Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Kirp The College Dropout Scandal 20240713

Public speaker who has given talks on four continents. He is also advised governments both domestically and abroad and even served in president obamas education policy team. Lastly, david kirp is a contributor to the New York Times and awardwinning author of 17 books including improbable scholars, kids first, and the sandbox investment. The College Dropout scandal, the authors latest work, exposes several Shocking Facts about the Higher Education system today. Almost 40 of students leave university with no degree. Almost 60 of Community College students drop out without an associates or transferring within three years. The author especially highlights students of color, those from poor families and those who are the first generation to attend college as these Group Situation is particularly dire. In order to solve this crisis the author proposes several solutions and in particular he emphasizes the necessity of making students feel like they belong and giving them the essential personalized and caring support they need in order to succeed. With this support more and more students can graduate continuing their journey toward achieving the american dream. Here to tell us more about the the College Dropout scandal is the author himself, david kirp. [applause] if you have questions just let me know. Its a bookstore so it seems to me its appropriate to begin with a little reading. Besides, i think the six most irresistible words in the english language is let me tell you a story it works for threeyearolds and b,83. This is the beginning of a story about City University new york Community Colleges. Which you have done amazingly innovative things but let the story speak for itself. New semper fi this square root, ergo sales asked her class . A host of hands shoot up. All but one of the 25 students believe that in this instance it cannot be done. The dissenter ablays out her argument but the rest of you think of leslies reasoning moving away from the blackboard glasses perched on her nose scanning the room, do you guys agree . Everyone wants to speak at once. After some back and forth they concur, leslie is correct stop then ms. Phelps points to another square root. You guys are great, what about this . And once again the students clamor to respond. In an ordinary college math class students are expected to memorize whats being spoonfed to them. Repeat the answers on the exam, students in ms. Phelps class must puzzle out the right answers for themselves and only when they reach an agreement do they move on. While this repartee sounds like a prep session for the gre, which requires perspective grad students perform the sink ab perform the same calculation. The grand concourse borders the school but while a handful of the ornate turnofthecentury movie palace survived the neighbor turned it into one of the poorest in the city and one of the most violent in the nation. This is the new jen education world. Where almost everyone is nonwhite, almost everyone receives federal and state aid earmarked for needy students. Like most abnationwide poor students are three times more likely than their welltodo classmates to start here. Its the collegiate home for half of all black and latino freshmen but just a third of white students. In first jen students are twice as likely to attend Community Colleges with College Educated parents. Students i met are survivors thats how they made it here. Most of them are juggling to compete for scarce time. Lunch time expressing breastmilk and studying student on call susanna g tells me i work full time husband requires kidney dialysis. These students have accomplished in less than three months the students in the break the mold program called cooney start is almost beyond belief. At the outset of the semester they were cowboy decimal points and negative numbers since then have power through Elementary School arithmetic to basic algebra and ready to tackle collegelevel math. Another minor miracle was unfolding in christopher enniss reading and writing class there students initially had a hard time interpreting short story of any kind parsing the figurative language in the start story. It might well read in freshman english. In a space in the classroom like a panther using his voice as an instrument cocking his head to listen. How do you know he probes never student has an interpretation. With the evidence from the text plainly whats happening in these classrooms. Hold some clues on how to solve the problem of College Dropout. I want to say one additional word about this teaching, one of the joys of spending time listening and talking and watching stuff, its very special moments. I was there for the better part of the day watching these two teachers and students. Neither teacher ever uttered the abhighlighting some things in the literature class. They are remarkable. And they are not the only students who i thought were remarkable. The students in a program that is next Level Program for students in the regular Community College system whomever you just heard a second ago that the graduation and transfer rates from six years from Community College is 39 percent. The Graduation Rate and b,60abs years is 13 percent. They are the graduation is 15 a ageorgia State University which is a big urban school 40,000 undergraduates the Graduation Rates doubled in the course of eight years and the opportunity gap shrunk in fact poor kids minority students, first generation College Students and immigration students are all grudging at rates higher than the overall student population. Its a very different story nationwide. I set out to try to figure out whats going on. The book begins with a jock loose. Its very simple. You have these abysmal Graduation Rates and they are especially bad for nugent students. About 10 lower than 1970 the consequences are dire. Particularly for poor and workingclass Students College really is the ticket of mobility. Unfortunately, they are the students who fare worse. They wind up leaving with debt they dont have a lot to show for it their lifetime earnings overall are not going to be immensely greater then if they just stayed in college and got a bunch of debt. The graduate from college on average their Lifetime Income goes up by 1 million. More in certain fields. Otherwise they wind up with debt and three times more likely to default on their debt. They default on their debt that means they have a harder time buying a car, a harder time buying a house and the effects ripple out from there. They are less likely to stay married. They are less likely to participate in politics. They are less healthy. Also they earn a lot less than they otherwise would. American institutes of research estimated one class one year the cost to the economy in terms of lost earnings is 4 billion. When i go out and i talk about this not infrequently a question i will be asked and anticipated these students are not College Material. Thats a phrase i feel. Certainly the kids describing to you a class of a not College Material student. One of the girls they are said to me describe what happened when she was in ninth grade her High School Counselor called her in and said said you just can get pregnant and dropout want you just leave now and save the taxpayers a bunch of money. The fact that these kids are there says a lot about their survival or skills. I have here they blown it its their fault case closed, you get administrators and professors thing you want to improve Graduation Rates give us better students will graduate more of them. There is an empirical answer to this question and that is if you look at colleges with the same Graduation Rate. Same overall Graduation Rate. Big difference is in terms of the percentage of students students im calling new jen students are the poor students of underrepresented minority students. There are huge gaps between the Graduation Rates of two colleges the same overall in the Graduation Rates for new jen students value enormously. Let me give you a couple examples of places that you might well not have paid any attention to but they are the places that American Kids go to school. Old Dominion University in virginia big Public Institution they graduate about 45 percent of their students. They have twice as many aare sorry they graduate 54 percent of their students and twice as many minority students of the university of toledo. The grip the minority Graduation Rate is 50 university of toledo with the same entering credentials its a 41 percent overall Graduation Rate. 18 percent minority Graduation Rate. In other words, same student goes to old dominion she has 2. 5 times better chance of earning a degree its also the case but if you look at the entering profile of students there is huge difference in the overall Graduation Rates and schools that look the same but day one look very different in terms of his causing them. I was in new york at one point i thought let me have a look at what the new york figures are like for a couple of state universities. Imagine mario who is thinking about where he wants to go in college who lives in the bronx and thinking about two of the sunni schools old westbury only alluded nobody and same entering criteria. Goes to sunni old westbury fewer than half the students graduate and fewer than half the minority students graduate. Heads up state to albany the overall Graduation Rate is 70 and 75 of the minority students graduate. So hes got a 50 chance of graduating. One of the hopes i have in the book is that you get parents and students to think about lots of things whether its sushi bars or the quality of their major and deciding on a college to just Pay Attention to the likelihood they will make it out the other end based on what the data look like. If you have high schools with the same Graduation Rate as Public University Public University Graduation Rate is 30 . High school with 50 Graduation Rate would be labeled a dropout factory the principal would be looking for other employment but there is no accountability in the Higher Education world. Nobody loses a job because of the fact that the statistics are as women as they are. I teach Public Policy and Public Policy is all about solutions. If i was a sociologist might stop there but im not him you will will i often do when im writing i went looking for examples of places that look like cooney look like Georgia State try to figure out what are they doing. What explains those differences. What explains the wires in this case. What are they doing to beat the odds . For starters, i learned something that i wouldve thought was terribly obvious which is that the president of the institution has to say Student Success is my top priority. I started out thinking, of course, what else might be the top priority . The answer is, making alums happy, placating the state lawmakers and the professors, getting them some razors and most important moving up the u. S. News and world ranking. How do you move up the rankings . You become more selective and how are you more selective . You reject more students. Thats the criteria of success. Long beach state is one of the institutions i featured in the book and the provost is a guy who used to be at the med school at one point a fellow named brian jeske. Long beach state nearly half minority students. Nearly half pell grant students it has three times more applicants than harvard the seventh largest number of applicants in the country 70 of the students graduate and one of the reasons it so successful is how closely is tied into long beach and everything from the preschool through the universities. Elementary high school Community College. It really is a system in fact and not just a name. Heres brian jeske we dont want to be harvard and we could be harbored even if we admitted the top people among the 96,000 who apply. We dont want to play in that pool. We cant. We want to be the best in our pool and we think we are. Indeed in a recent study in the operator of social mobility, long beach is among the nations best and moving students from poor families into the middle class. If our president is going to take seriously the idea of Student Success, what she needs to do in collaboration with somebody else in the administration who is entire job is producing more graduates. Thats the mission of that person. You need to look from the very first day from the day the student accepts to the day they walk across the stage or try to ajust try to figure out where the roadblocks graduation. Here are a couple of examples. I never heard of summer melts when i wandered into this project. I remember summer melt was the goodhumored truck came by and he picked up your ice cream by the time you got home that was summer melts. Thats not summer melt in this context. At the school and talking about which are the big regional public universities the schools that American Kids go to 20 to 30 of the students who are accepted by university and paid her first payment never show up in the fall. So whats that about . Partly its going to be about the fact that they decided they are not ready for college or theyve got family obligations that they didnt anticipate. A lot of it is about the fact that the paperwork theyve got to go through between the time they are accepted in the fall is huge. It got to get the high schools to turn in their last semester grades. Theyve got to decide what theyre going to do an orientation. Pick first semester they have to fill er philip financial federal aid applications. I dont know how many of you have ever seen a fafsa application. Lets put it this way, it is not student friendly. Its not me friendly either. I was having a hard time figuring out what i would do if i had to fill it out. If youre a middleclass student or upperclass come from a family where the parents are going to college and you got all sorts of advisors around somebody can sit down and help you with the paperwork. The students dont have anybody. To help them. They really are on their own. So how to deal with that problem pee dee its a newfangled low cost way. He sent Text Messages to the students and you say you are fafsa application is due next week. By the way, if you need help just text the following number and we will get you help. That little innovation costs approximately nothing. Text messages are essentially free. At Georgia State which was the first place to do this, cut the summer melt problem by 40 . By the way, Little Things make a huge difference. When california took the letter it sends to High School Kids encouraging them to take the first step in register the process thats going to make them participants in the funding for the california fafsa when they change the wording of the letter. They read it in english and then says something and the effect of this is the first step on the road to your college success. That little tiny bit of tinkering, just that one sentence increased by two percent and the change of language plus that tinkering about eight or nine percent. It doesnt take a whole lot to engage students in this story. The other end of the process, the universities are noticing that surprising number of students who are in their last year or maybe even their last semester, dropout. When they look figure out whats going on what could be going on . The answer is, they run out of money they havent been able to pay their bills because the College Loans are run out of there in a state that has often the state guaranteed loans are good for four years and now in their fifth or six year, what to do . And they are not out a ton of money. If you give these students, give them 500 or thousand dollars, Georgia State one of my hero institutions pioneered this program. Say here it is. You need this go graduate. By the way, the students first reaction was, this was a scam. Like my cell phone i dont even answer the phones unless i know who is calling because they now invaded my phone. If youre a student, hello are about to give you 1000 but in fact thats what happened. In a class of about 10,000, they increase the number of students graduating by 400 kids. Also, when they surveyed the students and their attitudes toward the university there was a big change because the students were now getting that when the college said, we care about you, we are behind you, they really meant it. They were literally putting their money where their mouth was. The biggest stumbling block is math. College math. Whenever diane encountered this all of my nightmarish memories of a calculus class that i had to take and did not pass, were it not for physics paired with that i would become a lord knows i would be a College Dropout perhaps. But algebra. I dont know when the last time you used algebra was. Its been a halfcentury for me probably. Which i never used but there was. If you are going to go into stem fields you need algebra you need calculus. If youre going to go into ordinary life you need statistics. And there are smart statistics classes that produce enormous improvements in graduation. Most students who go to these big universities would be consigned to remedial math classes remedial english classes. Just the fact that they are sent to the classes means they cant begin their regular curriculum. That substantially reduces the chance that they will graduate. Many of them dont make it through the class the first time a ticket, the second time they take it. Even if you decide you want to teach algebra you can teach it in a way thats engaging as opposed to the professor whose teaching like that. You can actually do the same kind of things the teacher at cooney did with the class that she was teaching. Do a lot of lab work. Students are working at their own pace with professors and graduate students around to help when they run into trouble. Change the course. There are other things that i talk about in the book and what i do is i spend time at seven or eight schools and highlight some of the interesting things that are happening. Rutgers new york has a wonderful honors programs. Honors programs are particularly something that secondtier universities do to try to more talks to play that would will go to harvard its a program that will rate and not grades he looks for students who really they think have the smarts to do it. Have tough lives. Something that looks interesting they come into the program and it really is a cadillac style education in that actually are grownups are around to Pay Attention to them and care about them. No students or weight outperforming the regular record students whose gradepoint average High School Grade point average is higher than that of the other students in the program. Lots of different ideas this is not a cookbook. Its a take this seriously. Why doesnt it happen . One reason i suggested before is that Student Success isnt a priority and another is, it takes guts to address some of these questions particularly when you Start Talking about changing the curriculum. Summer melt is fine its just an app no professor needs to know about. But tell me how to teach my math course . Thats tougher. And College President s dont have a reputation particularly for bravery. The biggest take away and it was suggested in the introduction from the book is that students need to feel that they are valued members of a community that is committed to their success and not just a revenue source. They need to understand that they are not imposters that they really belong. I am the book with a chapter on amherst college. I knew enough about the college to know that among the elite schools it was number one in terms of the percentage of kids permitted. It got a lot of attention 24 percent of the kids were on pell grant which is amazing for a school that kind. Got a lot of National Attention a lot of back patting it deserved it. Then it stop it said we admitted these guys sink or swim. There was something called the m wrist uprising was basically a college boy demonstration led initially by a group of chicanos were saying basically nobody cares about us we dont fit this place nobody is interested in us. The issues of course. People are dropping out of amherst. You sort of have to work at it is not easy to drop out of the school at a 94 percent Graduation Rate. The belonging issue making students feel somebody cares about them and that they have a copy contribution to make its not just we are going to take these students and give them a nice pedigree. But in fact they got a lot to teach us. Thats important across these institutions. The key to that when i was talking to two old friends of mine who been really old friends who are known since college days a key to that is having somebody that students can rely on somebody they can turn to for support. I would talk to students about who were in some of these programs what was it that really mattered. The money was good and various other things that colleges did that were smart but the thing they most they would keep coming back to is there advisor. Think about if you put yourself back to the point where you are 18 years old and away from college for the first time away from home for the first time and really on your own you dont know how well youre going to do. A lot of us are not like imposters its not something confined to the Georgia State Long Beach State of the world. Having somebody that you can rely on is really a bridge to the rest of the college. It gives you courage to Start Talking to your professors Start Talking to classmates instead of thinking you are too dumb to say anything to them. When i would say that i actually wrote about in the New York Times i got a bunch of letters that said you are just coddling these students. These letters are all written by people who will tell you that they got to school by walking five miles uphill both ways. What they dont seem to get is the difference between the lives they lead. If youre New York Times reader there is a certain age of writing you just know theyre not like. Theyre not expressing breast milk thats not what their lives look like. In terms of policy recommendation that cost money its worth expanding the administration on evidence institution to expand the numbers of counselors and survivors. I go back to my hero institution Georgia State it decided it was going to cut by half the administrative staff and replace it with counselors. The ratio they went from 100 to 1200 which is, by the way, typical of these universities to 1 to 400. They had 40,000 individual appointments with their students enter school with 36,000 students on average students saw counselor once a year and i sat in on a couple of those sessions just walked in. Toby set it up for me. And how often did the student see the counselor . As often as she needed to. He showed up and nobody would turn you away. Very impressive stuff. This is really a message to the universities. If the university took seriously what the Successful Schools are doing then you really could move the needle on overall Graduation Rates. You can really cut the opportunity gap. When i would talk to the president or the progress of these places they would say the same thing, people come visit us from campuses because theyre not unknown its not as though people dont know about Georgia State or cooney they would come and say whats the magic . Whats the elixir . They would say, here are the things you need to do. No, how about organizing study groups for students . Then they go away and nothing winds up happening. So the beginning was why did i write this book . I wrote the book, i was saying to somebody beforehand, the book is a means to an end for me. It would be nice if people bought books of course. But it really is to be a ticketed admission to a National Conversation about Student Success which is an important issue. Particularly now in a Political Climate one on one hand people know about this topic is the College Admission scandals, usc story. When the candidates are talking about free tuition no debt. We can have a whole conversation about the merits of either of those two propositions but the point is, they are not talking about what happens to students when theyre there. They are not paying attention to that question. In the firms gentlest way i can i want to call it the successful universities and pointing fingers at places like the toledos of the world that are doing not doing the job they should be doing. I want to get parents and students to Pay Attention to these issues. I would like teachers to think of professors to think about what their responsibilities are to their students. Until this story about the university of texas a professor teaching a big cam section. The section is 300 students. For sections like this. They all have the same final exam. You want to go to med school, tough. We will destroy your life for you here. In these classes, 30 to 40 of the students would fail. In his class lxxxv percent of the students got as and a minuses. The first thing he did, hes an amazing teacher. The first thing he did was to get off the stage walk in the middle the classroom and say to the students, im on your side. 18 years old showing up to college coming from rio grande town for panhandle. Im on your side. Imagine the power of that message. Finally, i really want this issue to get on the political agenda. I was saying it would make me very happy memories semisigned up to be in on the road speaker for mayor pete but id be perfectly happy to do this for any democrat who ran a talk about this. Just imagine 15 seconds on tuesdays debate, 50 of the students go to public universities dont graduate, thats a scandal. It costs them rest of this we can do the something about that. I got a plan for that. I borrowed that line from a local senator. Thank you. [applause] comments, questions, thoughts . Its probably easier to find out what Graduation Rates are but how does one get information about dropout rates . We were talking about georgia and toledo. You look at the various lists and see how the graduate. Wheres the Information Available . Thats a great question. Where do i get all these numbers, right . Go to College Results online. Org. You can go there, you can look at a given college with the Graduation Rate is this year what is been the last five years, what it is for some of the various subgroups Program Students and africanamerican students, how does it stack up against the institutions that by their calibers to the same institutions. Where do i come up with these . Its a very much underutilized College Results online. Might even be just College Results. Org. As you mentioned, the default rate for students who dont graduate considerably higher than that of students who do. What should be done potentially for the department of education to address this issue. You can theoretically invest money and still generate positive return because people are more likely to pay off their debt. Yes and he may not have followed this but betsy devos has just been held in contempt by a court for refusing to ab which require she not collect money that was owed for students who went to forprofit college, which went bankrupt. Thats a whole other terrain i just left out of this conversation entirely. You get more students graduating, fewer students dropping out and paying their bills if you expand pell grants both the amount of money uncovered not just tuition and fees but all the other expenses that students have. The students im talking about, theyve got to hire babysitters to go to school. You know while we are sitting in a bookstore cost thousand dollars or more a semester or somebody to go to college. That isnt factored into the equation. If they are away from home theyve got to get there they have room and board. None of this gets figured into the equation. The state of massachusetts is very tricky, if you look at tuition tuition looks pretty low at the public universities because fees are astronomical. Thats bait and switch. I think. He want to provide aband you start thinking about loan forgiveness for working and middleclass folks doesnt need to be perverse incentives for people not to pay their loans but the fact that College Loans the only kind of loan i know where you cannot declare bankruptcy you cannot wipe the slate clean you are stuck with it for life. It presumably was the rationale for this once upon a time but i can imagine what it is. You have evidence that suggests that in making ab this you are or movingly Entrance Examinations, drop off rates decreased substantially . If you looked overall, you would find that there are professors right in that overall. The higher the students on the High School Grades the more likely they are to graduate. The higher test scores the more likely they are to graduate. The sat, College Entrance exam is not a great predictor and a lot of schools abandoning that exam. I think you would get a whole lot fewer dropouts if universities and Community Colleges particularly in high schools paid attention at rates 10, 11, 12 to addressing the kinds of issues that now lead 60 of the students who show up at the big state universities to fail their interests exams in either math or writing or both because once they are down that path the other thing you want to do you want to make those grants large enough so that you can say to students, you really need to go to school fulltime. We know that its hard to do, we will help you by creating blocks of time you are in class, blocks of time you are working. You need to take 15 credits. If you dont, if you go to school parttime you have cut your chances of graduating in half. One little thing. But they used to use money to do that, its a lovely idea but there needs to be resources and there needs to be the flexibility. And the awareness on the part of the institution in order to do that. People who run, one more anecdote along these lines that i Love University of Central Florida staff guy one of his jobs was to figure out what some of the little stumbling blocks were, he organized a group of senior administrators to follow in the footsteps of the student who wanted to change her major. Three hours and seven buildings later, seriously. They got the idea. I have not gone back to the university of Central Florida to see whether or not they simple find the process but something that should be done online require just endless weights. Its the Little Things an institution does that says we are paying attention. The reason why university of Central Florida had that system is nothing to do with their eight students. They just never thought about it. It worked perfectly well for them. For the grownups, it worked terribly for the students. So theres a bunch of things you can do. I wondered what you would, having picked out successful Community Colleges and University Branch campuses what ideas do you have about getting the rest of them to follow suit . Because as you said at the beginning, its a kind of ungoverned enterprise. I think about various sources of pressure. One is if you actually got College Applicants mobilized around the issue of Graduation Rates and flipped around the other way if you got colleges to brag about their Graduation Rates and do comparative advertising. Come to albany are three times more likely to graduate but if you go to old westbury. That would make a big difference. New can instead of making state money basing state money on the number of bodies who show up you base state money of the number of folks who graduate who can create incentive in order to make sure university is like everybody else is great at gaining a system. You provide bonuses for institutions and the basis of the number of new jen students they are educating so you understand you are going to need to work harder. They need to work harder. But those kinds of incentives were tied to high school. A great deal of system gaming, fake data, putting up students etc. Youre familiar with all of this . Yes. What that says it is cuba who got to start designing a system that at least is aware of what the problems are. There are fewer institutions. Even at a big state system like the University Like cal state which has 450,000 students, you got 10 campuses. But this implies i think to your first comment they would have to be some political mobilization. Actually, in fairness, thats happening now. The number of states have said, youve got to eliminate remedial classes. We will give you money to build in remediation into your regular class. The way in which step away build in remediation into stat so you graduate at the end of the year he they are doing that in first returns are quite good. Students lo and behold are capable of doing better work than the Entrance Exam would have them. They are also starting to look at High School Grades rather than test scores as a measure of how well you do. Theres always going to be some gaming of the system but i think now there is increasing political will at the state level to engage in those kinds of behaviors. You could do the same thing you can do versions of this. I havent thought my way to what you do in washington. Because im turned off by washington but you could certainly structure state aid in a way that incentivizes universities to behave in certain ways. But these institutions are politically pretty influential in our state legislature. But theres no fighting back. There is no pushback. I havent heard anybody say. Is political mobilization in the end. Theres nobody on the other side of the story. In fact, the people who are in these institutions, try pushing herbert around and see how far you get. Not so easy to push berkeley around. Thats because those institutions are supremely confident of their ability to execute their mission and confident in their mission. You get to the Umass Dartmouth or the university of wisconsin green bay, they are aware of the fact that they have a problem. Nobody at those places will say, we dont have any kind of problem. They might say, its our students. It seems to me the pushback that, this Institution Just like you has Graduation Rate 15 percent higher. They must be doing something right. Thats a part of the story. I also think if i were in a state position i would be encouraging aggregations of Community College university and high schools at industry and metropolitan areas to Work Together so you dont have these courses that are sort of all over the place. Its not enough for example that Community Colleges courses count for credits at the university. You got to build the curriculum which brings together the University Professor and the Community College professor so there is a real onramp. If you said that in all the institution there would be a lot of eyebrow raising. If you see it said it at the university of Central Florida thats what they do, theyve got faculty from the university stationed on the campus of the Community College. They spent every summer working on curriculum at those places. So this is a very long conversation, one that i look forward to continuing just to continuing to have but i think there is enough evidence out there little bits and pieces of change and if you can somehow move the conversation away from free Community College tuition, which is actually a bad idea for reasons i would be happy to explain, demonstrated in massachusetts said the program in massachusetts that provides for Certain Group of students free tuition has kept the students from applying to schools they be likely to graduate and dont realize they could probably go there for less money because they dont see that. But to get politicians off that dime and onto the questions we are talking about now i think its a political winner. Thats why i gave you my five second spiel at the end. Its very hard to argue that where we are now is a great place for us to be. Not given with the labor market. Do think there would be a constituency for these things in the faculties of the Community Colleges . Yes. Community colleges absolutely. Fouryear universities, much more mixed but yes. Why . Let me take some of the questions. We have lots of chance to talk about this. I knew it was a mistake. [laughter] what portion of the population do you think belongs in a i have no way to answer that question but if the question is coming from someplace where is it coming from . What lies behind the question . 16 years of formal education profitable to majority of the population . I dont think so. Thats where i thought you might be coming from. It depends on what the education looks like. The reason that a High School Degree is not enough is that the skills that a forklift driver needs these days are not going to be satisfied with most high school programs. To some people need some Post High School training . Almost always yes. ab its a rhetorical question. Im answering the question as fully as i can. We import educated people from china india and russia to to our educated tasks. Is that a good idea . Its a terrible idea. Exactly, thats the answer to the question that you really would like to have kind of educated folks who can fill the jobs you are describing. There really are jobs to be filled. I dont have a number for you but a there are 12 whole years of education before you get to college. Let me tell you one of the things that happens, first of all i went to that class i described at the beginning of the session and i had two reactions. One was oh my god these are smart kids and really good teaching is, what the hell happened in those 12 years that preceded this . I wouldnt argue in the least that k12 is doing its job. It also dont think, yes, the whole of the conversation ive had in my last book about what you can do to rebuild the k12 system but that doesnt let universities off the hook. Thats all i would say. Thank you for coming. [applause] ill bet you want this back. I am pleased to welcome you to tonights events with