college debt?
Yeah, well, first, I mean, we should look at the statistics.
Because we all can have our own opinions
but we're going to argue with the same facts.
And the facts are that about 70% of college students,
when you graduate-- if you finish the four years--
end up having debt and that debt is about $28,000 on average.
So there's no... you can't deny that that's significant.
President Obama had debt that he didn't pay off
until he was basically in the U.S. Senate.
It is a real problem.
Even Peter Thiel, who is trying to dissuade students
from going and getting college degrees,
pay them to be entrepreneurial,
says if he had to do it again himself
he would go get his own college degree.
WATSON: The Silicon Valley billionaire
with two Stanford degrees
is paying people not to go to college.
There's real data.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Pew Research,
Gallup, all of them say, you're right,
if you finish your four years...
But even if you don't finish four years
and you get two years,
any post-high school education leads to increased earnings
over the course of your lifetime.
And that's just undeniable.
It also leads to a lower chance of unemployment
over the course of your lifetime.
- Can we talk about some of the intangibles,
which Margaret mentioned earlier,
such as broadened worldview.
Let's say you come from a community
where everybody sort of thinks the same way,
does the same thing.
In this society you really need to be globally aware.
Going to college helps develop that sense of global awareness
so that we don't think that our point of view
is the only point of view that's valid.
WATSON: Charlie, is it that cut and dry, though,
in a world in which it's now almost four times more expensive
to go to college than it was a couple decades ago,
which you heard Margaret say that people have big bills.
In your mind, is it that black and white
that students en masse should be going to college?
- Sure.
I mean, yes, we absolutely need to make sure
that students are having a more worldly view.
But do we need to spend $50,000 a year sometimes,
around that price tag, to have these firsts?
Yes, these rites of passage are very important--
the first time, you know, you drink alcohol,
the first time you do drugs, the first time you have sex.
But...
WATSON: Spoken like a non-parent.
I love that, that's great.
- But does this need to cost this much money,
or can you do that in a beach on Thailand
or at your local dive bar?
This is a serious...
this is a question we need to start asking ourselves.
WATSON: Which is why you have a professor to your left.
- Yes, who maybe can answer Margaret's point.
WATSON: I mean, Robert, how do you think about it?
Because you not only got a college degree,
you went to graduate school, and yet if I hear you right,
you see some caveats to the idea that going to college
is a good return on investment.
- There are definitely some caveats
because finishing is far from guaranteed.
And, yes, on average, people who go,
even if they don't finish, tend to do better.
But that's on average.
You see a substantial percentage of students
taking on maybe $10,000 or $20,000 in debt
that they're struggling to pay off over ten years.
Maybe 30 years later, does it even out?
Sure.
But in the short run, you've got debt
that is extremely difficult to pay.
And a higher percentage of students default
on less than $5,000 in debt than more than $100,000 in debt.
WATSON: So is there any part of you that looks up
and says plumbers, when they come to your house,
still make a good living,
mechanics still make a good living,
and that for not just a few people
but for a large number of people they should actively be thinking
about something other than $30,000 in debt or more?
To your point, for sure, college is not for everyone.
And I would also add another point.
There are colleges that cost less than $50,000 a year.
There are also community colleges for young people
who might not see the likelihood or logic of going to school
for four years, but they can go to school for two years
and get a really great education.
- I think we're arguing that college...
there's an expanded definition of college.
College can be two-year colleges,
college can be a four-year college,
college is sort of any post-secondary education.
And frankly, I would like to see a more robust
vocational educational system developed in this country,
which we don't really have.
- Similar to Germany or...
- Yeah, and then you would have that...
you would have more economic benefits.
But the fact is, if you have a high school degree
and you are a plumber,
you don't have any post-secondary education,
your earnings now are 62% less
than somebody with a four-year college.
Do you think it has to be that way?
I'm purposely playing devil's advocate.
Do you think it has to be that way
or do you think in a world in which people can
increasingly learn skills on YouTube,
can take entrepreneurial paths, etcetera,
that we are being too reflexive
in saying that college is for everyone?
Are we still living out a 20th century dream
in the 21st century?
I mean, I actually think...
I think maybe we'd find some common ground here
that there is a really... this notion there's a straitjacket
for the four-year B.A. at a brick-and-mortar institution
is becoming obsolete.
And there are ways...
being accredited and having learned skills
without having that B.A. degree.
I think there's an expanded definition
of how to educate people.
But the fact is, and I think we would argue,
is that education, even though it's expensive,
is still worth doing
for all of the societal benefits in addition.
I wonder if, in fact, we have reached a point,
and we've read that this is true,
where a college degree is now more or less equivalent
to what a high school degree was like 30, 40 years ago.
It is a gatekeeper.
It is like the first... one of the requirements,
the metrics that a potential employer looks at
to see, do you have what it takes to focus,
to be dependable, to carry through on task, to learn.
And every job requires constant learning, retraining,
on-the-job training.
Professor, would you disagree with that?
- It's one of the easiest ways for employers to say,
"Do you have basic skills?"
Because they can't easily sit down and give you a test
because they face the risk of a lawsuit.
And some of the economic benefits of a college degree
is getting that piece of paper,
not necessarily what you learned.
So Charlie, help us out here, because it seems too easy
to say that college is a slam dunk,
and yet I talk to young person after young person
who's saying, "I went to school to study film
and I'm working as a baker."
"I went to school to study English
and I'm competing for a part-time job at Starbucks."
I mean, how do you speak to that in a real world
in which you've got not one, two, or three people
but literally there's more student debt
than there is car debt.
There's more student debt for many people
than there's credit card debt.
How do you think about this?
I think that where... if you can stomach the price tag
of going to school, and let's be honest,
a lot of this conversation has been framed around
these private institutions that are degree-seeking,
full-time undergraduate.
And that is just grossly not a good lens
to look at this problem.
But even the public ones are much more expensive
in even a place like Massachusetts.
We see, including room and board, you can walk out of there
with $30,000 in debt.
- Sure, but that's still only one third.
Like flagship public universities and private schools
are still only one third of the institutions
that we're talking about in this conversation.
We're totally eliminating the other two thirds
of students that are coming out,
who are stomaching the price tag.
And that could be anything from a community college price tag
all the way up to, you know, we're now up...
I think NYU today is up to $73,000 a year,
which is a lot of money.
So you are able to go... you go to school
and you are running through it just to get a degree at the end.
Then you get this degree and you're not really being trained
for what the work force is.
And I think we have to be careful with
is this the only reason you're going to school?
Yes, earnings over your lifetime are going to be positive
but I think a lot of reasons why parents are willing to take on
the debt for their children is not because just on earnings,
it's they want them to be happier,
they want them to feel they've had an impact on the world.
They want them to feel like they're reaching
their full potential.
And I think when you have skull-crushing debt
when you walk out of four years of school,
you can't really think about those things.
- But...
WATSON: Hold on a second,
we're going to take a little midterm here.
I know that was fun,
but we're going to take a little midterm here.
It's a segment that we love and we call it Fact Check.
I'm going to pose a fact or a question
and then each of the teams will give me an answer.
To be clear, it's not an open book test,
but you can work with your partner.
- Good.
So here we go.
All right, question number one, everybody.
Everybody ready? Everyone good?
If you're between 25 and 34 years old,
are you more likely to have a college degree or live at home?
Between 25 and 34,
more likely to have a college degree or live at home?
(indistinct whispering)
WATSON: All right, cue the "Jeopardy!" music.
(laughter)
All right, here we go, we're going to get to the answer here.
All right, so the question again, for those of you at home,
was if you're between 25 and 34 years old,
are you more likely to have a college degree
or to live at home? - In 2016?
WATSON: In 2016? - Right now?
WATSON: As opposed to a century from now?
(laughter)
- I know for a fact in 2011, 37% of millennials
had boomeranged and were living home with their parents
because of the recession.
WATSON: And how do you know that, Ms. Hoover, for a fact?
- Because I read a book about it.
But I know that's declined since then
because the economy has recovered.
WATSON: All right, all right, eh, eh,
what are you guys saying?
Are you guys saying more live at home or more have a degree?
- More live at home. - Okay.
WATSON: Over here.
I would say it's close but live at home.
- Yeah.
WATSON: Close but live at home.
Okay, the answer... scroll.
The answer, a college degree.
About 36% have a bachelor's degree
and only 14% live at home.
Although, of course...
- Improving economy.
WATSON: Although as some very generous parents
I'm sure would point out, some people fall in both categories.
- Some parents paying for the apartment rent, yes.
WATSON: The parents are definitely doing both.
All right, back to question number two.
All right, so I love this one.
What is the most popular college major?
I'm going to give you a few seconds to discuss.
Most popular college major.
- I think something science-related.
- I would think so too, or business.
- Oh yeah, maybe business.
- Well, it depends.
Are you talking about graduating, or...?
- Undergraduate.
WATSON: Undergraduate.
- And that's what they graduate with?
WATSON: Not what they graduate with,
what they major in.
- What they major in.
- Communications, you think?
Business or communications?
WATSON: People are reaching for lifelines over here.
I like this.
All right, we're going to get to the good stuff.
- And you mean in 2016?
WATSON (laughing): That's going to become the Margaret Hoover.
I'm going to start calling that not the Fred Flintstone,
but the Margaret Hoover.
I love that.
Okay, all right, here we go.
So the question again was,
what is the most popular college major?
I'm going to go to you guys first, what say you?
BOTH: Undeclared.
WATSON: Interesting.
That's a little what we call trickeration.
I like that, that's good, okay.
- Business.
WATSON: Business, okay.
The correct answer is business.
Over here, the good people.
A fifth of all degrees in 2011-2012--
so not the Margaret Hoover-- were business,
which of course is the perfect major
if you're going to pay off that one trillion dollars
in student loans.
All right, let's continue to take a look
at how Americans feel about college's price tag.
We've got an exclusive "Point Taken" survey
from our friends at Marist.
In fact, they do these special surveys for us every week,
and again this past week, they asked,
is college worth the price tag or not?
Here's what they found.
55% of Americans said yes, it is worth the price tag,
so similar to our studio audience,
while 38% said nyet, no, not worth it.
But consider this other interesting fact.
When asked if the cost of college
was out of reach for most American families,
75% of those same people agreed, 23% disagreed.
So Margaret, interesting.
You are hearing folks saying that college is worth it,
but they are worried that it's out of reach
for a lot of people.
How do you hear that?
- What that means to me is that we're in dire and desperate need
for reform for the system, because it just feels...
Frankly, navigating the financial aid process
is an extraordinarily difficult process.
I mean, there's tons of forms.
There's, like, a 35-page form you have to fill out
about all of your needs and your parents.
And just the barrier to entry
feels incredibly frustrating, and it feels too big.
WATSON: How aggressively would you reimagine it?
You know, in the presidential election,
we've heard a variety of thoughts on what to do here.
How aggressive would you be?
- I'm for radical reformation and for massive simplification.
I mean, I think you heard,
especially both on the right and the left...
I'm not one of these people who thinks the government
should just pay for everybody to go to college,
but I think it does need to be made more affordable.
The federal government has been, I think, tipping the balances
in terms of making sure,
frankly, facilitating the increase in tuitions.
I think you can do things like amend student debt repayment.
People pay back their student debts
as their incomes fluctuate over time.
So make that more correlated.
WATSON: So you'd vary the price tag based on what you make.
- Yeah, that's one solution.
There's another solution that says
there should be transparency when you go to a university
so you know how much graduates at this university make
when they have this major
so you know when you get out what you're signing up for
and what you're likely to earn.
- And you know, there's one other point,
and it may be slightly political.
I don't understand why it is that college students
cannot get lower interest rates on their loans.
They are prohibited.
I mean, everybody else can refinance.
Why can't a college student?
WATSON: You know, there are some very aggressive moves
even in the private market now to allow that.
But let me jump over to you guys.
How aggressively would you reimagine,
given that we all agree that the load is heavy?
Would you have taxpayers pay for it?
Would you make other changes?
What would you do?
- You know, I mean,
I'll go along with Margaret here with the Point Taken
and say that something needs to be done.
And I think that what we're seeing now is
there has been this surge
in all these boot camps that are coming out.
Students want to know if they're going to pay this price,
that there are some outcomes,
and holding colleges accountable to those outcomes
will be important in the coming years,
otherwise they're going to be completely taken over.
WATSON: How aggressive would you be with that?
Would you shut down those who don't perform?
- I mean, right now, I'm going to go out and say that
a lot of the colleges in this country
are not setting their students up for success.
- May I add something else too?
And this is part and parcel of what parents have to do.
So, you can get a degree from an accredited institution
that costs you $50,000 a year,
or you can go to one that costs you $30,000 a year.
I have done some teaching at the University of Mississippi,
Ole Miss, the Meek School of Journalism,
and some students have come to Mississippi
because their in-state tuition is more expensive
than the out-of-state tuition is at Ole Miss,
which is an accredited institution.
I know a lot of folks don't want to go to Mississippi,
but I'm telling you, it's a great school.
WATSON: So you're saying state shopping.
You're saying to families, "Look around."
- Look around.
And there's Jackson State and Alcorn.
I mean, they are accredited institutions of higher learning.
People from all over the world go there,
but people tend to have, like, blinders on
when it comes to certain parts of the country,
certain state schools.
Maybe they should take those blinders off
and save some money.
WATSON: So Margaret,
you have an interesting connection to many universities
including to Stanford, where the former president once said
that he thinks we should get rid of the idea
that college is four years,
and that we should try and get it done in three years,
or maybe simpler.
Would you be in favor of something like that?
- Absolutely.
Look, I don't think there's any law written,
anything that says you are fully educated
after four years of a B.A. degree,
and that it can't be tightened into three years.
But what you want is
you just want to enhance learning,
you want to enhance skills,
you want critical thinking skills,
and you want to broaden your world view.
I mean, one of the things I love,
Steve Jobs didn't even finish college.
Now, Steve Jobs was exceptional,
he's not an ordinary person, but when he was at Reed College,
he dropped out, but he took this calligraphy class.
What he says about his calligraphy class
is that it dramatically impacted how he thought about design.
Well, imagine if Steve Jobs
hadn't taken that calligraphy class, right?
- The iPhone would look like this.
(laughter)
WATSON: Not a good look.
Charlie, talk to me on the other side,
because there's a reason why you're helping
to lead this group called UnCollege.
Lay it out crisply why, even given the various benefits
that Margaret and Randall and others are saying are there,
you still think that large numbers of students
should be looking away from college,
at least in current days.
- Well, I think that the big point for us at UnCollege
is that students are going in and they're just not prepared.
And it's not that there's no value in college,
and that's why we try to stay away
from this argument of learning versus not learning.
We're not saying that at all.
What we want colleges to understand
is that they're great at teaching content.
They are not great for you
exploring who you are as a person
and figuring out what you want to do.
Going through a course catalog and saying,
"I'm going to take this credit, this credit, this credit,
"and this is maybe going to transfer over to my major,
but maybe not," and then all of a sudden,
two years becomes four years, four years becomes six years,
six years becomes 50% of people are dropping out,
we are not doing a good job in preparing them for that.
So that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to take it back and say,
"If college is the right path for you, go."
WATSON: Robert, take the magic wand.
I'm going to give you the final word one more time.
Big change, what big change would you bring to the system?
- I think the big change that needs to come
is additional accountability for college's outcomes.
And that can take the form of requiring colleges
to report earnings by major, as you said,
or requiring them to be responsible
for a portion of student loan defaults,
and that's an idea that's going around Congress right now.
WATSON: That actually is very interesting.
The same way that
they're now making CFOs and CEOs of companies
sign off that they're not Enron-ing their numbers.
That would be very interesting
if they made the same thing happen at university campuses.
A little provocation, we like that.
All right, great discussion today,
but the question remains, did any minds change?
So let's check in with the studio audience.
Now audience, here's where you started.
57% of you said that college was worth the price tag.
43% said nope, it isn't.
So please pick up your remotes and tell us how you feel.
Click "one" if you think it's worth it,
"two" if you say no way, too expensive.
And remember, you good folks at home are invited too,
so hit us online on Facebook, or Twitter.
Now, while the studio audience votes,
back to our teams here.
At "Point Taken,"
we believe you can always learn something new,
even from people you disagree with.
So Team Yes, briefly,
what's the best point you heard from Charlie and Robert today?
- I... please, go ahead.
- Well, I liked the idea about more accountability.
I mean, I think that is absolutely essential
in any field, but especially when you're dealing
with such a huge financial investment,
and also investment in time.
As someone says, "Time..." what is it?
"Money can't get you time, but time can get you money."
Anyway, yeah, more accountability.
WATSON: And good singing.
All right, you guys over here.
Robert and Charlie, Team No.
Most compelling, most interesting,
maybe most unexpected point you heard
from Margaret and Randall today.
- I'd focus on the non-economic benefits
that can come from college.
That you can meet interesting people.
That you can network.
That you can discover new interests.
And those are things that
if you don't go to college, you need to find some other way.
Even to meet a spouse.
WATSON: Well, there's that.
- It worked for me.
- I think for you, the point Robert started off making
is that really, the gap that we have
is that you have kids who are starting college
and not finishing.
So not only are they not having their degree,
their earnings capacity has gone down,
and they have the debt, and that's the real delta.
And that's, to me, I think was the strongest point
you guys started off with.
WATSON: Well, I love that people are taking points.
Point Taken, indeed.
So back to our studio audience.
Now remember, before the debate,
57% said yes, college is worth the price tag,
43% said no.
What do you think happened?
60% now say yes, so...
- Yes!
(laughing)
Well done.
WATSON: 40% say no.
Charlie, why do you think you lost a little bit of the people?
Not to put everything on you.
- Just me.
WATSON: I'm not calling you low energy.
(laughter)
- I think that, you know, again, we need to look at
what a lot of these statistics are saying right now
and making sure that we're framing it in the right way
and we're talking about a majority of Americans
that are going through school and not just a subset of people.
I don't know if we did a good job highlighting that.
WATSON: Randall, last big thought on this topic.
- I also think that we need to do something
about the schools that promise a lot
and give the students nothing.
And I'm not really talking
about our mainstream educational institutions.
WATSON: You're going into for-profit school.
- Yes.
WATSON: I thought we were going to hear that
a little bit earlier in the conversation.
-You only gave us 26 minutes.
(laughter)
WATSON: Close to forever.
All right, with that,
I really want to thank my terrific guests:
Margaret Hoover, author; Randall Pinkston, journalist--
thank you both.
(applause)
Charlie Taibi from UnCollege and Long Island, originally;
and Robert Kelchen-- good to see you again.
(applause)
Hey, so if you enjoy debate,
you probably also follow politics,
and so after today's voting in five key primary states,
the races for the Democratic and Republican nominations
are shifting once again-- so it's not going to be boring--
so don't miss the PBS NewsHour tomorrow night
for the latest news and analysis.
We're going to keep going online and on social.
That's it for us though on the broadcast.
I'm Carlos Watson for all of us here at "Point Taken."
Good night, and as we love to say, good luck.
- Cramming on her way to exams,
Charlene pauses to show off her natty fall outfit.
Real classy for classes.
And after classes, a time to relax before homework
and a time to reflect on leatherwork,
alluringly styled to make any girl a sweetheart,
from alpha to omega.
WATSON: Dive deeper into this and other debates,
watch exclusive video, and join the conversation
at pbs.org/pointtaken.
Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH, access.wgbh.org
- Funding for Point Taken was provided in part
by The Pew Charitable Trusts, driven by the power of knowledge
to solve today's most challenging problems.
By the WGBH Fund for Innovation, whose contributors include
Maureen and Michael Ruettgers and Myrna Putziger.
And by viewers like you.
Thank you.
You're watching PBS.
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