Everybody,
welcome back to Futo Teachers and Mike, where
we remix the conversation about race power in
education
like always.
Today, we're getting into something that touches every
family,
every classroom,
and honestly, every dream that involves opportunity,
this idea of higher education.
I taught mostly high school during my time
as a classroom teacher, and this was always
the conversation.
We fumbled around with ideas of college level,
and college ready, and post secondary options, and
post secondary readiness, and college and career, and
college and career readiness.
We were as a system
woefully undereducated
and ignorant about higher education, which is concerning.
Right?
We couldn't figure out a way
to name a future for kids
that would align with their hopes and dreams,
that would align to what we perceived as
their abilities and talents,
and that aligned with data, frankly, that we
needed to to provide about our impact.
And everyone had some kind of an agenda.
Schools wanted to be able to boast that
their grads went to D1 school for sports,
highly selective colleges for academics.
Parents wanna be able to one up each
other, and 17 and 18 year olds were
left to struggle with the dueling factors of
peer pressure,
social status,
and their true hopes,
dreams,
ambitions,
and uncertainty.
The way the system talks about higher education
is
broken, y'all.
It is cooked.
It's cooked like any center trying to defend
Nikola Jokic.
Had to put my nuggets,
information in there.
Some of us look to college rankings,
like the ones from US News and World
Report
in those lists that crown Harvard,
Princeton,
Stanford
as higher education
royalty.
Right? And those are great schools. Go there
if you can,
but most kids ain't going to those schools.
And this is why I'm so hyped to
bring you today's guest, Paul Glastres,
who wants to flip that whole conversation on
its head.
Paul's been editor in chief of the Washington
Monthly for a good minute.
It's a small but mighty magazine out of
DC that has fought the good fight for
the democratic ideal in politics and beyond.
Before that, he was a speechwriter for president
Clinton, and way back he worked at US
News, the same place that built the college
ranking
empire. So he saw from the inside
how those numbers get made
and how they get cooked.
So Paul and his team decided to remix
it. Every year, the Washington Monthly releases their
own college rankings,
ones that don't measure prestige
or exclusivity,
but instead ask,
does this college help students move up in
life?
Does it create knowledge that benefits all of
us?
And does it produce citizens who strengthen
democracy?
So in other words,
instead of who's the fanciest,
they're asking
who's doing the real work
for the biggest number of kids who need
them to?
K. I'm gonna be real with you.
This is a long interview.
Paul's voice, man I love Paul's voice. There's
something about
gravelly,
smart
dudes
that just appeals to me on the deepest
level. His voice is gravelly. It's real. It's
lived in, and he's got stories.
He reminds me of my favorite professor in
undergrad who knew his stuff and was passionate
about it. That's why I really enjoyed this
conversation. And he made me wanna ask more
questions.
So I will say to you right now
that your habitual disruptor, me, myself, and I,
definitely dragged out this interview a little bit
because he would say something, and I'd be
like, yo. Tell me more about that. I'm
super curious about what you were saying to
me right now.
One of my favorite things about this interview
is that you'll get to hear about what
happened when US News got caught using whack
and deceptive metrics,
and then how universities
like Fresno State and like Berea College
are quietly outperforming the Ivies
and what it actually means to say higher
ed is part of a functioning
democracy. Like, no wonder the Trump administration is
attacking it because they don't actually want
democracy to function in a way that benefits
most people, but that's another podcast.
So this episode isn't just about tuition or
rankings, and their work at the Washington Monthly
isn't just about tuition or rankings.
It's about how we as a country decide
whose education matters, and that's
where
this work aligns so tightly to what we're
doing here at TudoTeachers and a Mic. So
lean in.
I would say take a walk.
I would say let this one roll on
your commute.
I would
say run this one while you're doing things
around the house
because what Paul shares here
about accountability,
equity, the purpose of higher education
is the kind of truth we need
to remix
into our understanding of education.
Alright, y'all. Let's get it.
Alright. What's up, everybody? It is really awesome
for me to welcome my guest, mister Paul
Glastres.
Paul,
so in the intro, we were talking a
little bit about what we're gonna be doing
today,
which is kind of a remix of higher
education. So I wanna start with a question
that I am asking everyone this season.
Looking at race, power, and education today,
what is the piece that you think
most
needs a remix?
That's a easy one for me. Well, first
of all, Geraldo, thank you for having me
on the show. Really appreciate Absolutely. Had a
chance to talk with you and and,
chat with your audience.
It's a easy answer for for us. The
Washington
Monthly ranks colleges
once a year as a kind of alternative
to US news.
And what we're trying to do
in answer your question
is shift to the gaze
of
public
policy, of the national conversation,
of politicians,
of people in charge, of the media,
of the public at large,
away from
the handful of elite schools
that educate
very few people
and take 90%
of the
attention
and to the other 90%
of the schools
that
provide
college educations
to the vast majority of ordinary Americans
and get a sliver of attention
and a sliver of the money.
I love that. That is a huge remix.
And
as you, as you kind of explain that,
and we'll get into some of the details,
with this. It takes me back to,
a graduate course I took in the history
of higher education
where, the professor, shout out doctor Malaika McKee
Culpepper,
amazing, amazing scholar and teacher,
named that The United States
by far has more institutions of higher education
than any other country, and so the fact
that we focus on this very small number,
that does seem to be remixed. So, Paul,
before we kinda hop into it, tell us
a little bit about, the Washington Monthly. Tell
us a little bit about yourself
and,
and what is it that kind of brought
you into this work that you're doing?
Well, the Washington Monthly is a small magazine
of reportage and opinion
published out of Washington, DC. We're, I think,
56 years old.
In the fifties, anyway. I've been editing it
for twenty four years.
So older than both of us is what
you're saying. Yeah. Well, not older than I.
Absolutely. Considerably older than that. I was trying
to give you one there. I was trying
to get I know. I know. I cannot
even know. And,
if you know magazines like The Nation, Mother
Jones,
The New Republic on the left or, you
know, Commentary
or American Compass on the right, it it's
similar. You'll find essays, reporting
on government.
We go heavy into public policy at the
Washington Monthly, but there's a lot of politics,
book reviews, history, things like that. And
every year, we do an annual
alternative
college ranking,
and it is the I say alternative. It's
the alternative to US News, the big guy
in the in that space of publishing ranking
colleges.
And my story is I used to work
for US News.
Not for the college rankings, but the college
rankings
paid my mortgage, and everyone the mortgage of
everybody who was there is a big moneymaker.
And around
1997,
we got a new editor who was a
friend of mine, James Fallows, famous journalist.
And everybody at the at the at US
News kind of had a suspicion that the
metrics of our college ranking was a little
hanky. And Jim kinda got wind of that
and
went out and hired
a very,
well known organization, the National Organization for Opinion
Research, NORC, out of the University of Chicago,
to look at our rankings, to look at
our metrics. And they came back and said
that the way that the magazine weights its
different metrics
makes no
logical
or scientific sense. Jim reported that to the
owner of the magazine, Mort Zuckerman.
And some short time after that, Jim was
fired. Yes. Well then. So when Jim was
fired,
I quit
and in protest as did a few of
us.
And I went to work for president Clinton.
This was 1998,
as a speechwriter.
And,
you know, back then, the education beat
you know, you you know, each speechwriter would
write on different policy areas,
and, the new guy
got the short straw and had had to
write about education.
And that turned out to be a a
lucky break for me because
that's when the whole
education accountability movement
really got started,
was on Bill Clinton. And A lot to
talk about in that one. Yeah.
And so that,
allowed me to really go deep into
the subject.
I had reported on education, k 12, a
little bit of higher ed before that, but
suddenly I had to become an expert pretty
fast.
Mhmm. Then at the when the administration was
over,
I wound up going back to the magazine
that I had first got my first job,
and that was the Washington Monthly.
And we did a we did a couple
of big investigations of US news. One of
which,
we got a hold of that report that
Jim Fallows had produced
out of Newark.
Who knows how how it fell into our
hands?
And we did some critiques of the of
the magazine's,
metrics.
And finally, one day, we said, you know,
if we're so smart, can we come up
with a better one? So I hired the
woman who did the report
to create
a different set of metrics, and we you
know, the whole game worked on it.
And the basic idea is
US News and its dozen or so imitators,
in a general sense,
measure colleges
in ways that the most elite schools
almost always dominate the top 10 or 20.
That's right.
And why is that?
Well, because they define
the best
in ways to ensure that result. That that's
right. Yeah. Right? Some on the scale. How
does USU define the best? Number one,
how many students does it not let in?
Right? How exclusive is the school?
Right.
Right? Kind of a weird thing, but, you
know, it's like it's like the you know,
you're too young to remember,
Studio fifty one, like, these New York clubs
that get hot because they don't let people
in. Because they don't let people in. It's
not the difference between a three, but but
it's hot by definite. And that that's the
second thing they measure. They measure
prestige.
They literally send
a a survey to college leaders and say,
what are the most prestigious schools in the
I don't know why the
president of University of Mississippi
happens would know that, but they presume that
he doesn't. Oh, it's Harvard. It's, you know,
whatever. So it's Probably Harvard. It's probably Yale
College in Dartmouth. Yeah. Dartmouth. Right? And then
the third thing is they measure his wealth.
Like, how much money do you spend per
student? Well, we all would love to have
maximum money per student, and I suppose you'd
you'd rather go to a college that spends
more rather than less. But Right. Why do
they have all this money?
Right. Because they're exclusive.
Right? They only let kids in with these
enormous SAT scores.
People with high SAT scores tend to be
people from wealthy families who go to the
best high schools. Right? So it's all very,
very referential.
And I'm I'm not knocking elite schools. I
went to one. I At all. If, you
know, if you have kids and you can
get into one,
good for you. There there's a there's a
good education to be had there.
But let's face it. You know,
almost nobody can get in those schools.
Right. Right? They're very, very hard to get
into,
and,
it's not hard
to educate and graduate
a student who spent his whole life preparing
to get into that school, who comes from
an educated family and a wealthy family. That's
not really very hard. Right? In a family
of alums oftentimes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they know all the
no. What's hard is educating somebody who has
no background in college, who doesn't come from,
you know, the best high school. That's hard.
Right? Yeah.
That that's the tough job. And so so
instead of exclusivity, privilege,
and wealth, we designed our rankings
to reward schools for three things. Number one,
upward mobility.
Does a college
recruit
and graduate
students of modest means with degrees that pay
something in the marketplace
and don't load them up with too much
debt? Yeah.
Number two,
research. Are colleges producing the the new ideas,
the scholarship, the scholars
who drive technology,
economic growth, and the solution of global problems.
And number three, we call service. Almost every
college, if you look at its founding documents,
says that one of its purposes is to
produce
active citizens who take part in their in
their nation and their community.
They don't
operationalize
that as much as they should, but it's
it's part of it. Right? So those are
the three things. This is aimed
not
just at students. This is a list of
ranking not just for students,
although it is that.
You know? It's where the best place for
the ordinary student, not the wealthy student, the
nonwealthy student, to invest their tuition dollars.
But it's also
for the citizen
to invest his or her tax dollars. Yeah.
You and I, my friend, the and your
average listener out there, the average taxpayer spends
$1,700
of your money every year supporting higher education
because higher education gets about a half a
trillion dollars in government financing at the federal,
state, and local level. So you and I
have skin in the game even if we're
not in college or we don't have kids
who are in college.
We have an interest
in whether colleges are performing. Right? And we
have this magnificent system. As you said, no
other country comes close to the geographic
diversity, the diversity of types of colleges,
the number. We are blessed with, you know,
an unbelievable
system. It's got some big problems, but it's
it's still one of the crown jewels of
of the country, one of our great legacies.
So we're trying to hold those colleges accountable
for what students and taxpayers,
average students and average taxpayers want for their
money.
I love that. And it's, it's such it's
such an important thing to think about, this
this critical lens on college rankings. I wanna
get into so
one of the things that
makes this such a pertinent
topic, and the rankings that Washington Monthly has
come out with that makes it so pertinent,
is knowing
that
so many families and students dream of college.
I remember
the two years before
my kid,
applied and was accepted to school,
it was like that drive. It's kind of
at a manic pace and there's a lot
of emotionality that comes with it. It's not
just about what's a good school, but it's
so hard to find that information. And now,
we're seeing this struggle
that seems to be escalating with cost, access,
and debt.
And so I really hope people are tapping
in for this conversation.
Let's kinda get into let's zoom back and
look at kinda the big picture around, higher
ed.
Higher ed carries this, like, this kind of
weird double identity
that I think you and the folks at,
watching the monthly, you know, cover
this idea of private aspiration and public ridicule.
Can you speak to that concept for just
a moment?
You know, you can look at higher ed
as
like shopping for a car.
It's totally a personal thing. Right? What car
do I want? What car feels best to
me? What car will get the job done?
And a lot of of the rankings kind
of look at higher ed like that, like
it's a consumer purchase.
Right. And I get it. And part of
what we do is is it's kind of
a a a service journalism. Here's a way
to judge how to spend your tuition and
what's gonna be best for me.
But as I said, higher education is not
just
personal.
Right?
It is a national asset that
government
arranges and pays for, and so it can't
just be what's in it for me. It's
gotta be what's in it for us.
And right you know, for for the longest
time, the conventional wisdom of higher education, go
back twenty years,
was we have the best higher education system
in the world. There's a college for everybody.
Right. It might be a little pricey, but,
boy, is it worth it.
Right.
And this magazine, but also lots of other
publications, lots of other scholars' think tanks have
really taken,
that myth to task.
First of all,
college really is expensive now.
Since 1994,
between 1994
and '19 and 2024,
the price of a community college education per
year
has almost doubled, and the price of a
four year and I'm talking public. Right?
The price of a four year public college
per year
has more than doubled. So
the public,
in its management of those colleges,
getting them to manage their costs
and providing them the money that they need
to operate,
has fallen out on the job. So college
has become
more costly.
There are a lot of students going to
college now
from families
who didn't send their students to college back
then. Right? Working class families, minority families. Those
students come in
less prepared.
They're no less smart. They're just less prepared.
Their families Yeah. Nobody in the family went
to college or maybe uncle uncle, you know,
Jose did, but nobody else did. Yeah. And
they don't really know what college is about.
They don't have the stories.
Maybe they didn't, you know, take honors courses
or they weren't there any available. So they're
getting into college, and they need more help,
and they're getting less
because we're investing less in it. Another thing
that's happening
is
because of politics,
right, the great
movement,
it used to be that both parties
had more or less
similar percentages
of college educated voters and noncollege educated voters.
Now it's quite lopsided.
The Democrats
have the lion's share of the college educated
voter,
and the Republicans have the lion's share of
the noncollege educated voter.
So what used to be a bipartisan
thing, it was really not political. People didn't
there wasn't a real politics to higher ed.
You couldn't say,
that guy's Republican. I know what his position
is on higher ed.
You know, nobody knew that.
Now because of politics,
you have a Republican party and a Republican
base that is increasingly
seeing colleges,
un American, a threat,
not holding up its bargain.
So
if you look at the data,
faith in all institutions has plummeted
over the last 20 faith in higher ed
has also plummeted.
Yeah. And yet and yet and yet,
higher ed is one of the top four
or five out of 20 or 30 institutions
that people do have faith in.
Yeah. It's higher than
any branch of government.
It's higher than organized religion.
So it's down,
but relative to other institutions, it's still doing
pretty well. And why is that? Because even
people who bad mouth higher education want their
kids to go to college. Yeah.
So when you actually look at the polling,
the faith
that college
is worth it and helpful for me and
for the country is actually quite high. But
people are genuinely
upset at the costs,
and there is reason to be upset about
the quality.
Yeah. Absolutely. Like, that's something,
that's something I hear a lot just in
my own household,
about, you know,
our kid was raised by two teachers, and
so their
expectation
of quality instruction
is understandably higher, right? And so I think
some of that is kind of happening there.
I mean, we'll kinda get into the the
politics
of,
of education right now. I think to your
point, that undermining
of public institutions has been by design largely,
and it and it's come for the colleges
and university.
Just a quick follow-up on on this question.
To what extent do you think
higher education has kind of fallen down on
the job?
It it seems that there's
just like with so many of
of these
efforts to undermine these institutions,
a lot of times they are sort of
rooted in a grain of truth. Right?
Where do you see the accountability
for,
higher education as a whole? In the current
environment,
the debate is all about
wokeness
at elite institutions.
Right. And we can have that debate. You
know? We can have that debate. I I'm
not gonna defend it.
Right.
I'm not a huge fan of
a lot of the academic trends in higher
education having to do with some of these
issues.
But,
again, you're talking about colleges that educate 5%
of the public. That's right. What is the
typical
college student? There is no typical college student.
But the typical college student is taking a
marketing course at a public regional public university
Right. That has that has never been in
mentioned in the New York Times in ten
years. Right.
Right? Taught by an adjunct professor,
making very little money, who's never heard of
Herbert Marcuse,
not political one way or another more than
the average person.
Right? Yeah. That's college. Right. And for years,
liberals have overemphasized
the elite colleges. I think Republicans and conservatives
now are jumping on the same bandwagon, and
we're all debating what's happening at Columbia. Yeah.
You know, we did a
a story last year where we got some
very good data from a organization that kept
track of all the Gaza encampments and protests,
and then we mapped that onto the data
that we use to do our ranking. And
you just look at the scatterplot
and look at the graphs, and it you
can find it at washingtonmonthly.com.
And what it shows is what you kind
of would guess, which is at most colleges
where most people go, there weren't very many
protests.
Maybe there were none. Right? Yeah.
Not because students didn't have a political view,
not because
Right. Their political views necessarily
differed all that much from the students. Maybe
they did, but there's not great data on
that, and what data we have suggests, nah.
Not it's not that different.
It's that they were probably five years older.
They had jobs.
You know, they were working class people.
You know? They didn't have the free time.
You know, there were commuter schools. Like, nah.
You know? Yeah. I got other things. I
got other priorities.
Right? Yeah. My big beef with the whole
discourse
is
that we bend toward the world of the
elite
and ignore the world of everybody else. That's
so that's so deep. And I I appreciate
you re remixing that,
thought process for me because I think we
do tend to focus on those things. Whatever
the whatever
wherever there's a little flash point,
and then then mainstream media is drawn to
that like moths to a flame. Right? Like
you're going in there and all of a
sudden there's outrage that Cornell West made a
hip hop album. Right?
Most people are not missing their professors
for weeks at a time because they're making
a rap album. Like,
it's not representative of
Oh. No. It's not the typical university
college experience. We did a quick little,
bit of research.
We googled
all the mentions of Harvard
for a twelve month period
in The New York Times, and then we
googled
all the mentions
of the 10 universities
with the biggest student bodies, Florida State or
whatever. Oh, man. I don't wanna I don't
know. I've been to brace myself. The the
the campuses with fifty, sixty, 70,000 students. Yeah.
Yeah. Right? Harvard's got 5,000 undergrad. Like, kind
of dinky.
There were more mentions of Harvard in the
New York Times over the course of the
year than there were of all the other
colleges combined. Wow. And then you take those
big universities if you take out sports,
references. Well, that's what we did. We took
out the the the what you'll Oh, you
did. Okay. Sports.
You know? Because and and and but, yeah,
that so the media
focuses on the elites because the elites are
who reads the media. What's the good news?
The good news is if you go into
washingtonmonthly.com
and you look at our rankings, you're gonna
find a whole bunch of colleges that are
doing it right. Let's segue into that topic
because I think what what you've really done
and what Washington Monthly has really done is
to remix these rankings and reimagine
the rankings for, I think what folks would
refer to as like the 99%.
Like the the those folks and communities that
constitute the vast majority of people
seeking or participating in a higher education experience.
So you started to talk a little bit
about
what drove Washington Monthly's rankings, right? It was
this report that you had a data scientist
kinda put together and they sort of showed
that
what was actually being measured in The US
News rankings.
What's the philosophy? Could you expand a little
bit about that behind Washington Monthly's rankings? What's
the belief driving that? I guess the belief
is
this country only works
when the government is focused on the needs
of the voters, the real needs of the
voters.
You know, you look at the the era
where America was at at its best. It
was when that was the case. And there
are always elites. There will always be elite.
But when the elite people and elite institutions
are focused on themselves
and ignoring
the needs of the average person, the working
class per that's when things go awry. You
know, at the at our best, when we
created during the civil war under Abraham Lincoln,
we had the Morrill Act, which created the
land grant college system, which brought higher education
down from the elite to the average farmer
and mechanic. The federal government gave land to
states to use to fund the creation of
college, And that's how you got this system
in The United States that is quite unique,
where you have
excellent
institutions of higher education
in every state, scattered in every region. Hardly
a place in the country
that is, you know, more than an hour's
drive from some kind of college. And it's
a big country. You know? And then again,
with the GI Bill in World War two,
where the returning GIs
were allowed to, you know, given essentially free
college tuition. Yeah. That turned out to be
one of the greatest investments in the history
of the country. Yeah. And then again in
the nineteen sixties
with the passage of the Higher Education Act,
which said that cost
shouldn't be a factor
in getting,
getting a a
a college degree. It basically opened
the doors of colleges not just to
working class GIs,
but working class everybody.
So we've had these moments
where we've opened the doors of college and
invested.
The creation of community college is another example.
Yeah. We've gotten away from that
over the last twenty, thirty years. Yeah. And
now we have a a system much more
rigged toward the benefit of these universities that
cater to people of means. And it's
the same way in other aspects of our
country. Right? Yeah. You know, we abandoned
laws that are on the books that used
to regulate
everything from airlines to monopoly
Yeah. In ways that have benefited
the upper 20%, really the upper 1%,
to the detriment of everybody else. And that's
what the Washington Monthly has been involved in
is looking at how to make government
work better for everybody. Yeah. I think that's
so important because it occurred to me a
few weeks ago. I was just kind of
doing some reading and realizing
that when
the 1% talk about a good economy, they're
not talking about the same economy that I'm
talking about. And, and so I think so
that that's a really important sort of a
foundational,
piece of these rankings is that
the idea
is that the more
access
all people have to upward mobility,
the better it is for our society. So
the rankings are out,
and
curious, I have some of my own surprises
around the rankings, but I actually wanna hear
what surprised you the most this year. Like
there's a couple of, pieces that jumped out
at me, but I wanna I wanna ask
you to talk a little bit about the
rankings
and what maybe surprised you,
what you maybe think is notable
and that might surprise our audience.
Well, I wasn't too surprised. I've been doing
this for twenty years. I kind of think
all these things work. That makes sense.
But,
I think it will I think it has
been a big surprise.
And I I I will say this year,
we did a little we did we did
some changes to our methodology,
which I'm happy to explain to you, but
it's it's a little bit boring. But,
I'm into it. Aspiring researcher checking in. I'm
into it. Yeah. So so
the thing that I think is gonna surprise
your,
viewers and listeners
is if you look at the top 30
schools
on our signature ranking best colleges for your
tuition and tax dollar, Half of them are
the kind of schools you would expect that
would be on US News. It's it's it's
Stanford. It's Harvard. It's Princeton, etcetera. Yep. MIT.
On US News, almost all of them are
that. Right. Of ours,
half of
them are colleges, again,
that are probably well known in their communities,
but almost completely unknown outside of that. And
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I'm gonna
guess very few of your readers will audience
know anything about that. And, you know, it's
a it's a relatively new
regional public university. It's a merger, I don't
know, maybe twenty years ago,
of a couple of colleges down there in
the heavily Hispanic
border regions of Texas. They came in seventh
out of more than 1,400
schools. Oh. You know, like, eight places above
Duke,
20 places above Harvard.
Harvard. That's what I was gonna say. They
outrank Harvard. They outrank Harvard. The highest ranked
school
out of in our in our list is
Princeton. It came in at number five. That
means the four schools above it are not
elite. Three of them are campuses of the
California
State University system, including the number two university
on our list, Cal State Fresno, which is
a fantastic school. And and I had a
wonderful opportunity to do a a podcast with
the president who I've met before. And this
is a college
smack in the middle of the, Central Valley
Of California in Fresno. And I I don't
know if you know Fresno or you know
the the Central Valley, but it's it's,
pockmarked by pretty serious poverty. And the president
himself grew up on a farm, and the
students are not imported from all over the
country. You know, they're they're not students with
the the best SAT scores from the best
high schools. There's average students from around the
California, but especially the Central Valley. Yeah. And
what they do very well
is they provide
a
low cost tuition, one of the lowest prices
in the country. They graduate students
at higher rates than you would expect given
their demographics.
They load them up with less debt at
the end. The students go on to make
more money nine years after starting college than
you would expect from their demographics. So they
it's the whole thing. And
they do a very good job on the
service part of our rankings. They students vote
at high rates.
They join the military.
They join they do community service.
The school allows work study students
to do community service rather than just, you
know, have a job in the in the
in the gym or something. Right. So that's
a whole package. Wow. And then the number
one school, I'll bet you've never heard of
it. I had never heard of it.
Talk about number one, Berea College.
Berea College. Berea College. See, I didn't even
say it. I got I I mispronounced
it. Berea College is a small liberal arts
school in Kentucky, maybe. I think it's maybe
an hour from Lexington, if you kinda know
where that is. Is. And it was started
in in the mid eighteen hundreds by abolitionists
as a school that would educate both blacks
and whites and was one of the first
schools in the the only school in the
South to do both, and the only school
in the South to educate women also. Yeah.
At the end of the nineteenth century, they
made a a new
plan that they would charge no tuition. And
it Wow.
And
that's been tough, but they've managed to come
very close. Wow. Yeah. The net price is
under $3,400.
Yeah. And a lot of students are are
it's almost nothing. And the way they do
that and by the way, these are not
students from wealthy families. These are
moderate income families, poor families
from Appalachia.
Some 80% of their students are from the
nearby
counties, the nearby states. Yeah. And like Fresno
State, these students go on to get jobs
that pay $5,000
more than you would expect given their background.
And they managed to do this in three
ways. Number 99%
of the students are on Pell Grants. Right?
Pell Grants are grants for students who come
from moderate to low income families. So that's
part of it. Part of it is
it's a work college. Every student has a
job, not just you know what work study
is, but this is work study on steroids.
Every student works. And part of their pay
goes to pay for their tuition.
And the federal government has a handful of
colleges that are considered work colleges, and they
get funding for that. And then the third
thing, probably the biggest thing is, for a
hundred years, they've been building up their endowment
with small donations, and now they have a
billion and a half dollars. Wow. And instead
of using that money to build libraries in
the name of this or that person, they
use it to make college inexpensive for their
students. That's incredible.
I'm getting really excited, like, kinda learning about
these. I think there's a couple of pieces
that really stand out to me particularly, and
you mentioned it before, the median earnings nine
years after entering college. So what that sort
of says to me is that what you're
tracking isn't trying to be cute or contrarian
or academic in nature. It's more
that, no, these are the things that people
want from their higher ed experience.
I think there's another piece of this that
that stands out to me, and that is
the way,
as you're explaining it, the way these rankings
honor institutions that really center and serve folks
who are first gen, folks who are working
class, and folks of color. So can you
talk a little bit about how those rankings
honor those institutions?
Yeah. Look. These institutions,
some of them are really large. They're educating
vastly more people than the elite schools, and
they're relatively unknown. We're the first ranking that
comes in and say, you know what? By
our measure, you're the best in the business,
or you're in the top 5%. Nobody's ever
told them that before. Nope. And this is
very empowering. And I I don't mean just
in a psychological
sense of feeling good about it. I mean,
in a power sense. When college
presidents are hired, the boards, the trustees,
and the legislatures that oversee
those colleges are pretty
clear. We'd like to rise up in The
US news ranking. Do what you need to
do. There's even occasions where college presidents got
bonuses for rising up the ranking. Right? And,
you know, what that does is it creates
a terrible cycle where colleges spend more money,
exclude more people,
exclude
more people, build their brands rather than, you
know, doing right by the the the average
person. But you can colleges have are learning
to use our rankings to do the same
thing. Right? Oh, Washington Monthly says we're the
fourth best college in California. This was the
case some years ago with Fresno State, and
the president told me they use that ranking
in all of their literature, all of their
marketing. They go to the legislature. They go
to the system, and they say, look how
well we're doing. Right. Give us bigger budget
or at least don't cut our budget. Right?
Yeah. And the other thing that he told
me is they are using their ranking
to successfully get corporate research dollar into their
university to successfully
increase
corporate recruiting
for their graduate. Yeah. So, you know, we
don't have a study. We it's more anecdotal.
But I think over the years, the brand
of the Washington Monthly ranking has become one
that universities
can use. The universities that are doing right
by our metrics to advantage themselves, to pull
ahead, to not have to go do the
things that get them, you know, higher ranking
on on The US News ranking. But instead,
follow a different path and be told that
path is good and noble and you're a
success. Absolutely. So my mind goes to a
bunch of different places. Like, there there seems
to be a very pragmatic
application
to these things, not just
for students and families, but also
because we know that we hear about education
budgets
all the time. They at the institution where
I'm doing my PhD,
tuition is through the roof. It's out of
control. And, you know, we always hear about
these larger budget shortfalls, but what you're saying
is that there's a pragmatic
understanding that can be gleaned from this work.
So really quick, elevator pitch. What should families,
educators, and communities
take from these rankings? So how would you
say to somebody
that says, okay. Okay. I mean, Washington Monthly
has its rankings and Newsweek has its rankings
and US News and World Report has its
ring. They're just like rankings. What should people
take specifically away from the framework you all
use? Number one, I don't wanna bad mouth
all rankings.
They measure things. Right? They measure real things.
Look at a bunch of different rankings.
Inform yourself. It's not gonna hurt. Yeah. And
I don't I'm I'm, in a sense, not
bad mouthing elite institutions.
There's things to criticize,
but it's our overemphasis,
our fetishization
of these
institutions that's the problem, not the institutions of
health or less so. Yeah. What they should
take away is, look, there are great colleges
all over this country where you can get
a great education at a reasonable price
and enter or stay in the middle class
and maybe even better. You don't have to
mortgage your soul and move a thousand miles
away to to get that if you're lucky
to be near a school
or in a state that has such schools
Yeah. There are 1,400 plus colleges on this
list, and a lot of them are not
good. So look at the bottom of the
list and avoid those schools. Pick the ones,
you know, that are in the on the
upper half, the upper third, the upper quarter.
You do that, and you're gonna be fine.
But also, as you're voting, as you're thinking
about politics, as you're listening to your, you
know, elected officials and,
you know, smart writers and the people talking
about the future of the country, Think if
we're gonna right the ship of this country,
part of it has to be riding the
ship of higher ed. What is your agenda?
Because ultimately, we're doing we're a political magazine.
Ultimately,
we publish this for a political agenda or
at least a policy agenda.
And the policy agenda is more attention, more
resources,
more support
for the schools
that do the best job with the students
who need it the most. The average medium,
middle class, working class, poor student. The rich
will take care of themselves. You don't have
to worry about those people. They they're they're
all locked and loaded.
Yeah. Stop stop obsessing with them and start
focusing
on what matters. I think it's so powerful.
And what I kinda hear you saying is
that, you know, rankings rank things. Have your
eyes open to what is being ranked.
Do the things
that this set of rankings
rank
align with what you want for yourself or
for your family? Or
I'm thinking as a teacher too, for your
students.
Yeah. Absolutely. And do they align with I
hope teachers are gonna use our rankings
because in a lot of schools, they don't
have guidance counselors who have a lot of
time to spend on College Choice.
A lot of, you know, you the students
probably where you teach.
They're not looking at rankings and
have to do all over the country. They're
gonna go Or or if they are, they're
looking at it as a cover story on,
on a major mainstream publication and not
really they don't have any idea what what
goes into those rankings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And
so I know Yeah. Yeah. Good consumer. You
know, if you're gonna, you know, buy a
a car, you're gonna look at different rankings,
different reports. Some of them are
are you know, if if you're clever and
you look at how they do it, you
could see that they're tilting toward the manufacturer
that's paying them. Right. These are these things
are all worth looking at, but you have
to have a jeweler's
eye for the methodology. And,
you know, I think you can trust ours
if you're the average person. One of my
favorite things to think about right now is
you're saying this is that you all are
accepting that there's an industry
around college rankings. But rather than be the
industry artists, you're operating as artists within the
industry. And I really love that. In this
third segment, I wanna kinda transition
into some things that you've touched on a
little bit, particularly around politics policy and the
future of higher education. And by extension, as
you kinda teased us in the last set
of, questions,
democracy.
There are a lot of us in education
and who
have been in policy circles and
national,
discussions.
A lot of conversation around the current sitting
president, governor DeSantis in Florida with a lot
of the
curricular sanctions that have been implemented over the
last few years, and just a general sort
of political interference,
in education. I've seen a lot of it,
firsthand with colleagues
trying to navigate
stuff that might be stigmatized as woke. What's
the real threat to higher ed by
this level and this brand of political interference?
Number one, it diverts attention
from the real problems in higher education. We
can have a good battle over whether the
curricula and the viewpoints
of the professors
at this or that college could be better
or worse. I might have you my view,
you might have your view. But for the
history of the country, we've more or less
let the faculty figure that out. Right? We
we don't dictate to doctors
whether that person should have a gallbladder operation
or not. Right? The government is not in
the business of doing that. It sets standards.
It provides
support.
It provides tools.
It doesn't tell doctors how to do their
jobs. Right.
You know, one of my favorite examples is
New College down in Florida. This is the
first college that governor DeSantis
took over, cleaned out the board, got rid
of a bunch of the professors,
said it was a horrible school, and they
were gonna make it into a conservative bastion.
Well, New College is a very progressive place.
It's like one of these places where everybody's
got tats and, you know Mhmm. Studs in
their eyebrows, long hair. Just like Yeah. You
you know, is that is that kind of
school? On the beach? Sneakers, T shirts, all
that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a professors are
lefties. They are. Yeah. New College produces more
PhDs
out of its graduates in just about any
school in the country. Oh, wow. Their correct
their curricula
is actually quite serious. They're studying Machiavelli
and all the classics as well as global
warming and other things. The students go on
and, you know, become
very successful. It ranked quite highly in our
ranking. Florida schools do pretty well,
and it doesn't charge a lot,
and it has good outcomes.
So
governor DeSantis,
what's your beef? Right. Right? You don't like
the politics of the professors. That's none of
your damn business. I mean, you can make
it your business a free country. I suppose
you can break all norms and decide that
what professors teach in the classroom should be
decided by elected officials. But by the measures
that matter, New College is doing great. Yeah.
But,
you know, Florida is an unusual
most people don't think Florida great higher education.
Right? They think Florida
great spring break. Florida doesn't have any hoity
toity colleges.
Right? Doesn't have a Ivy League or Ivy
League kind of college. What Florida has is
a whole lot of colleges that don't charge
a lot of money, don't load up students
with debt, and that the students go on
and make decent income. They're really good at
that. And they're good at that not because
of Ron DeSantis. They're good at that because
for about a century,
but especially over the last fifty years, they've
put in place public policies to make sure
that's the case. We have a story by
an authority,
who has been part of the Florida higher
education governance system, Chris Mullen, that walks you
through how it is Florida
happens to have so many schools at the
top of the Washington Monthly ranking, including New
College. And it's because of they they made
policy choices. Let me give you an example
of just one small thing that nobody thinks.
Thirty, forty years ago, the governing
system of Florida passed a resolution that said
every college course
will have a number, and that college course
will be the same in every public school
in Florida. So if you take Oh, wow.
English one zero one at Miami Dade Community
College, when you go to University of Florida,
they're gonna say, oh, you've taken English one
zero one. It's not gonna stay as a
lot of universities do. Well, we don't really
trust that you got the right education.
Pay us more money to take to retake
the class. So we can set it right.
So we can make it right. Yeah. Right?
Yeah. But and and the board and and
this very strong
centralized
system said no. Universities can't rip students off
that. Wow. Hundreds of decisions like that so
that Florida
doesn't overspend on its education, but it over
performs. Yeah. Well, it is that centralized system
that Ron DeSantis is using to change the
curriculum in the classroom to conform with his
politics. Right? So it's a double edged sword.
You need a centralized system, and I believe
by the state that you wanna keep tuition
low and quality high, but then a governor
comes in and can take that system over,
and that's what's happened in Florida. That's incredible.
And and so
so it's it's funny. I it I was
just thinking about all of these questions that
need to be asked on a deeper level,
on an on a more earnest level, in
my opinion. One of those has to do
with these radical left politics of professors, and
people talk about this as if every professor,
every university is that way.
As a
sort of first gen
Mexican Mexican American student at a major research
institution,
that was not my experience of professors.
There were so many. Even in the liberal
arts, like people will talk about how well,
you know, if you're in engineering and business,
then you get might get more moderate views,
but if you're in the liberal arts, it's
just a bunch of radicals and that kind
of thing. Wasn't my experience in the history
department at the University of Colorado. It was
not my experience in some of these other
areas. And so what that sort of says
to me is the desperate need we have
to have a genuine
conversation
around
what people are experiencing
around higher education
and how it aligns
with data. Because what happens to your point
is any of these institutions
can be appropriated
by folks who wanna act in their own,
political or self interest. One of the other
things that comes up and by the way,
everybody,
the we'll have a link to the Washington
Monthly
generally, and then we'll have a link to
the rankings in the show notes. I will
also put it on our socials, so you
gotta check this stuff out, especially
if you have any connection to higher education.
And what I hear Paul saying is that
all of us have a connection to higher
education because our democracy
depends on it. One of the things that
pops up in in,
some of the work you all have done
has been around vocational education.
There are
truths
that not every 18 year old is ready
or wants
to go to a four year university
right after graduation.
And then there are things that kind of
that have that you all have kind of
named as political theater.
Can you help us unpack
truth versus political theater when it comes to
vocational education? Sure. It is absolutely the case
that most people
don't have or need a four year degree.
Now most,
at this point, is not the vast majority.
Most is
55, 60%.
The percentage of people who have four year
degrees is increasing. Yeah. And it's increasing for
a reason because the vast majority
of jobs that pay middle class and above
wages require a four year degree. We just
they just that's just the hard facts. But
we couldn't we won't have we don't have
places in the economy for everybody to have
a four year degree, and nor does everybody
in a position or have the getting degrees
is a lot of lot of work. A
lot of people can't do it. Yeah. Don't
wanna do it. We don't have a very
good system for that for those folks. In
other countries, they have much more built out
apprenticeship program. Mhmm. You know, we we have
apprenticeship programs in sort of the building trades.
Right? If you wanna be a carpenter, you
get selected for an apprenticeship.
They pay you decent amount,
but, you know, you start you start sorting
the nails,
and five years later, you're a master carpenter.
It takes a while. Yeah. Big investment. But
it's college of a sort. Right? Mhmm. There's
a lot of brains. You gotta be able
to read a blue blueprint. There's it's not
like it's pure manual labor to master
plumbing or electric or HVAC. That stuff's tough,
and it requires training.
People say, I don't believe in college. I
believe in vocational education. Where do you think
most vocational training happens?
In college. In colleges. Right? In community colleges.
Yeah. That's right.
It's either that or it's for profit colleges.
For profit vocational colleges.
So we have done rankings of the best
and worst vocational programs. And you can go
to our website, you can Google it. There
are some very good ones where, you know,
you know, welding, HVAC, certain,
medical fields,
but they require
a year, two years, sometimes more
of training.
They're trying to open that up in Washington
for short term stuff. Maybe we'll see how
that works, but but a lot of it
is terrible.
A lot of it is just ripping people
off. They take their money and they give
them no marketable skills. These people go through
these programs. They spend $5.10, $15,000
that are in debt, and they make less
money at the end of it than they
have they now gone at all. So we
have a terrible system.
You asked about Donald Trump. The Trump administration
talks a good game about improving the vocational
system. But if you look at their the
administration's budget and the big budget bill that
just passed, the big people, they're cutting that
stuff. So, you know, it's it's kind of
a shell game that's going on. On. Does
it feel like, and I you've done the
research, I have done less research around this
area, but sometimes it feels like there's also
an agenda at work there to sort of
deploy vocational education as a way of undermining,
that four year education. I think that I
think that's fair. And the test
is if the person
has power, you know, can vote in the,
you know, congress as the president of The
United States, and they say we don't think
so much about four year degrees. We believe
vocational education.
Where's the money? Show me the support. Yeah.
Yeah.
I I have some I I would have
some respect for that position if they back
it up with real public capital, but they're
not. They're cutting it. So to me, it
gives away the game. Right? They're just using
it as a struggle. Disingenuous.
Yeah. Because it's politically
useful because their base is increasingly noncollege educated
people, who, by the way, want their kids
to go to college. Right? That's right. That's
right. Educational training. Right? They're they're not talking
to their kids. They're screwing their own people.
They're screwing their own people.
That's right. That's it's it feels good to
have that somewhat validated.
We got a couple more topics I wanna
get to that you all have covered.
Student debt. We hear these horror stories all
over the place. The Biden administration had tried
a couple of different methods to try to,
forgive student debt, and we're and there's a
lot of folks I know who are kind
of living in this gray area, this kind
of,
purgatory
of,
am I paying this back? Am I not
paying it back? How do we get into
this student
debt crisis?
And
are there
fixes that are viable
and that we may see in our lifetime?
Where I told you earlier
that the cost of a year at community
college has nearly doubled and the cost of
four eighty degrees more than doubled, that's a
big part of the answer. When I went
to college back a long time ago, you
were a little kid if at best,
in the late seventies, early eighties, College didn't
cost that much.
With Pell Grants and some work study and
some modest loans, you can go to a
good school. That is not the case.
Well, for me, even, like, we you you
mentioned something about starting in the nineties. For
me, I was in I was doing my
undergrad in the nineties, and I paid out
of pocket
at a four year Research one institution.
It was 1,500
to $2,000
a semester.
Yep.
Now it's 15,000
Yep. You know, on average at a public
four year school. So that's the big that's
the big so we we if you're talking
about state public colleges, right, state governments
cut funding for higher education
in times of recession
and then ratchet it back up in good
economic times.
They don't do that to other parts of
the government. They can't do that to pensions
or roads. Right? But they can always do
it to higher ed because higher ed can
always raise tuition, and students can always go
out and borrow. Seems to function. But you
do that over the course of thirty years,
you get to the situation where we are
now. And it's punishing. You have students with
debt that they can't pay back because they
didn't finish college, or they're paying off their
debt and not getting married, not buying houses
because they you know, it's terrible. Power raising
families,
all those things. But, you know, I am
not a fan of the way the Biden
administration went about doing debt. I think they
had some good ideas. You know, we've written
about the one that I thought was actually
excellent, but they also did some, you know,
very Rube Goldberg
schemes that the court said we're gonna not
gonna accept, and they did them anyway, and
then the courts knocked them down. And that's
why people are confused because
eight different plans, and I don't know Yeah.
Whether we'll pay this back or not. So
I think it was very poorly handled. Now
to kind of the big question,
what role should colleges play
in
democracy building and in civic life? This was
something you touched on early in our conversation.
Would love to have you kind of take
us into
that.
I think colleges have to
be institutions
that
are educating students not just for careers, but
for life,
life in a democracy.
Where else are you gonna learn those habits
of cooperating,
of serving, of giving back,
of of
assessing,
of being informed?
Right? Problem solving. Of problem solving. Like, we
we have lost our ability to solve problems
in this society
because what we do is we run to
our binary corners. We don't have a conversation,
and we think that pointing out problems
is
solving them. Correct. And so we
encourage colleges
to
enhance their roles
as
nurturers of democratic
practice.
So you get extra points if your college
makes it easier for students to vote. You
get extra points
if your college
has
large numbers of students who are on ROTC.
Right? They're given back to their country.
If their the college matches the grant
that AmeriCorps members get when they do their
civil their public service.
You get points
if you are a college that
students go into
socially useful fields,
like teaching, like health care. Universities
are doing things for the whole country. There
is a patriotic
role to the university
and
saying,
here's our you you got a different measure
of that patriotism?
I'm I'm all ears. This is our this
is our combined measure.
Yeah. It's,
it's so important. It's so affirming because I
think what we've seen you know, you you
keep mentioning this thirty year period
and
what it looks like. And I've I've I've
only ever worked in education. I think working
in a central office space feels a lot
more corporate than being in, in a school.
But one thing I've I've observed is we've
got this notion
of
operational
skills, right, technical skills.
But what tends to get lost
is this, and I wrote this phrase down,
is
nurturers of democratic practice. Like, are we producing
people
who can be nurturers of democratic
practice? Like, we have folks who are really
good at bringing other people together
and facilitating
dialogue
and asking questions,
but those are never listed in the competencies
in the workplace.
And it makes me wonder yeah. You know
what got us started with these rankings? It's
because a friend of mine who was involved
in the national service world
suggested that we look into work study. Work
study is a federal program. It's screwed up
a bunch of different ways.
Yeah. But it it's got a noble object.
And in the legislation that was passed in
the sixties, it said,
colleges
are obliged
without ever giving a number to use this
money
in part to provide students
with chances to do community service, to tutor,
work at a food kitchen, help build whatever
whatever community service,
the problem solving
democratic
service
right? We want this money to help students
have experience
in that.
And
we we looked, and it's like very few
colleges put
much of that federal money into community service.
Some did a lot. Wow. And so we
ranked colleges
based on how what percentage of their work
study money went to community service jobs. That's
what gave me the idea. Oh, we could
do this. That is the nurturing of democratic
practice. Right?
I I am gonna devote some of my
time to helping my this community where I
happen to be solve some of its problems.
Yep. And it's compensated,
and it's so you don't have to, like,
carve out your It's not just volunteer. Have
you ever been takes your time. I think
of these kids who get stuck in a
file room with no windows
getting together, like, filing things for the university's
collections department, and that doesn't sound like it's
in the spirit of what you're describing.
Yeah. But it might be it might be
honest work, but, you know, it's neither giving
them skills nor doing much for their community.
That's right. So I wanna kinda
take us away with with this kind of
and I had two questions, but I think
I'm gonna combine them into one.
So
folks who are
facing down this challenge of finding the right
higher education experience
after graduation,
how do you recommend folks start framing
that conversation with their kids,
with each other, with the schools, particularly the
high schools. How do you recommend that that
process be framed? And if there's any advice
you would give. So you're you're a you're
a high school student or you're
post high school. You're out working and you
didn't go to college or you took a
couple of, you know, community college courses, but
you haven't advanced too much. You're thinking about,
alright. What's my next step?
Look. If you've got
top 5%
SAT scores, try to get in the most
selective college you can get into. Sure. That's
that's good for you. If you can do
that, you're gonna earn more. You're gonna get
build a good network. You're gonna get a
good education. But if you're not that, you
need to go to college. You wanna go
to college. You want the education.
You want the credential.
You want the entree
into the career that you're interested in or
some career that pays well. The good news
is there are a lot of colleges
that can deliver that for you
at a price you can afford
with a quality you can count, and
open your eyes to the wide selection that
we have in this country. And I think
if you go to our website and you
look at our rankings, you're gonna see probably
there's one not too far from you. And
if you happen to be in a few
states that do a good job, Florida, California,
New York, Texas,
North Carolina, there's a lot of them. And,
don't look down your nose at them. They
they they could be
exactly the right choice for you. That's beautiful.
And it makes me think of the way
that we
define
a successful
application process and admissions process into university is
very much
colored. I would say it's disproportionately
colored by this thing that you referred to,
which is that public ridicule. Like, you're just
afraid, oh,
they're going to a community college. Like, if
we can break that cycle of thought and
that cycle of dialogue, then the world is
wide open in terms of your higher education.
And there's a lot of assumptions that are
widely
held, but assumptions are upheld by individuals.
And how do we kinda critique those? I'll
ask you one last thing. There have been
a lot of really powerful critical points made
in this conversation
couched within a really nice context of, no,
there is something there for you. Like, you
don't have to just take what everybody's telling
you you have to take. What is it
that gives you hope about higher ed right
now? I see some resistance.
More resistance than the papers are giving credit.
I think if you get past the politicians
Yep. Average voters, if they can put their
politics aside, there's wide
agreement on the role of colleges, on the
usefulness of colleges, the desire.
I think we are moving
toward
balancing the ship. We've put a lot of
money into four year colleges, some money into
community colleges, very little into vocational. And what
we have put in has gone to really
bad colleges, a lot of it. Yeah. I
think we're moving to a more
fair system,
and it's gonna take a lot of time.
Yeah. It'd be great if both parties could
agree on it, where regardless of whether you
go to a four year elite college or
a six month, two year
vocational program,
there's money there for you
for a quality education that's gonna help you
get ahead. We are perfectly capable of doing
that as a country. We're about the only
country that was doing it for a hundred
and fifty years. We know how to do
this. We can do it again, but we
have to agree on it. We have to
know what the goal is. And the more
we focus on Harvard, the more we take
our eye off the goal. I think it's
so powerful. It makes me think of the
data. One of part of my job that
I was in until very recently
was to manage federal grants for teacher pathway
programs that we had. And as we've kinda
tracked some of the federal grants and some
of the policy discourse around them, I learned
that the administration wants to do away with
everything. Right? They just wanna, like, slam the
door on all of it. But Congress,
that's a non starter for Congress. Yeah. That's
a bipartisan
set of beliefs. And so as skeptical
slash
cynical as I can be at times, that
is sort of encouraging saying that at the
end of the day,
if your constituents
are not receiving the opportunities
that
they need in order to advance and and
live a good life,
you're you're gonna pay the price. Yes, sir.
This is not gonna end well for those
who are,
trashing higher ed. It's just not. If they
cut budgets
for research as they have for research, for
training,
people are gonna feel it. And it they're
cutting
obviously, their focus
is elite schools in blue cities.
Right.
Of course. Cutting in Tennessee
and in Louisiana
and in Wyoming
where those grants are
keeping those places alive
economically.
It's life and death in those places. People
are not gonna react well over time.
No. At all.
Paul Glasseris, this has been
an illuminating conversation for me. I have so
I've learned so much, and I'm so deeply
appreciative that you took the time today to
talk with the audience about higher education, about
the future of democracy,
and all of the things. Where can listeners
find your work? I know we've got, like,
so we'll have the link
to Washington Monthly and to the report. Are
there other places where they can follow the
work that you and folks like you have
been doing? Yeah. We're on I still call
it Twitter.
We're on Twitter. We're on on Blue Sky.
We're we've got a YouTube channel with great
podcasts
Oh, heck yes. Monthly podcast.
You can follow me at at Glassgris,
Twitter and bluesky,washingtonmonthly.com.
We're all over the place. Just Google us.
Alright. Well, thank you. Incredible.
Thank you,
incredible conversation. Great job of asking questions, and,
I I don't normally get this kind of
time
to really get the full story, and I
appreciate you giving me this time. No. I
appreciate it. I'm I'm here for all of
it. I know my audience really loves to
hear
the depth and the research and the the
details around these things because I think it's
easy to feel really hopeless in these times.
And Yes. You know, what you have given
me and I believe our audience
is a lot of things to be hopeful
and not not naive hope. Like, oh, it's
all gonna be okay, but concrete things that
we can work towards. And I find that
really inspirational. So I apologize, Lana. Thank you
for, remixing this conversation,
Andre's Power and Education.
The layer that you have added here is
something
that that I think is just gonna be
so powerful.
We'll get this out and spread it more,
like, as as wide as we can. And,
we'll just have a for taking a call
with us today. Okay. Thank you, buddy.
Stay dope, y'all.