Future Outlook for Higher Education

This is in Conversation from Apple News. I'm David Green, in for Shumitab Basu. Today is college still worth it Earlier this year, New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang was doing his taxes with his wife when he started to think about the contributions they were making to their children's college savings accounts. He lives in the Bay Area where there is a lot of talk about how AI will fundamentally alter higher education, and he wondered what that might mean for his nine year old daughter who will be graduating from high school in twenty thirty five. My question was just like, shouldould I keep contributing to this thing? Is my nine year old really going to go to college? or at the very least, is the landscape of higher education going to look very, very different here in ten years Personal inquiry became the premise of a deeply reported series for the New Yorker about the viability of the American university system In it, Jay explores how AI is already impacting higher education, but he also looks at a much broader crisis happening How factors like demographic shifts, high tuition costs and low public trust in institutions are leading to growing disillusionment with college education and Dropping enrollment numbers And underneath it all, there are pervading questions about the true purpose of higher education and whether colleges and universities addequately serving that purpose today So this all started with a really personal and specific question about whether you should still be contributing to your nine year old daughter's college fund. Do you feel like in your gut you sort of knew the answer? was this genuinely a curiosity on your part Yeah, I would say that ninety percent I was like, well, she'll probably go to college, right? Ten years is not that long of a time and American university system certainly has gone through large changes throughout the past two hundred years, but you know, it's still there That was actually one of the interesting things to unpack while I was doing the column, which was like, why did college feel so inevitable for me? For example, I went to college in nineteen ninety eight And what I found was that basically we have had fifty years now of unstopped growth in higher education and that that for many reasons, but most notably because of demographic shifts in the country is probably coming to an end. And so I think that maybe that ninety percent was a little bit over indexed by the fact that I and most people that I know have grown up in this era where college just kept growing and growing the number of people who went to college growing and growing in that the sort of inevitability of young people of some means or who could graduate from high school, going to college just kept expanding and expanding I have to say there's your writing got really personal for me at one point because you wrote, would a fifteen year old hell bent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricular to get into Harvard? Or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work? Being a journalist who went to Harvard and spent money to go to Harvard for four years you really got me thinking about today, my job, was it a valuable years and I think the answer is a resounding Yes But I wonder like how your thoughts are evolving. Like before we get to sort of the AI questions What is college for today? And where do you see the gap between what its stated purpose is and the purpose it's actually serving for people Well, I mean, when I went to college in twenty five years ago, I think that it was much more about At least the narrative that I was told and the narrative that I believe that there was a level of self discovery that would happen, right? There are two levels of it. so The fundamental level, which was unstated mostly, except I remember I told my parents like, I don't know if I'm going to go to college and they're just like, you have to, right? You You will go to college The idea was that if you don't go to college, you're just going to fall down the class ladder and you're going to essentially be homeless, right? Like That's a very hyperbolic way to put it. certainly wouldn't have been true, but that was the idea that was put in our heads, but it was unstated. Now on top of that, there was another layer, which was that Well, you have to learn who you are as a human being. You have to learn what you want to be in life. likeike what is your purpose in life? If you go to this college and you search And you go through all this knowledge, you meet professors who will help you, then by the end of it, you turn into who you're going to be, right? seelf actualization I think over the past twenty five years that young people have become pretty demystified of that second layer,? I think that they see it as a credentialing opportunity. They see it as I'm going to go here either my parents or I'm going to go into debt. and then by the end of it, I'm going to have a degree that is going to help me get a job and that hopefully that job is going to push me up the class ladder, right? And that hopefully this job is going to actually require that I need this degree The reason why I think that has become much more demystified and that kids are much more eyes wide open about what college actually is for is just because I think that We have much more discourse now about the impact of student loans and the impact of the higher cost of college. I think that The experience of applying to college is much more stressful now than it was twenty five years ago for these kids who are competing to get into these top level schools And so I think when it's just like every waking moment is focus on this goal, You probably do ask yourself a lot more if the pomp and circumstance around that goal actually is true or not. You see this in all this polling data that I looked at, which is that like as far back as twenty ten, When people asked young people Is a four year degree really important? somewhere around seventy percent of people would say yes, right Last year when Pew and Gallop were both very reputable sources on all of this and who track it year to year. when they looked at it, it turned out that that number had fallen into the thirties, right? It had been halved. Yeah, that people are just not believing that this is a necessary thing to go through financially in terms of the effort and what it actually gives to you. Right. you know, mirroring that in twenty seventeen or so, maybe ten years ago, you had About seventy percent of people who graduated from high school would go on to some form of higher education. and that was a high watermark And over the last ten years, that number has dropped down to about sixty percent, right? And so you have the shift in the attitudes, which is showing somewhat up in the actual number of people who are attending college right now. And so I think that all of that reflects a much more I don't think cynical is the right word, although I think it's the one that first comes to mind, but I think the right word is maybe transparent and also knowledgeable understanding of what a college degree is actually going to confer to a lot of these kids And I think that as a result, some of them are choosing just not to do it. Why go into debt One of the things that I think about is that I When I finished college, I went and I got a master's degree fine arts, fiction writing, right? It cost a lot of money. And I went into a lot of debt because of it But at the time in two thousand two I wasn't really thinking about the debt that much. It wasn't because I could just afford it and write it off. It was just because like I felt like If I got this degree, it would better my life and that I would somehow be able to pay it off, even though like writing novels is not something that is generally supposed to pay that type of stuff off. Right, But whatever takes I'll pay it off, it was that no matter what, you never mion the value And now because of so much of the media, but also studies and academics and also politicians like Joe Biden talking about student debt so much, I think that people have a much better understanding of what student debt actually is. I think that's a positive thing, but I also think it is probably making some people choose not to pursue some of these degrees, whichich as we should say, is not necessarily A negative That's a healthy thing to start thinking about as humans and as a society, do we need this thing to be and to support ourselves over time. Right. I think that putting eighteen year olds into a lot of debt having inststitutions that might not be actually telling the truth about the amount of advantage that it's going to give to these kids Having the reality of the workplace for young people right now where I think that a lot of young people who have four year degrees are in jobs that don't require those four year degrees, right There's a new book that was put out a few months ago by Nem Schiber at The New York Times and it was about the organizing efforts at Starbucks and at Amazon and some of these places And what Nonome is writing about is that a lot of this is kicked off by people who got four year degrees at pretty fancy places and then found themselves working at an Amazon warehouse or at Starbucks or at a place where those are good jobs, but it's just a place. It is not what you expect that you will be doing when you graduate when you go into a four year degree. Yeah. Some of the discontent over the conditions and some of the idea like can we organize and get better conditions for us is pushed in part by young people who might have expected a better workplace for themselves. And so The macro stuff around higher education, I think is the thing that's pushing a lot of this stuff. you know, what I ended up concluding, even though the conceit of the set of columns was like, is AI going to make it so my daughter isn't going to college What I ended up finding is that all these macro factors are much more important in terms of finding that answer Let's bring up the elephant in the room, AI. I'm fascinated by what you just said. We should not overstress that AI is the big difference maker here. You're saying there are a lot of other forces at work that might have been at work before AI even came into the picture that are causing these sort of trends. Yeah. The biggest force out there is something that economists are calling the demographic cliff, right? And it is that Starting in two thousand eight with a financial crash, that the birth rate in America plummeted and it hasn't recovered. whichich means that they're much less eighteen year olds that are in the pipeline that would go to college and that there were before Now it's twenty twenty six and it means that those kids who weren't born in two thousand eight would be going to college this year, right? And so people have been thinking about this because obviously it's not like it was, you, the signal was raised a few years ago or even ten years ago that maybe this would be a problem Universities really haven't adjusted to the new reality because as I said before, they've had fifty years of growth. It's hard when you're just in a growth industry to then just say, well, maybe things will change. That's the number one macro factor. All the economic stuff obviously is very, very important. And what AI has done more than anything, I think that it's been said by a lot of people that AI more than anything is a mirror, right interact with the A when we think about the AI, it more reveals stuff about ourselellves And so What it's done is that it has been a very unflattering mirror for higher education Because it's exposed a lot of the problems that were there beforehand, right? Like now if look what? what comes to mind? Like if you look at the cheating thing, right? That's the biggest thing that people think about when they think about AI in college. It's like, well, why are all these kids cheating? Why is it so rampant? I ended up talking about twenty something professors about AI in their classrooms and every single one of them With a couple exceptions, even the ones that were bullish about what AI could produce were like it really sucks to have these kids cheat all the time And you had professors just pleading with students, right? Like I don't care What your grade is, like you have greatade inflation, your grade's going to be okay. R. Just I want you to learn. I want you to learn. Read this book and tell me what it did for you emotionally, right? Like I just want you to think about this. It's like one of the big questions in human existence and like just think about it. And a lot of students just wouldn't do it. And what does that reveal? Well, it just reveals that maybe The relationship that these students have to their college education is somehow broken. It's not about going there for learning about the world. It's not about like, you know, when I was in college I took a religion in class, I read the Bug of A Gita and it was very I was a bad student and I didn't go to that class very much. times that I went and I read that book, it was very transformative for me to think about the Bagaba Gita But that's because I went into the classroom thinking, well, I don't know, if I pay attention, maybe I'll learn stuff that'll change my brain and I'll be a different human being afterwards. And I think that what the cheating thing at least exposes is that for a lot of kids, it's much more mercenary. It's just I'm here to get this degree. And that the cheating scandal more than anything just sort of shows, well, if you can't get these kids to stop for their own good, then like what does that say about the reason why the kids are there? you know? And what does it say about the message? for your own good it means. Yeah, the fact that they're using AI, this tool says something more about them than the tool itself. Right, which is so interesting. and I mean, you talked about the professors are kind of desperately seeking ways to hold on to this Nostalgia, I hate to even use that word, but they're returning to blue books and oral exams. Like, did you come away thinking that teaching can successfully Aapt or or no Oh man, I mean, that's a tough question. The level of despair that I found amongst the professors was quite profound And you know, one of the professors wrote me, he's a drama teacher at Gramling State University which HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. You know, like he was talking about how it was so hard to get the kids his students to read August Wilson's fences and he gave them all these options, right? You can watch the movie that came out, you can read the play. J any way that you can intake this thing, please do it and we can talk about it, you know? And he just got AI summaries of the play. These are kids in a theater class, right? It's not like it's not like a boring class. It's like a class where you would hope that the students would participate. Now that doesn't mean that all of them are doing it, right? But it is students. I talk to Professors at flagship state universities, at Ivy League schools, community colleges, regional public universities everywhere. And it was completely consistent that a large, large number of students basically farming their educations out to the chat bots and I think that resting that away basically cannot happen until you ask the most fundamental question. And I don't know if the colleges are ready to ask this question, which is like why are we here? What are we doing? Like why do we exist right outside of a credentialing system that people do because they've done it in the past or because their parents did it or because employers want it, right? Like why are we here And when they can't answer that question, except,, well, you're going to go to some classes and then you'll get a better job then that students are just going to, I think, basically default and say, well, I can just kind of not do this thing, right? the classwor I don't value it that much because I feel like I'm here to get this degree because that's what I've been told. That's why I did all this competition in high school to get to this place And I just don't want to do it. It's almost like Bard will be. there're like, well, Id prefer not to, right? And I think that that's a really tough situation for a lot of professors to be in againain I think that for the students and also the faculty and the administration, like that fundamental question of why are we all here hasn't really been answered in a satisfying way I want to talk about some of the take homes that you have from kind of studying this. I mean, one, I think about you saying how AI is a mirror on kind of younger people today. Part of it is getting younger people to not you college and this experience is so, you know, mercenary and transactional, right? It's to encourage them to want something bigger, whether it's a four year degree or whether it's something else, but like if you're going to pay for this, if you're going to put a lot of money in, you know it's conversations between parents and and their kids to make sure that there's an understanding of the value. and you're not just going there to cheat and get a degree. Yeah, I just think that's very hard when college has become so competitive and cutthroat. Like how do you convince a person who starts resume building in the seventh or eighth grade, right? Like here in Cupertino California or down in Silicon Valley, you just have these intense intense competition among students So just get into these colleges. Can you get into UC Berkeley? Can you get into Harvard? Can you get into Stanford foral transactal competitiveness. Right. Your life is over, right? Like if you end up at like Davis, then like you're just never going to be able to access the elite, you're not going to work at a VC or whatever as in the way that you would if you went to Stanford, right It's just fundamentally true that people who go to these Ivy League schools have much better access to these prestige institutions than if they don't, right? And the kids are very aware of all of this stuff. I think that when you basically set this thing up as a credentialing system to get into the elites thenen how do you convince the kids that they should go and they should read the books and that they should think about the Trishna and Arjuna at the battlefield at the beginning of the Bg of A Gita and that's the point of college, right? Or that they should go to art history class and they should look at Buddhas and they should think about you know, how all life is suffering. These are all things that were important to me in college, right? Yeah. Like they're going to go and they're going to say, well, I want the best thing out of this. I heard about all these people who didn't get the job that they wanted coming out of college and now they're working at a Starbucks, right? And I don't want that for myself. And so I'm just going to be as transactional about this as possible. so when The value of the degree is dropping when the number of people are who are attending these schools is dropping when emmployers are starting to sort of calcify their elite credential funneling systems or their pathways into them I think that is really hard for everybody to think about it in any way except cynically because the system is cynical. so I don't know, seelling them like, Hey you know, there's a lot of people who have a lot of ideas about what college should look like now. and one of them, which I'm very Partial too is like, well what if we just had AI free school and we just read Ovid and we read Katalis and we read I don't know, Herodotus and the kids read. The Quran and they and they were like Fu or whatever. Yeah in a totally tech free zone. No cheating Right. No Yeah And the kids will learn the socratic method and they'll sit there and they'll be like, well, what is Western civilization? And they're like, what is Eastern civilization? And like you somebody tells me that's not the answer, but ye. But like the idea that that would be at scale, right? The idea that that could be something that lots of people did, I don't know. I think that's really difficult to sell. I mean, I'm a Lit nerd. I live in Berkeley, California. I work for the New Yorker And so if there's anybody who would be okay with their kids going to that type of college, it would be me But even I would be like, well, I don't know, I think we gotta get a little something else out of this college education. We need some guarantee And so yeah, I don't know. I just think it's very hard to break the cycle of this cynicism just because I think the cynicism is there because it's accurate. Did you I mean, you gave us a number of reflections in the last piece in your New Yorker series. any of them or positive and less cynical about higher Yes, I think that as knowledge O the idea of acquiring knowledge becomes flattened a little bit. And I think as a lot of these four year institutions start feeling a lot of pain from the enrollment cliff I think what will happen is that one of the big winners out of all of this will be community colleges. And the reason why I think that is because I think that, hey, people will be very aware of the high price of four year institutions. And as some of these places start to close because of the enrollment cliff, I think that a lot of the students will be funneled into community colleges. I think that community colleges also are much more flexible And they're much more used to dealing with economic disaster because they're always at a point where things are tight. And so I think they'll be more flexible moreore than four year institutions who might just say, like, we have all these donors, we have all this tradition. and what ends up happening is that they close within ten years, right And so I think that that's very positive. I think that having an expanded base of students who go to community colleges, some of whom transfer into four year institutions, some of who don't is actually a better model for higher education than what we have right now, which is a lot of expensive for your institutions The schools that are on the biggest chopping block, I don't mean to offend anybody, but like as you can imagine, as enrollments go down and things get tight are these four year institutions private institutions that don't necessarily have a very high academic reputation, right I think those types of schools, closing is not the worst thing in the world. I don't think a hundred thousand or eighty thousand, seventy thousand year private institution that doesn't really bring that much to the table. L I don't think that that's the worst thing for that type of place to close. And if those types students who go to those schools end up at for your regional public institutions that are much cheaper if they end up at community colleges and transfer into for your institutions, I think that's probably better for society than just having this like marass of expensive higher education universities. Given all of that, you can probably predict my oming f circle question. Are you Your daughter thirty five is when she'd be going to school How do you feel about that college fund? You're gonna keepb? Yeah, I'm gonna keep contributing to it. Because I think that I would feel worse if you know she wants to go to for your institution. I don't have the money saved up. So it's mostly a defensive measure, but I will say this that I think compared to my own childhood where it was not on the table for me to to not go to college, even though I feel like I mean I don't know yet, but you know I would say if I'm going to predict things, I was much more rebellious than I think she is. and I was much more of a live option to not go to college than she was just because I had a rough time in high school And I also was quite rebellious and I was not interested in going to college at all I would say that if she came to me and said, I don't want to go to school, I'd be much more open to it than my parents were for me. And I think that that's not any specific thing. I just think that if you take the generational averages of sentiments about parents being okay with their kids not going to college, I think in twenty thirty five. There will be much, much more parents. whoose kids could go to foreign institutions who decide not to, who will be okay with that than there were in nineteen ninety eight I mean, maybe this, as you said, is a moment for everyone, all of us, parents, you know, students who are thinking about it and the colleges themselves to just be asking the question, like what is the value? What is the purpose of this and is it necessary? Right. And if we can't answer that question thenen should we keep badgering people and bludgeoning people with this cultural message that if you don't go, you're screwed. You know st's not going like you right It's okay. Yeah. Is that a responsible way for us to think about things when we know it's not true? There are colleges all around the country right now that are under intense financial pressure that are probably going to close And I think that because of that that there is a intense defensiveness and higher education that I understand I don't think that that defensiveness can just be everybody still needs to go to college when it It's very obvious that not everybody still needs to go to college And I think that the more the universities protest You know, we're at a time of intense like anti higher education, anti institutional thinking in this country, the more they protest The less effective that message will be, and I think it'll fall in more and more deaf ears as it goes forward. Jay, thanks for writing this, and thanks for this curiosity journey for all of us. and I really appreciate talking to us. Thank you We'll include a link to Jay Caspian Kang's piece eightight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education on our show notes page. 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