- [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) (gong rings) - Hello, and welcome to "The City Club of Cleveland" where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, Chief Executive here and a proud member.

Today's February 5th.

And we are once again live from the studios of our public media partner 90.3 WCPN and we're deeply grateful to their partnership and support.

In the United States, higher education continues to play a critical role for many who wish to realize the American dream.

Here in America, we wanna believe that college education is the great equalizer that everyone, regardless of race, class, background can attend the college of their choice, succeed in that college and afterwards, experience find an experience with a good job, upward mobility and ultimately, financial security.

Unfortunately, the reality is much different.

Facing increased costs, decreased state funding, changing student demographics, many colleges and universities have increased tuition and fees in the last few years.

And that was even before, that was just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The changes have affected low income minority and first-generation college students the most, creating a system many researchers believe reinforces the very obstacles and structures of inequity that higher education claims to remedy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded us the opportunity to rethink existing social structures and identify inequalities and work to dismantle those inequalities.

So today, a conversation about this question; what should be done now if higher education is ever to meet its own aspirations as a beacon of opportunity?

Let me introduce our City Club Friday Forum speakers.

Dr. Anthony Carnevale is the director of research.

And I'm sorry, he's the director and research professor at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

He's also one of the co-authors of "The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America."

Dr. Carnevale has spent his career working at the intersection of education and employment policy.

Also with us, Victoria Jackson, she's senior policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a partisan research and policy institute that pursues federal and state policies designed both to reduce poverty and inequality.

In her role, she works with the state fiscal policy team focusing on K-12 and higher ed issues.

Clevelanders of course may remember her from her previous role at Policy Matters Ohio.

If you have questions for either of our speakers or about this topic in general text those questions to 330-541-5794.

The number again for your texting is 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your questions @TheCityClub and we will work them into the program.

Tony Carnevale, Victoria Jackson, welcome to "The City Club of Cleveland".

- [Tony] Hello.

- It's wonderful to have you both with us.

- [Victoria] Hi.

- Hello, Victoria.

I wanna ask you both to describe the state of higher ed today with respect to inequities.

Victoria Jackson, can we start with you?

- [Victoria] Sure.

I think what we've seen is that over the past several decades, we've moved away from this idea of higher education as this public good.

And so we've seen there's a steep decline in state funding for public higher ed.

And what that means is that states are then shifting those costs onto students, making it more difficult for students to access and complete their educations.

And at the same time, that that increasing costs and decline in state funding was happening, higher ed was also becoming more diverse.

And so when we look at sort of over the past decade or so, what we see is there's like these deep declines, largely from the recession for higher education.

If we look specifically at Ohio, when we look at from 2008 to 2018, the State of Ohio was spending 16.9% less on student fund, on per student funding, which is about $1,200 per year.

And then we look at who was affected by these costs.

And we look at the overall cost of college and we look at something called net price, which takes in the cost of tuition and cost of like books, housing, et cetera.

Overall in the State of Ohio, that costs about 31% of the typical families' annual income But when we look at black students, that's 52% of family income.

LatinX students, it's 41% of family income compared to 29% for white families.

And so what we see is that these, the burden of college costs is really heavy on black and brown students and their families.

And so that contributes to some of the inequities.

- Victoria Jackson is senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Tony Carnevale of Georgetown University is also with us as well.

Tony, how do you see it?

- [Tony] There's an historical dimension to this.

In the 1970s, higher education didn't really matter very much that is in the '70s.

And people in Ohio know this well.

In the '70s, a good 60% of good jobs, jobs that nowadays would pay about 65 grand a year, a minimum of 65 grand a year, went to people with high school degrees and even dropouts, that is you could get in at Chrysler and get in the union.

You'd be doing fine, a lot better than school teachers and a lot of people with college degrees, except doctors and lawyers.

So there is a fundamental shift.

And with that shift towards college requirements or post-secondary and training requirements in roughly 75% of the jobs now, if you're gonna get a good job, about 20% of high school kids can get a good job.

And those are virtually all boys that are living off the old industrial economy still.

But since the mid-1980s, there's been an increase in earnings inequality in America.

And 70% of that increase is due to differences in access, to post-secondary education and training.

So it is the new barrier.

It is now part of the problem.

- Tony Carnevale, you're a coauthor of a book called "The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America."

So talk to us a little bit about that title and about what your research says about the merit myth and how our colleges are favoring the rich.

- [Tony] Well, one statistic that I think tells the whole story is that if we track young people from kindergarten now through age 30, and what you see when you do that is that if you are in the upper half of the test score distribution, using IQ tests and other tests, but you come from a family family in the bottom 25% of the income distribution, family income distribution, you've got about a 30% chance of making it to a good job by age 28.

On the other hand, which is good news.

30% of people who start out way behind actually make it but the bad news or the contrary news is that if you're a young person who is in the bottom half of the IQ test scores, education test scores, you have a 70% chance of making it to a good job by the time you're age 28.

That tells you something's rotten in Denmark.

That is people who are born to win, get schooled to lose.

People who were born to win do well.

And it, it proves that in America now more than ever, it's better to be rich than smart.

- Better to be rich than smart is sort of devastating, a devastating indictment.

In the end, I mean, this is, you know, for most of the second latter half of the 20th century, and for the last two decades, there've been people who have been working in institutions, working very hard to rectify this, providing different kinds of financial aid, changing the way that Pell Grants work, changing the SAT and the ACT tests to make them more equitable.

Have they all failed, Victoria Jackson?

- [Victoria] I wouldn't say they've all failed but they certainly haven't achieved equity or, you know moved us far enough in the right direction.

I think one of the things is we're always sort of, we know things that work, we know that colleges need more funding.

We know that need-based aid works.

We know that academic supports work.

We know that providing people with, you know, if they need food, providing them with food works.

And we have evidence-based programs that do that.

So the CUNY ASAP program is a community college program.

They provide students with intensive advising, transportation costs, additional financial aid, et cetera.

That improves community college graduation rates from around 20% to over 50%.

And that's a New York's city program for the CUNY ASAP program.

And that's also been replicated here in the State of Ohio at Tri-C Lorain County Community College and then Cincinnati State and Technical Community College.

And they've gotten similar results.

And so we know all of the things that work and we really just need funding to make them happen.

What we see is like, you know sort of what Tony mentioned is money.

If you're born rich, that's about money.

And then also we know that outcomes, When we think about what colleges and state policy can do and federal policy can do is also about money.

So it's about investing where we know things work 'cause we know we can get the outcomes we're looking for when we invest and target those resources appropriately.

- Tony Carnevale one of the areas that you target for criticism is the role of merit aid in college admissions.

This is aid that is not linked to need but nor is it usually actually cash.

It's just sort of a discount that colleges that are incredibly expensive most of them, many of them, upwards of 60 $70,000 a year net price are sort of just knocking off thousands of dollars to entice students who otherwise could probably stretch to afford it.

- [Tony] Merit aid is a scam.

It's not about merit at all.

It's about the business model in higher education which is one of the reasons this is so hard to fix.

In truth, people in higher education are no nicer, nicer or nastier than any of the rest of us, but their business model militates strongly against racial and economic justice.

That is if you're running a college, the general model is you get as many full paying students as you can.

And if you're very lucky, it's 30, 40, 50%.

And then what you do, you start competing.

And a lot of those are foreign students.

They're out of state students.

If you're a public college who pay higher to pay out of state students pay higher tuition, then you gotta, then you start competing with all the other colleges in your competitive band and the way you do that, and we all know this story is parents get in cars and on planes and travel around America, visiting colleges looking for the one that's best for their child.

And in the end, they end up in the financial aid office and to see what kind of deal they can get.

So if you're an elite college, if you're a View VA, you worry about Brown 'cause they're gonna get an offer from either place.

So in the end, merit aid is just a way to fill out your budget.

Now, generally, if you're a healthy institution, any college president will tell you if merit aid starts to exceed 50% of your revenue, you're in trouble, you're on the way down.

But in the end, the way the model works is you end up with maybe five to 10% of your seats where you can really focus on the need of the student so that if you look at the top 500 colleges in America by ranking, 5% of the students at those colleges come from the bottom 25th percent of American families.

They really can't afford more and that's true for many colleges.

It's easy to say, do more but the presidents and I've been involved with a lot of them, they will tell you then I've got to take money out of merit aid.

And if I give a full scholarship to a poor kid, I've got to take away merit aid from 10 students.

So it's not in...

So the burden on them, and there are those that try mightily here, is they gotta go raise more money if they're gonna have more lower income students and especially now, especially now that's not happening.

- Tony Carnevale is the co-author of "The Merit myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America."

He's also director of Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce, Center on Education and the Workforce.

Victoria Jackson is also with us.

She's a senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And we're talking today about whether higher education can become the engine of equality that it aspires to be.

It's your City Club Friday Forum.

If you have a question about the topic, text it to 330-541-5794.

The number again is 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet it @TheCityClub and we will work it into the program.

This idea of the business model, Tony Carnevale is really I mean, people forget that colleges whether they are public colleges or private colleges are essentially businesses.

Although that fact has become apparent as some have not been able to stay open in recent years and have been particularly crushed by the pandemic.

- [Tony] Yeah, that's right.

I mean, in the pandemic is just the beginning.

The pandemic is a devastating blow because it blows up the business model.

- You can... - Does it need blowing up?

Does it need disruption?

- [Tony] Blowing it up, I get that question often.

And my answer for that is we wanna fix the system.

We don't wanna destroy it because if we destroy it, we're gonna hurt a lot of kids.

And we're in a place at the moment where a demography over the next 15 years or so is gonna reduce the size of the college age population.

And more and more of that population will come from poor kids.

So overstated a little bit.

At the same time, however- - That's because the populate, we're going through like sort of a population lull, a kind of a valley?

- [Tony] The young Americans, and it's not easy anymore to be a young American, have been through three profound recessions now.

That has increased the age at which women have children.

Some people think the women will have more children sooner when the economy recovers.

Most people who studied this don't believe that for a minute.

Women aren't that stupid.

So, you know, this is something that's going to happen as we go forward.

Fewer college kids, kids with less money, their parents have less money and their parents didn't go to college.

So this is a pocket.

And at the same time, we're gonna have more and more rich kids.

So if you're a selective school, your market grows and you become more selective or you expand if you can.

If you're a non-selective school, you're in deep trouble.

- And many, and some have been acquired, some have simply shut down and some are just sort of looking at their budget projections and trembling.

Victoria Jackson, when you look at this and you mentioned the CUNY ASAP program, that's the City University of New York's program for advancing students.

What other solutions do you see or other models do you see that ought to be brought to bear?

- [Victoria] Yeah, I think generally, all of the programs out there sort of follow a similar model.

They follow the things that work.

So it's increased financial aid, it's intrusive academic supports but also from a policy standpoint, it's really about ensuring that institutions have the resources to implement these things.

So it's, you know, for the upcoming fiscal year, two fiscal years in Ohio, state sheriff instruction has barely increased.

It's largely flat.

And when you adjust for inflation, it's not increasing.

And so we're in this continual point where we want institutions to do more with less.

I mentioned earlier over time they're spending less per student.

And so we can't get better outcomes when we're sort of squeezing institutions and then expecting them to sort of help students get to graduation.

- In thinking about all of this, I mean this week there was a push by some in Congress to encourage President Biden to reduce college debt.

College debt is a huge part of this problem, the unwillingness or the discouraging nature of like taking on, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans.

Tony Carnevale, is there a solution in the kinds of proposals that the President Biden is considering and Senator Sanders, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is certainly encouraging?

- [Tony] Well, one of the ways to look at this is that free college whatever that means, it means different things to different people is now a permanent plank in the Democratic Party platform.

The Democrats, as they deserted the working class, especially the white working class that went over to Donald Trump, black working class, Latino working class had nowhere else to go but the Democratic Party.

But as the Democrats deserted the white working class, they became the party of college graduates.

That's why Bernie Sanders was not stupid when he brought up free college.

Hillary Clinton had to whether she liked it or not.

And then Elizabeth Warren had to if she was gonna take center left in the Democratic party and now Joe Biden has to be for it.

So it's not going away.

It could be the shot in the arm that saves a lot of these colleges especially if it focuses, as his program does and as most of them do, on kids who come from families that are not rich, families that make less than 125 grand a year in his case.

The question is will the votes be there for that?

And that remains an open question.

- Among the many remedies that you suggest is a suggestion that we ought to end the over-reliance on the SAT and the ACT, because you say that GPA has been shown to be a better predictor of academic success.

There's been a huge movement, particularly in this year towards test optional admissions, allowing students to apply to schools without reporting their test results.

It seems to me, when I look at this, and I'm not disinterested, I should say, like I have a high school sophomore at home right now and these are conversations we have often.

But when I look at this, it looks as if my sophomore may have to take the SAT and the ACT.

But my eighth grader probably won't.

- [Tony] So there is a, if you're at Yale or Harvard, you don't care about money.

You could run the college on the interest rate from 1/10 of the property owned.

But for the rest of the institutions, they need money.

So the preferred student is always the kid who can pay the tuition.

So when you take away the SAT, what happens then?

And we know this from research is more rich kids get in.

So the SAT is a terrible instrument to this and I used to be vice president of the operation that made and sold the SAT.

It is an instrument that is way overused.

If you get a score of a thousand which is roughly the average on the SAT or 22 on the ACT which I think is the equivalent, you have about an 80% chance of graduating from one of the top 500 colleges.

You're not gonna get into any of them because they're competing for prestige based on test scores.

So they way overused test scores.

They're not that stronger predictive of college success a holistic admission if done properly, but again holistic admissions begins with a budget target.

And that's what really drives this.

A lot of the things like California gets rid of the SAT.

That's kind of a feel good thing.

They're still gonna have to find the money to run the institutions.

- So when you say, find the money and you talk about the business model being a driver of the problem, it doesn't sound like there's much other solutions other than creating public systems to fund colleges and universities.

- [Tony] Correct.

And we're headed down that road one way or another.

College is in cahoots with the economy.

It drives lifetime opportunity.

If we're gonna have anything like equal opportunity, government is gonna have to get a lot more involved, not less involved with college, not necessarily to tell colleges what to teach, but where we're headed is for a system where colleges are gonna have to have to compete on the basis of their outcomes, one of which is already in legislation already out there.

And that is, does the program you're in, not the school you're in, the program you're in gets you a job and a decent wage?

At a minimum, all colleges are gonna be required fairly soon to be transparent.

So any kid who decides to major in economics they're gonna be told what happened to all the other kids who majored in economics, whether they got a job and how much money they made.

They make up their own minds.

If it's a training program, very narrow which they're gonna be a lot more of over the next few years, if it's a program for heating, ventilation and air conditioning, the government's going to wanna know that the value returned to the student that is the earnings in the job were worth the money the government paid, or the student paid.

- Victoria Jackson.

What Tony Carnevale is describing, reminds me of the move in K-12 towards measuring, towards the value added measurements that have been used in recent years in trying to better understand test scores from school to school or year to year to year.

- [Victoria] Yeah, I mean, it sounds similar to that.

And I think there's a move to, you know judge schools based on performance.

Ohio has a hundred percent performance funding system.

I think, but one of the things I just want to make sure that we sort of cover here is just that, you know, we've talked a lot of time about alluding to like highly selective institutions and sort of like the elite colleges but most people attend public institutions, most people are not attending highly selective institutions.

And one of the things we know is that those open access public institutions they aren't receiving the same amount of funding that like flagship institutions, like Ohio state are spending per student.

And I'm certainly not spending like what Yale is spending on per student.

So it's ensuring that all of the institutions, you know like students who are going to the University of Toledo or going to Wright State also need to have educations that cover all of the things that they need.

And if there's funding for that as well, I think before we move to a fully going on performance we actually have to reach a place of actually foundationally funding colleges in a way that actually meet the needs of students.

Before we go to performance we need to make sure that institutions have the things, the resources that are necessary that we know help them succeed to be if we have the career, you know, programs.

So they have the correct classes and all of the extra supports.

And can they, you know, have they switched from going from merit, lots of merit aid to need based?

These are all performance things, right?

That should be included in what your performance looks like.

You know, if you're over emphasizing merit over need-based they then like that should impact what your performance is looking like.

So I think fundamentally we have to get to a baseline of actually providing equitable funding before we fully go to performance place.

- Victoria Jackson is senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Victoria, you've said, you know we hadn't really surfaced that issue yet.

Another thing strangely that we haven't surfaced yet is the disproportionate impact of all of this policy and inequity on young people who are black and brown.

- [Victoria] Right.

So we have, you know, there are access issues.

So just being able to start there are issues with completion.

And then we were sort of talking about on the outcomes front, when we look at what we expect people to get from higher education.

We see that with debt, there are worse outcomes for black and brown people that are specific, particularly black students have particular difficulty with debt that goes beyond just thinking, oh are the students lower income or did they not complete?

'Cause when we look at black students who are first-time full-time students who come from the highest income Quintiles and attend four year schools, their default rates on their loans are higher than the lowest income white students.

So looking at white students who have a family income of about $15,000 per year, compared to black students who have a family income of about $130,000 a year, their default rates are seven times higher.

And then we look solely at the State of Ohio.

When we look at debts owed to public colleges and universities, Ohio's quite punitive in how that debt is collected.

So if you didn't pay back a library fine or a parking ticket in the State of Ohio that money will then go to the Attorney General's office.

And then they will collect on that money.

And they have 40 years to collect.

And some people, you know, they've 10 years down the road they're collecting that debt.

What started as $250 fees and other interest has been tacked on and now they owe $2,000.

And so that's one of those outcomes that we're seeing.

We see a racially disparate outcome there that is really concerning.

And there are things that can be done to address that.

Not all can be done within higher ed to address that either.

- No, these are, I mean these issues that you described are reminders that higher ed operates inside of the context of a broader society, which itself reinforces inequities.

Before we move to questions from our viewing and listening audience, I just wanted to quickly run through Tony Carnevale the other recommendations for remedies that you offer.

We spoke about the over-reliance on SATs.

Halting legacy admissions seems self-explanatory.

20% low-income students and Pell Grant recipients at every college is also similarly self-explanatory and you just spoke about outputs.

You also say that we should treat high school college and careers as a single system.

What do you mean by that?

- [Tony] We've had roughly since 1983, the longest wave of education reform, and arguably, some people say in American history.

We started with 'A Nation at Risk", a report that said American schools are not up to snuff.

So we took K-12 education and said everybody's got to get a good academic education.

We used test scores too soon to use jobs.

So what is happening now, what everybody agrees with, and none of us quite know how to do it, is that the truth is that if you're gonna get a good job by age 28, it begins with pre-school.

This issue is systemic so that in the end, there's a critical juncture on labor market outcomes, which is middle school.

People in middle school need to learn about occupations.

You don't wanna track anybody into an occupation which is what we used to do.

And then in high school, you need internships.

And in college, it needs to get much more serious about occupations and where people will work.

The only thing in my mind that ties all of that together is counseling.

There is no counseling system in America that does this where bereft of career counseling first of all, and most other kinds of counseling and student services.

It's the missing link in all of this that at some point, I suspect there are a lot of private institutions, Google who want to get in this business because the data is gonna be there to do this within the next three or four years.

But it's no longer about fixing K-12 'cause what happens then is you get 40% of the kids that don't go any further.

It's not all about fixing higher education because we have no outcome standards for that system.

It's sort of a huge computer with no operating system.

And in the end, it's about connecting the dots truthfully all the way back to preschool.

- It's interesting that you mentioned pre-school.

Last week, the importance of early childhood education came up again in a conversation specifically about access to education generally, but it is a reminder, and as a former high school teacher, and as a former journalist who's covered this issue, I'm reminded again and again, that you'd never move away from the importance of early childhood education.

It is really the foundation of so much.

We're talking with Tony Carnevale.

He's the director of Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, also co-author of a book called "The Merit Myth", and I would also commend to you and our listening audience, too that he's done some very interesting research, he and his colleagues on the ROI, the return on investment of college of the cost of tuition and the time of college that I would encourage you to take a look at.

Victoria Jackson is also with us.

She's a senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And I'm Dan Moulthrop.

You're with The City Club Friday Forum.

We're moving to questions from all of you.

If you have a question, you can text it to 330-541-5794 or tweet it @TheCityClub, and we will work it into the program.

The question that we didn't even get to that is so basic, Tony Carnevale why is college so expensive?

Where are these increases in costs going?

- [Tony] Well, we don't know.

- What?

- First of all, college... - [Dan] How can we not know?

- [Tony] We know that we're spending more and more on administration, more and more in every part of the budget, but here's the point.

There is no natural predictor in the higher education industry.

There's no competition.

So what you do with college is the more expensive it is, like a car, you assume the better it is.

So you write the check and you pray.

And the more expensive it is, the more likely it'll work out for your kid.

So there are issues like a legislator from New York said to me, some months ago in frustration, "Why do we have 30 places in New York, in public colleges where you can major in English?

Why don't we have 10?

And all the kids who need English to get their B.A.

can take courses online from those 10.

The others who wanna major in English and go there."

There's a huge efficiency problem in higher education.

It really, it along with healthcare, higher education in general are the two least sufficient industries in the American economic system.

- It's interesting that you say that and that you bring up that example.

The University of Akron recently, Victoria Jackson, I think you've probably tracked this at the at the University of Akron when they, I believe that they ended their history department, sort of recognizing that they can't do, provide everything to everybody?

- [Victoria] Yeah, I think so from when I look at the public system overall and if we look over time, you can start looking at 1980.

If you track just from that and you track recessions, every time there's a recession there's a decline in state funding for higher education.

And after that recession, you see a little bit of recovery.

There's an increase in the share that school fund college funding is coming from tuition.

So one of the things we know that is driving public institution increases in tuition is the decline in state funding for those institutions.

And that is increasing the share of funding going to that is coming from directly from tuition which is coming directly from students.

So that's one of the big drivers in the public system for costs.

- Victoria Jackson, another question for you.

Several years ago, the Ohio legislature mandated public high schools to implement college credit plus offerings to help offset the cost of higher ed and allow students early access to those course offerings.

No direct cost to families for students taking these classes while in high school, although it is an unfunded mandate to public districts.

Are we seeing that this is actually helping students attend college?

As a result, are there more college graduates now?

- [Victoria] I can't speak directly to the data on outcomes but what I will say about college credit plus is it's, not to be crass, but it's like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And I think fundamentally when we're looking at college costs for students and families, it doesn't necessarily address all them.

It will reduce your overall cost for getting the bachelor's degree or the associate's degree.

We'll have the bachelor's degree but if you still can't afford to attend the institution you know, maybe you have two years of credit when you graduated from high school.

If you still can't afford to go to Ohio University, because there's not enough need-based aid in OCOG And we know, OCOG has significantly declined since its peak in 2008.

- [Dan] What is OCOG?

- [Victoria] OCOG is the Ohio College Opportunity Grant.

And in 2008, it was funded at $223 million a year.

And I think like right now, it's about 108 million, give or take for the next fiscal years or so.

And so if that is stopping you from going, it's great if you have those credits but if you can't continue on because you know college costs are still too high, then we have a problem.

And yeah, so, if you want some to look at.

- Tony.

Okay, Victoria Jackson, thank you very much.

Victoria Jackson, Senior Policy Analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Tony Carnevale a question for you.

How do athletic scholarships play into these inequities?

- [Tony] One of the things about athletics in college that is I only learned in the last decade or so, is in the end, it's part of the sale.

Me included, a lot of people go to college so they can play sports.

And you've got to go to a college where you might play to my case was one that didn't have very good teams.

So the college is part of the deal.

Now there are colleges that make money on sports.

In general, that money supports what are essentially professional athletes so that part of the package, every college it's the cafeteria model of college.

If anything new comes along, you got to get one.

If suddenly people are playing pool competitively, you got to get a pool theme.

So it's like the supermarket model of college.

There's no efficiency in that.

That is everybody has to have everything including sports for students who wanna play sports.

A lot of colleges, if they didn't offer sports programs would go out of business.

- Do the athletic scholarships though, going as they do to both students of color and white students, is it basically a wash when it comes to addressing inequities or does it just sort of mirror the existing inequities?

- [Tony] In the case of money-making sports, which are football and basketball, principally, what's happening is you're paying extremely low wages to people who are worth 20 and 30 times what they get in a college scholarship.

They are a source of revenue now in all the other sports, table tennis, lacrosse, all the rest of it, that costs money, but it's part of the draw.

If you've got to have a lacrosse team because there are a lot of people that want to play lacrosse and can't play.

I don't even know if there is professional lacrosse, but there is no professional league.

I mean, you're not gonna so, or the kid who wants to play football, but he's only 180 pounds like me.

So and slows.

So, you know, there is a, it's part of the package.

So in cases it is largely an expense.

It is an expense that draws largely interestingly on white people, not minorities.

The money-making sports draw on African-Americans and others who are basically playing pre-professional sports and not getting paid.

- Next week, Tony Carnevale we'll have you back to discuss your football career.

But right now, Victoria Jackson regarding free college, wouldn't it make sense for college to be free for the first two years at a community college?

What do we know about the potential impact of such a policy?

- [Victoria] Yeah, so one of the, so there are a lot of free college models and one of the important things to think about free colleges, how it's designed and how it's designed it matters then who benefits primarily from the program.

Currently, the way most first dollar programs are designed is that they're what is called last dollar, Meaning after you get the federal Pell Grant, which is a need-based aid grant and maybe other aid, then your free college aid would be applied to your tuition and other costs.

And so for low income students, the Pell Grant in most places covers the full cost of tuition at a community college.

But that tuition at a community college is usually only about 20% of full costs, whereas 80% of costs go to other things that you also need to be a student.

And so what ends up happening is that free college programs end up benefiting primarily like middle income students.

And then it doesn't really help the students, who aid for college is the make or break and whether or not they attend school.

And so then ends up being one of the issues.

And so you can better design free college programs and the aid is targeted to the students, you know.

If they get the money or don't will return whether they enroll or not.

And then I think when it comes to, you know, should community college be free, should we seriously be looking at, you know really low tuition and free college or debt free college for low income people and affordable college for all I think those are important things to consider and it's not like that is something we've never done before.

- Well, and beyond what we think of as the cost of college being tuition room and board say, or just tuition when you're beyond the first year of college when you're no longer sort of required, when students aren't if they're at residential schools to live on campus, there's textbooks which can cost as much as five or $600 for one single textbook in one course.

- [Victoria] Yeah.

And so it's important to think about those non tuition costs.

Like you mentioned, you know, there's transportation, there's computers, there's internet.

You mentioned room and board but it's also important to think about that.

Today's student isn't just that like right out of high school, you know, still sort of dependent on their parents student.

Today's student, you know, is working full time.

They have children, there are other costs that they need to consider.

And so being able to support those students also, and also the right out of high school students, as we know that students are also a greater share in becoming our low income, we need to be able to make sure that we think about financial aid in a way that encompasses those other costs.

And so for the Ohio College Opportunity Grant, which is the state's only need-based aid grant and policy improvement there would be to make it first dollar and it would improve the policy and solve a lot of issues with that grant.

- Tony Carnevale, you mentioned before the importance of externships and internships and connecting students to career opportunities and career pathways, and just information about careers.

What exactly can colleges do to improve counseling so students make better choices in selecting their own career path?

- [Tony] Well, first of all, they said, do some 'cause they don't do any.

Every college in Ohio, the State of Ohio knows for any student who ends up working in Ohio knows the program they went to in college, knows whether they're employed and how much money they're making.

I'm willing to bet, and I bet I'm right, that no college in Ohio tells that to the students when they sign up for those majors.

The government's gonna have to step in and say you've gotta do that.

There's gotta be transparency.

But the other thing to keep in mind here with respect to first dollar, again, I wanna emphasize what's being said, and that is what the Biden plan and others that the better idea is free college means free tuition and, and... - Nope, we just lost you there for a second, Tony.

As we- - [Tony] What should happen then is- you should... - Hold on Tony Carnevale, just if you'd go back just to- - [Tony] Free college means a free college should- - [Dan] No, we can hear you now.

Just make sure.

- Oh, sorry.

- I just wanted you to restart where you were.

- [Tony] Free college should be.

What free college should be is the government depending on your income, family income.

We'll pay for tuition fees and the actual costs of what we think of as the cost of college.

You use your Pell Grant and any aid to pay the other stuff.

That is the more progressive version of this idea.

And one that'll work, because it is exactly right.

If you do it otherwise, you're gonna be sending more and more middle-class kids to college fewer and fewer poor kids.

And one other thing - Tony!

- [Tony] I wanted to say and that is in the end, if we get free community college which we have in a lot of states already, basically.

So it's cheaper.

I think it's only 12 billion federal dollars whereas free college altogether is 50 billion.

So it's kind of the sweet spot in the political debate, cause it's cheaper.

So in the end, if you do that though you're gonna have a huge problem because we're already tracking by race and class between two-year colleges and four-year colleges essentially white Americans, there was white flight from the city to the suburbs and the good and free and housing from FHA and VA loans.

And those kids then got good K-12 educations.

And then in the '80s, when you needed college there was white flight to the colleges.

They are way ahead in the game.

So if you do free community college you're gonna get a lot of pushback from African-American, Latino and other groups because what you're basically saying then is two more years, two years of college is good enough for those people.

So you're gonna have to do things like, and I'm not sure if Ohio does this.

In 25 States now, two-year schools are allowed to give bachelor's degrees that will help.

And then in any public institution, my bias is that at least 20% in the enrollment in four-year public colleges has to be community college transfers.

That way you build a bridge between the institutions.

You melt the boundaries.

- Victoria Jackson when the idea of free college comes up, many look to Europe as a model where many nations provide for your education or had a bachelor's degree for free.

What do we know about the effectiveness there?

- [Victoria] I think the point that Tony just made is something that comes up often as the idea of tracking.

There that I think like people will mention Germany.

I think they sort of will start students in a track that's more of a technical training track earlier on.

And then some people are more like a university track.

I think, you know, looking to Europe is fine.

One of the things that I would say and from my perspective at policy matters is one of the things is they have higher rates of taxation and they have greater supports for their institutions.

It's one of the ways that they're able to be more affordable.

And so I think, you know Policy Matters did a report on equitable free college and emphasized the need for any proposal like that to include public four-year institutions and to cover, you know, to make it debt-free.

So it is a first dollar grant that allows that those the additional aid to cover those other non-tuition costs.

But I think, you know, we know already what can be done and designed here in the United States, you know lots of people have modeled it and thought about it and proposed things.

So I think it's really just about the will of policymakers to implement these things and to fund them.

So then we can have a higher education system that's more equitable.

- Victoria Jackson is with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, formerly of Policy Matters Ohio.

Tony Carnevale is with us as well from Georgetown University.

Tony, is there any incentive for elite schools to diversify their student populations?

It would seem that donors and legacy families have an incentive to keep elite schools elite to protect their own self-interests and ensure their own children's success and keep the circle of privileged small perpetuating the cycle of economic and social inequality that already exists.

Do we really think that we can change this reality, asks a listener?

- [Tony] Well, we've built a system and now education is a big part of it.

Arguably the major part that's new since the '80s where we take the inequality that begins in preschools, we take the inequality that then grows in K-12 education.

We then project that inequality into higher education, through selectivity.

And then we push it out into the labor market where the white and privileged get good jobs and the cycle starts all over again.

They move into neighborhoods with good schools and the data shows that this has begun to accelerate in America since the '90s, that is we're reproducing race and class privilege now and we're doing it systemically.

That is you can't blame people's motivations although they're there, but it's institutionalized now.

And the good news in that is you can do something about institutions to the extent they're public.

There are a lot of privates including the one I'm in where people would love to do more with less advantaged kids.

They can only do so much more.

The general number that floats around is it would be nice if every selective college reserved 15% of its seats for less advantaged kids.

That's one of the things that's coming up in the dialogue on free college.

So I think the, no, the private colleges will continue.

People, we know from the admission scandal that people will pay God knows how much money, millions have hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the right sweatshirt with the right brand logo, and to be able to put the college sticker on the back of their car.

There are no limits to people's willingness to pay for that.

And that's fine.

Let them do that if that's the way if they wanna spend their money.

I think the real issue for us is the quality of the public system.

- This is a very practical question.

We've been speaking very much at a higher sort of policy level and with an eye towards the future and how future policy might be implemented and might have an impact.

This question though asks, takes a more personal approach.

Without more money infused into any part of the system because it does not seem like it's going to happen, what should poor and lower income and middle school families do to prepare for their children's future?

What's your best advice?

You've looked at the system more than almost anybody.

So if you were giving advice to a friend who had a middle schooler right now, how would you tell them to, how would you advise them to game the system for themselves?

- [Tony] Well, there's only so much gaming they can do because the tracking and the system is strong and getting stronger.

The Supreme Court in 1973, we had Brown v. The Board of Education which seemed to be opening the way to the idea that education was important and was a right of American citizens.

Brown basically said that in my judgment.

Then there was Rodriguez in Rodriguez v. San Antonio in 1973.

I was part, I was one of the people who brought that case and we thought we were gonna win.

We want to equalize spending across jurisdictions.

We thought we would win because we were coming on the tail of Brown.

By the time we got to the Supreme Court, Richard Nixon had appointed four more justices.

We lost.

And that basically slammed the door on need-based spending in K-12 education.

And then a few years later, there was Milliken v. Bradley where the Supreme Court basically, once the door was slammed, they nailed it shut.

And they said even within districts that are next to each other, you have no right to demand equality.

So there is a big issue here in K-12.

I think the answer there frankly, is we need to sue them.

That is that they're all promising to make all students college and career ready.

Every legislature has that rhetoric and its laws.

They should be sued because they're not doing it.

- Victoria Jackson, the State of Ohio has been sued a number of times regarding education funding, to little effect although there is a proposal, there was a proposal in the lame duck that is being revived in the current legislative session that may address some of this.

But I wanna come back to the listeners' specific question about advice for parents of middle school students, black and brown middle school students who are seeking to better prepare their own children to actually succeed and get through a system that is kind of rigged against them.

- [Victoria] Yeah.

So I used to do college access advising with College Now Greater Cleveland.

And, you know, I think normally my answer to a question like this is that those are individual solutions to structural problems but my advice would be obviously like an emphasis, like gaming it would be to get as much merit aid as you can or getting into the schools that will provide you with significant amounts of need-based aid just once you get there or to have those income requirements where it's like if you make under $100,000 a year it's free, which is typically like the elite institutions that Tony was talking about.

So I would say in middle school it's like an emphasis on grades.

You can even start having your student like if you can, those like the prep ACT and SATs, link up with a college access organization in your area.

Also, you know those organizations can take your student on college visits.

Of course, applying for the private scholarships is key.

Understanding, you know the whole, the FAFSA process, understanding college deadlines for priority scholarships.

All of those things are sort of the things that I would recommend, but really at the end of the day, those are there.

It's just too hard to navigate.

Like as someone who was doing it with hundreds of students, it's a lot.

And very few students were really able to like get through it fully unscathed.

Like so many students came through it in harrowing ways, but really we need policy change, but yeah, link up with the college access org in your area - And then the access in that organization here in Greater Cleveland is College Now Greater Cleveland.

And also inside The City of Cleveland's important to recognize the efforts of Say Yes to Education as well.

Victoria Jackson of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Tony Carnevale of Georgetown University, thank you both so much for your time today.

It's been a stimulating conversation.

- Thank you.

- [Victoria] Thanks.

- And I wanna thank you as well for joining us for this conversation.

And thanks also to our members, sponsors and donors and others who support our mission to create conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

We've got two such conversations coming up next week.

Wednesday, we talk with Justin Bib as part of our series with candidates seeking to be the next mayor of Cleveland.

And next Friday, we're back here talking about the future of the Republican Party.

You can find out more about what else is coming up at cityclub.org, and you can check out what you missed there or on PBS Passport, Roku, Amazon Firestick, Vimeo, and of course, YouTube.

Special thanks to Pete van Leer, chair of our education committee.

Today's forum is a result of his efforts.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

Stay strong and stay healthy.

Our forum is now adjourned.

(gong rings) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of The City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(dramatic music) Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.