AI transcript
0:00:06 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:12 We have been replaying our 2022 series called Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School, which
0:00:14 is about the economics of higher education.
0:00:16 I hope you have enjoyed it so far.
0:00:18 This is the final episode of that series.
0:00:24 It’s called What is the Future of College and Does It Have Room for Men?
0:00:26 We have updated the original episode as necessary.
0:00:31 One thing that didn’t need updating is the trend of men enrolling in college at significantly
0:00:33 lower rates than women.
0:00:37 In fact, that gap has increased since we first published this series.
0:00:44 In this episode, you will hear some explanations, some ramifications, and some possible solutions.
0:00:52 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:58 In 2013, the Lewis College of Business in Detroit shut down and put itself up for sale.
0:01:01 The asking price was $3.2 million.
0:01:05 $3.2 million is not very much for a whole college.
0:01:10 That’s what the basketball coach at the nearby University of Michigan makes in one year.
0:01:14 But apparently that’s all the Lewis College of Business was worth.
0:01:20 It was a small private school, the first and only historically black college or university
0:01:21 in Michigan.
0:01:27 HBCUs have been getting more attention lately, but again, this was 2013.
0:01:34 The funding wasn’t as supportive for HBCUs as it’s been in the last few years.
0:01:39 And this was a smaller school, so it received a smaller piece of the pie.
0:01:40 That is D. Wayne Edwards.
0:01:43 He and his family recently moved to Detroit.
0:01:49 As we’ll hear today, he took a personal interest in the history of the Lewis College of Business.
0:01:55 He tells us it was founded in 1928 in Indianapolis by Violet Lewis.
0:01:59 She was one of three black women to found an HBCU.
0:02:00 One of three, right?
0:02:01 I didn’t know about her.
0:02:03 I fell in love with her and her story.
0:02:09 She started the school on a $50 loan and she borrowed typewriters to teach black women
0:02:14 the skills to work in corporate offices because we weren’t allowed to do that at that time.
0:02:18 Relocating the college from Indianapolis to Detroit had worked out well.
0:02:23 By the middle of the 20th century, the auto industry was massive.
0:02:29 It’s easy to forget now, but in terms of commercial muscle and innovation, Detroit
0:02:32 was the Silicon Valley of its time.
0:02:34 There were a lot of good jobs.
0:02:38 The first black office employees at General Motors and Ford and Michigan were all Lewis
0:02:40 College of Business students.
0:02:45 Lewis was never the kind of college that made headlines or made any top 10 lists.
0:02:48 Few people outside of Detroit ever heard of it.
0:02:50 It worked.
0:02:54 It prepared black Detroiters for decent paying office jobs.
0:02:59 At its peak in the 1980s, Lewis had 550 students.
0:03:05 But as the US auto industry and Detroit began to decline, so did the Lewis College of Business.
0:03:11 Government funding started drying up and in 2007, the school lost its accreditation,
0:03:13 which meant students couldn’t get financial aid.
0:03:18 Ultimately, the doors closed because enrollment started to be reduced.
0:03:23 In closing its doors, the Lewis College of Business was not alone.
0:03:27 Hundreds of American colleges have been shutting down, especially since the financial crisis
0:03:29 of 2008.
0:03:31 Many others have consolidated.
0:03:37 In one single year recently, the number of four-year public universities fell by 2.3
0:03:40 percent, and the number of community colleges fell by 2.7 percent.
0:03:44 Again, that’s a one-year decline.
0:03:51 Over the past five or six years, US colleges and universities have lost around 1.5 million
0:03:52 students.
0:03:53 What’s going on?
0:03:58 A major challenge for these institutions is increasing costs at a time when family incomes
0:04:02 aren’t going up for the students that they’re trying to recruit.
0:04:07 Catherine Hill is an economist and a former president of Vaster College.
0:04:11 She’s trying to figure out ways in which they can get their costs down, and by consolidating,
0:04:15 you can hopefully experience some economies of scale.
0:04:20 But consolidation can create its own problems, like more students per faculty member and
0:04:23 fewer resources to go around.
0:04:27 It’s buying us some time, I think, for innovating and doing things differently in the longer
0:04:29 run.
0:04:33 What is the long run for higher education in the US?
0:04:39 If we were asking that question 10 or 15 years ago, the answer would have been easy.
0:04:41 Things are looking up, we would have said.
0:04:42 Enrollment is up.
0:04:43 Investment is up.
0:04:45 Belief is up.
0:04:50 Belief that college is easily the best route to achieving the American dream.
0:04:53 But today, it’s a different answer.
0:04:58 For the first time in modern history, overall college enrollment is down.
0:04:59 Belief is down.
0:05:05 If you are a college graduate looking at the size of your student loans, you’re probably
0:05:07 feeling down too.
0:05:13 This is the final episode in a series we are calling Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.
0:05:18 So far, we’ve told you how American higher education has two distinct models.
0:05:25 One model is about eliminating people so that there is a special class of achievers at the
0:05:27 highest end.
0:05:30 The other model is about making sure everybody gets through.
0:05:36 We told you how that first model, the elite model, has been accumulating ever more resources
0:05:41 while educating an ever smaller share of US students.
0:05:47 Educating a very small sliver of the American population who already get tremendous resources
0:05:48 allocated to them.
0:05:51 Those elite universities are generally thriving.
0:05:55 Demand for admission has never been higher.
0:05:56 What about everybody else?
0:05:59 What about the less prestigious privates?
0:06:01 What about the four-year publics?
0:06:06 What about the community colleges and trade schools, the HBCUs?
0:06:11 Today on Freakonomics Radio, we take a look at this second model of higher ed and why,
0:06:14 for so many people, it is no longer working.
0:06:21 To see $100,000 as a debt burden is daunting.
0:06:25 We look at why men in particular are skipping college.
0:06:29 Little boy behavior doesn’t fit as well with good student behavior.
0:06:33 And we find out if the Lewis College of Business can make a comeback.
0:06:39 All we did was borrow from nursing schools and welding schools and electrical schools.
0:06:42 Do you still believe in college?
0:06:44 We’ll find out starting right now.
0:07:08 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:07:18 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:07:22 If you add up all the students at all the colleges and universities in the U.S., you’ll
0:07:25 get to roughly $17 million.
0:07:30 Fewer than 10% of them go to one of the elite schools at the top of the pyramid.
0:07:36 The majority attend what are called mid-tier public or private four-year schools.
0:07:41 About 25% attend a community college or other two-year school, although nearly half of all
0:07:48 students start out at a two-year school, and nearly 10% go to for-profit colleges.
0:07:55 Of the total undergraduate population, almost 52% are non-Hispanic white, while 20% are
0:08:02 Hispanic, around 14% are black, and a little over 7% are Asian.
0:08:04 Maybe those numbers surprise you a bit.
0:08:05 Maybe not.
0:08:08 But here’s a number that certainly surprised me.
0:08:13 Nearly 60% of all college students today are women.
0:08:18 And remember what we told you earlier, that U.S. colleges and universities have lost about
0:08:21 one and a half million students in the past several years?
0:08:24 Well, men accounted for the vast majority of that loss.
0:08:29 Well, it’s certainly a big change, but not all that unexpected.
0:08:30 That’s Morty Shapiro.
0:08:35 He is an economist who studies higher ed and he was president of Northwestern University
0:08:38 from 2009 to 2022.
0:08:45 Decades ago, Shapiro predicted that the gender makeup of universities was getting flipped.
0:08:50 Part of it was change in labor markets and change in female labor force participation
0:08:51 rates.
0:08:55 So it wasn’t that hard to predict this so-called feminization of the academy, but I’m not
0:08:56 a sociologist.
0:09:02 I can’t really tell you what’s happening to these poor men and what’s happening to
0:09:07 their image and why their college enrollment rate has not increased the way it has for
0:09:08 women.
0:09:09 I mean, are you concerned?
0:09:13 Because we do see research on the deaths of despair and so on and longevity declining
0:09:15 suicide and ODs and so on.
0:09:21 I mean, wouldn’t one argue that the gain in female students can be a strong positive,
0:09:25 but that the loss in males could be a strong negative and maybe something should be done
0:09:26 about that?
0:09:27 I agree.
0:09:30 One of the things we used to tell all the liberal arts colleges was start a football
0:09:31 team.
0:09:36 There’s sort of a cliff you can fall off once you become 60, 40 female men.
0:09:40 It becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.
0:09:45 So one reason why some really small schools have football teams is because that’s 70
0:09:46 men right there.
0:09:50 And if you’re talking about liberal arts college of 1600, you only need 800.
0:09:55 You get almost a tenth of that just from your football team.
0:10:00 When you add in your ice hockey team and men’s lacrosse, it’s so-called helmeted sports.
0:10:04 It wasn’t always the case that college men were so hard to come by.
0:10:11 If you go back to 1900 or so, there were only around 250,000 Americans enrolled in college
0:10:16 and the overall population was about 50/50 male/female.
0:10:21 Most of the men were getting bachelor’s degrees at four-year colleges, many of which
0:10:26 were all male, including all the Ivy League schools, and many of the female students were
0:10:28 in two-year teacher’s colleges.
0:10:33 At the time, education was one of the few professions open to women.
0:10:39 And around 25% of women in college back then attended women’s only colleges, most famously
0:10:44 the Seven Sisters that were meant to parallel the men’s Ivy League schools.
0:10:50 The Seven Sisters were Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and
0:10:51 Wellesley.
0:10:57 Vassar was founded to be a wonderful liberal arts institution for women who didn’t have
0:11:03 the opportunity to go to the schools that were all male at the time in 1865.
0:11:09 That again is Catherine Hill, a former president of Vassar, which is in Poughkeepsie, New York,
0:11:12 just up the river from Manhattan.
0:11:16 And it decided to go coeducational in the late ’60s.
0:11:18 The late 1960s, that is.
0:11:25 This was a time when many schools were still single-sex, particularly the ones in the Northeast.
0:11:32 And the women’s colleges and the men’s colleges were recognizing that high school students
0:11:35 were telling them they didn’t want to go to single-sex schools anymore.
0:11:41 At one time, there were more than 250 women’s colleges in the U.S. Today, there are about
0:11:42 30.
0:11:45 So the change at Vassar was pretty typical.
0:11:52 Coming out of civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, there was a real shift away from previous
0:11:55 notions of what was appropriate and not appropriate.
0:11:58 The world was just changing very rapidly.
0:12:03 Part of that change, as Morty Shapiro mentioned earlier, was that more women were joining
0:12:04 the workforce.
0:12:09 And part of the reason for this was the widespread availability of birth control.
0:12:13 But also, more women were attending college generally.
0:12:20 While the gender split was around 50/50 back when only a handful of Americans went to college,
0:12:25 that dynamic had shifted, starting in the 1930s and even more after World War II when
0:12:29 returning soldiers used the GI Bill to go to college.
0:12:34 Suddenly, male students outnumbered females two to one.
0:12:42 But over time, that heavy male imbalance began to erode and then flatten and ultimately reverse.
0:12:47 If current enrollment trends continue, we’ll soon reach the point where for every man who
0:12:51 receives a college degree, two women will do the same.
0:12:56 I think this is a huge, huge change.
0:12:57 That’s Amalia Miller.
0:13:00 She is an economist at the University of Virginia.
0:13:03 Why might more women choose to go to college than men?
0:13:06 As an economist, the way you think about it is thinking about the net benefits, the costs
0:13:08 and benefits of that decision.
0:13:13 And so the benefit side of college could be the earnings you get as a college graduate,
0:13:17 where the cost side is the earnings you don’t get that you would have gotten.
0:13:20 And it could be that that’s higher for women than for men.
0:13:24 If you think about some of the non-college jobs in the service sector that women are
0:13:27 concentrated in, these are some really low-paying jobs.
0:13:33 New collar occupations or jobs that sort of paid a decent wage that didn’t require college,
0:13:34 a lot of those were more male-dominated.
0:13:39 In other words, a man who doesn’t go to college might get a job in construction that pays
0:13:44 well, whereas a woman who doesn’t go to college would be more likely to work in retail or
0:13:47 perhaps as a home health aide.
0:13:52 So it could be that even if college women earned less than college men, it was still more worth
0:13:55 it for women because that gender gap was smaller.
0:14:01 I think the problem with that explanation, though, is it doesn’t explain the increase
0:14:06 for women compared to men in recent decades, where it doesn’t seem like blue collar work
0:14:09 has had great growth in terms of number of jobs or wages.
0:14:13 So Miller went looking for a deeper explanation.
0:14:19 She and two co-authors, Sucingua and Elliot Isaac, recently published a paper which found
0:14:23 that college may produce bigger benefits for women than men.
0:14:29 One outcome they measured was future earnings for men versus women who attended an elite
0:14:30 university.
0:14:35 There’s no effect on earnings from attending a more elite school for men once you control
0:14:40 for applications and admissions, but we do find a significant effect of school selectivity
0:14:41 on women.
0:14:46 And then when we look deeper into this effect for women, we see that it is coming from including
0:14:48 part-time and non-working women.
0:14:53 So women who attended a more selective school for college are more likely to participate
0:14:54 in the labor force.
0:15:01 So for women, we find that attending a school that is more selective leads to a 14% increase
0:15:02 in earnings.
0:15:07 In other words, the female wage premium isn’t necessarily driven by having a more lucrative
0:15:08 career.
0:15:13 It’s driven by college-educated women going from not working or working part-time to working
0:15:14 full-time.
0:15:21 So the question is, does this return to greater selectivity also apply to a return to schooling
0:15:22 at all?
0:15:24 I don’t think that that’s a crazy leap to make.
0:15:26 It’s just another logical step.
0:15:29 Miller and her co-authors found another significant result.
0:15:36 So what we find is that there’s a significant decline in women’s likelihood of being married
0:15:40 in their late 30s if they attended a more elite school for college.
0:15:45 If we think of marriage as a positive outcome, then this might suggest a bad outcome.
0:15:50 On the one hand, there’s this career advancement, but it happens at the expense of family formation.
0:15:54 So these women are less likely to marry, but when they do marry, they’re marrying men who
0:15:56 are more educated.
0:16:01 So that’s one possible explanation for the current gender gap on college campuses.
0:16:06 Women simply have more to gain by going to college, especially if they are career-oriented.
0:16:10 But Amalia Miller has another very different argument.
0:16:16 The other argument that I give when people ask me about this is you have to behave well
0:16:17 in school.
0:16:22 You have to have good grades, these cultural attitudes about good students, and then other
0:16:27 cultural attitudes about gender and sort of what’s acceptable behavior for boys and girls.
0:16:32 Typical boy behavior or behavior that for boys is socially rewarded doesn’t fit as well
0:16:34 with good student behavior.
0:16:40 This claim may resonate for anyone who has ever been a boy or parented a boy.
0:16:45 And there’s good evidence that the gender gap in education starts way before college.
0:16:52 In a 2013 paper by the economists Nicole Fortin, Philip Oriopoulos and Shelley Phipps, they
0:16:59 looked at high school GPA distribution for girls and boys from the 1980s to the 2000s.
0:17:01 Here’s what they found.
0:17:09 The most common GPA for girls shifted over that time from B to A. The boys’ GPA stayed
0:17:10 at B.
0:17:18 One label that’s been attached to this phenomenon is leaving boys behind.
0:17:25 I think the problem is the way we treat our boys in K through 12.
0:17:26 That’s Ruth Simmons.
0:17:32 She rose from a sharecropping childhood in Texas to become the president of three very
0:17:34 different institutions of higher ed.
0:17:40 Smith College in Massachusetts, a women’s school and member of the Seven Sisters, Brown
0:17:46 University in Providence, Rhode Island, a member of the Ivy League, and most recently
0:17:50 Prairie View A&M, an HBCU back in Texas.
0:17:53 Boys often get into trouble in school.
0:17:56 They get very negative messages often in school.
0:18:03 They turn away from some of the advantages of school because of those negative messages,
0:18:12 the way that we are orienting ourselves toward particular behavior of children and rewarding
0:18:18 children who are quiet and submissive and do everything that we want them to do.
0:18:24 That’s a formula for girls, because we tend to be socialized in our families to do exactly
0:18:32 that, to be obedient and to not resist what we are told to do and so forth.
0:18:37 So naturally, the one thing girls are good at is staying in school and they can keep
0:18:42 going because that’s what we’ve been told that we should do.
0:18:47 Boys are not quite the same.
0:18:51 If boys aren’t being set up to succeed in K through 12, they would follow they aren’t
0:18:54 being set up to succeed in college either.
0:18:58 And there’s another recent change in college admissions that could be exacerbating the
0:19:01 shortage of male college students.
0:19:07 Here is Zachary Blemer, an economist at Princeton who studies educational and income mobility.
0:19:13 In 1996, California passed a ballot proposition that prohibited the use of race-based affirmative
0:19:19 action at the University of California and all public universities in the state of California.
0:19:24 Consider the effect at UCLA, one of the most selective schools in the UC system.
0:19:29 So the year that affirmative action stopped, the black and Hispanic population of UCLA
0:19:30 fell by 60%.
0:19:38 That was in 1996, between 2013 and 2020, UCLA expanded by 3,000 students.
0:19:42 90% of those new spots went to women.
0:19:47 But it isn’t just black and Hispanic men who are skipping college.
0:19:52 According to a Pell Institute analysis, lower-income white men are less likely to go to college
0:19:56 than their black, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts.
0:20:02 There is one group of men who attend college at rates even higher than women.
0:20:03 Gay men.
0:20:10 More than half of all gay men in the US, 25 and older, have at least a bachelor’s degree.
0:20:15 As the Notre Dame sociologist Joel Middlemann put it, “If America’s gay men formed their
0:20:21 own country, it would be the world’s most highly educated by far.”
0:20:29 But fewer than 5% of men in the US identify as gay, so for the rest of the young men who
0:20:36 aren’t going to college but might benefit from it, what should be done?
0:20:37 Coming up after the break?
0:20:40 I mean, look, I know how hard it is.
0:20:47 What we need is some innovation that would help us educate more students at a lower cost.
0:20:49 I just need to figure out how to make it free.
0:20:53 And if you missed the earlier episodes in this college series, you can find them on
0:20:55 any podcast app.
0:20:58 While you’re there, please leave a review or a rating.
0:21:01 That’s a good way to help other people find free economics radio.
0:21:04 And if you really want to help, recommend this show to your friends and family.
0:21:15 We’ll be right back.
0:21:20 When you’re young, whether or not to attend college is one of the first big choices you
0:21:32 actually get to make.
0:21:33 That is Donald Ruff.
0:21:45 He is the president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation in New York.
0:22:04 They operate five college prep schools in New York City and one in Newark, New Jersey.
0:22:09 Their New York schools are part of the city’s Department of Education, which happens to
0:22:13 be run by the Eagle Academy’s former CEO, David Banks.
0:22:30 But as Donald Ruff tells us, his schools are different from the standard public school.
0:22:35 Another big priority is making sure their graduates get into college.
0:22:40 In New York City, nearly 60% of all public school students go straight to college, but
0:23:01 that number is much lower for Black and Hispanic students in New York and elsewhere.
0:23:06 So Eagle Academy is plainly getting results, but things have been harder recently, especially
0:23:08 with the pandemic.
0:23:13 Ruff says the young men he educates are increasingly turning down college.
0:23:14 Why?
0:23:16 Honestly, I think it’s the sticker shock.
0:23:28 I can’t speak for everyone, but I know as someone who grow up low income to see $100,000
0:23:31 as a debt burden is daunting.
0:23:33 Ruff is a New Yorker himself.
0:23:38 I actually went to public school for junior high school and I was discovered and recruited
0:23:44 by a program called the Oliver program, where they take high achieving, low income students
0:23:48 of color and provide them with a full rights scholarship to attend private school.
0:23:53 So I went to the Brooklyn French school and I ended up at Oberlin College, which was an
0:23:56 incredible experience for me as well.
0:24:00 At Oberlin, he double majored in history and African American studies.
0:24:03 I didn’t even know I was poor until I went to private school.
0:24:05 It was a shock to my system.
0:24:12 And if I’m being honest, I’ve probably lived a lot of my early years after I graduated
0:24:17 from high school and college with a level of survivor’s guilt and survivor’s remorse.
0:24:19 I don’t think success should be a lottery.
0:24:25 And when I compared my school experience with my friends at the time, there was some savage
0:24:31 inequalities, which actually fueled me to do the very work that I do today.
0:24:37 Just seeing the price of college, I remember when we were first taking a look at financial
0:24:41 aid packages and my mother was stating how a year of college was more than what she
0:24:44 made in a year.
0:24:48 And just having those type of conversations makes you think a little bit differently.
0:24:53 He says that type of conversation today among Eagle Academy students have become even more
0:24:54 intense.
0:24:58 Students are making different decisions because from an affordability standpoint, they don’t
0:25:01 believe that they could afford it.
0:25:07 Not that they’re incapable of achieving and doing well in college, but okay, four years
0:25:11 of my life, I could be earning versus accumulating all of this debt.
0:25:13 What is it really leading to?
0:25:18 Throughout this series about college, all the economists we’ve spoken with have preached
0:25:24 that a college education is perhaps the single best long run investment you could possibly
0:25:25 make.
0:25:28 But Donald Ruff’s students don’t always buy that argument.
0:25:33 They’re seeing other examples where guys who’ve gotten degrees are now underemployed
0:25:36 or unemployed, it doesn’t make sense to them.
0:25:41 A college graduate is much more likely to be employed than someone who doesn’t go to college
0:25:43 and they earn more too.
0:25:49 That said, there’s no guarantee, especially these days, around 40% of recent college graduates
0:25:55 are technically underemployed, meaning they have a job that doesn’t even require a degree,
0:25:58 which also means it probably doesn’t pay very well.
0:26:01 And there are other reasons to think about skipping college.
0:26:06 Google has been a major disruptor with their certification programs.
0:26:09 So a student who’s interested in technology, I don’t really need college, I can actually
0:26:16 earn now and get these certifications and end up with a pretty good paying job.
0:26:19 Colleges can’t continue to have these archaic degree programs.
0:26:25 They have to figure out how do they have modern credentials and certifications where the students
0:26:31 who are graduating are now pipelined into employment and there’s not a skilled deficiency.
0:26:36 And some Eagle Academy graduates tell Donald Ruff they’ve got different plans entirely.
0:26:43 Okay, listen, I can invest in cryptocurrency, I can be an Instagram influencer.
0:26:50 What we need is some innovation that would help us educate more students at a lower cost.
0:26:55 That again is the economist and former Vassar president, Catherine Hill.
0:27:01 We need to figure out how to offer a better quality education at a lower price point.
0:27:06 About 10 years ago, it seemed that had already been figured out, at least if you were watching
0:27:09 CNN.
0:27:12 The president of this new online partnership, which is what they’re calling it, Harvard
0:27:17 and MIT says, this is the biggest change in education since the printing press.
0:27:19 Is he overstating it?
0:27:20 Not in the least.
0:27:23 The way in which we educate will forever change.
0:27:25 It has forever changed.
0:27:28 Online education, it’s coming into its own.
0:27:33 A batch of startup companies were promising to make a college education accessible to
0:27:36 anyone with an internet connection.
0:27:42 One firm, Coursera began offering online courses from name brand schools like Princeton, Stanford
0:27:43 and Penn.
0:27:48 They were called MOOCs or massive open online courses.
0:27:54 As the New York Times put it in 2012, they would open higher education to hundreds of
0:27:56 millions of people.
0:28:00 They were also supposed to drive down the cost of education, which for decades has been
0:28:04 rising way faster than inflation.
0:28:08 Why have college costs increased so much?
0:28:11 In retrospect, there are a lot of reasons.
0:28:15 Many schools added layers of administration that didn’t used to exist.
0:28:20 As college itself became more popular, it also became more of a consumer good, which meant
0:28:26 competing for students by offering better dorms, better food, bigger fitness centers,
0:28:29 more extravagant extracurriculars.
0:28:34 The federal government also began making more loans available, which gave colleges the leeway
0:28:36 to raise tuition further.
0:28:42 But also, the primary mode of classroom education, a professor up front, a bunch of students
0:28:45 in their seats, that didn’t change much.
0:28:51 And therefore, higher ed didn’t take advantage of new technologies to become more productive,
0:28:54 which is what happens in most industries.
0:28:59 Colleges may hire a lot of adjunct professors to save on costs, but even so, they’re still
0:29:07 paying humans a relatively high wage to perform a task that is not becoming more efficient.
0:29:13 Economists call this cost disease, when productivity does not keep up with cost.
0:29:17 Using students online, however, that was supposed to solve this problem.
0:29:18 It was scalable.
0:29:19 It was efficient.
0:29:20 It was cheap.
0:29:21 It was perfect.
0:29:24 It was just one thing.
0:29:26 Most people don’t like it.
0:29:31 The best evidence for this was the COVID-19 shutdown.
0:29:36 The whole world went online, and education went online.
0:29:40 And we learned fundamentally that it just doesn’t work.
0:29:46 That is Pano Canellis, who used to be president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
0:29:50 Online education just doesn’t work, whether it’s for K through 12 or in higher education.
0:29:55 That may be an overstatement, but there is evidence that online schooling doesn’t do
0:29:58 what its boosters said it would.
0:30:02 Some research has shown that students who go to class in person do better on several
0:30:05 dimensions than the ones who study online.
0:30:09 The in-person students get better grades, they’re more likely to do the follow-up coursework,
0:30:11 and they’re more likely to graduate.
0:30:15 And some of these are randomized studies, so they’re not just measuring the differences
0:30:21 between the kind of students who choose in-person attendance over online.
0:30:25 And there’s another piece of evidence in favor of in-person attendance.
0:30:28 It’s what economists call revealed preferences.
0:30:33 There are some corporations around Midtown Manhattan that are not fully back in person,
0:30:34 right?
0:30:38 Miguel Urquillola is an economist at Columbia who studies higher ed.
0:30:41 On the other hand, if you go to a campus like Princeton, everyone is back in person.
0:30:45 And to me, that reveals that what they’re selling is in part a personal experience,
0:30:47 and that’s what people want to buy.
0:30:51 So if online learning isn’t the answer, what is?
0:30:54 Pano Kanellis has an idea.
0:30:59 He thinks he knows why so many fewer people are enrolling in college these days, especially
0:31:00 young men.
0:31:07 One of the main promises of a college education is that it opens your mind to new ideas, new
0:31:10 bodies of knowledge, new ways of thinking.
0:31:14 But he says that on many college campuses, that promise is not being kept.
0:31:21 I’ve spent a few decades in higher education, and I’ve had literally dozens of conversations
0:31:28 with students and faculty who have felt the walls closing in the classroom or in the ambient
0:31:30 culture of their institution.
0:31:38 The statistics are out there. 66% of students in higher education say they self-censor.
0:31:43 Self-censor, as in not speaking their minds, out of a concern they’ll be singled out as
0:31:46 intolerant or politically incorrect.
0:31:49 And yes, the statistics are out there.
0:31:54 The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology recently published research which
0:32:02 found that more than 80% of Ph.D. students were “willing to discriminate against right-leaning
0:32:03 scholars.”
0:32:08 Meanwhile, more than a third of conservative professors and Ph.D. students say they have
0:32:13 been “disciplined” or “threatened with discipline” for their views.
0:32:19 It has long been established that college administrators and faculty members lean overwhelmingly
0:32:25 left, so we shouldn’t be surprised they create environments conducive to students who do
0:32:26 the same.
0:32:32 And if you’re asking why college enrollment has been falling, especially among young men,
0:32:38 well, in addition to all the reasons we’ve already heard about, including cost, one reason
0:32:45 may be that a lot of potential college students simply feel unwelcome on most college campuses,
0:32:48 and so Pano Canellis is doing something about that.
0:32:54 The University of Austin is a university that’s in the process of being developed and built
0:32:56 in Austin, Texas.
0:32:59 It’s going to be America’s newest university.
0:33:01 And Canellis is its first president.
0:33:07 The University of Austin is presenting itself as a college devoted to liberal ideals of free
0:33:12 speech as opposed to wokeism and political correctness.
0:33:17 In 2023, the state of Texas gave them the go-ahead to award degrees.
0:33:23 With $200 million in private donations, they plan to take in their inaugural class this
0:33:28 fall, 100 students, and grow the student body to 1,000 by 2028.
0:33:31 Look, universities will never be perfect places.
0:33:37 I think what we need to do in higher education is make sure that we’re looking at these trends
0:33:45 with our eyes wide open and doing what we can to minimize the pernicious effects of
0:33:52 a culture that might be trying to disallow certain ideas or silence folks or punish especially
0:33:58 young people, students for things that they may have said that are out of tune with prevailing
0:33:59 orthodoxies.
0:34:04 I mean, there are heartbreaking stories out there, and I can’t imagine something we should
0:34:10 be taking more seriously than making sure that our students have the ability to be intellectually
0:34:18 risky, to express themselves sincerely, to be wrong, to stand corrected, to correct other
0:34:19 people.
0:34:26 That kind of robust exchange of the things that we think we know or do know or believe
0:34:30 to know, that’s how we learn both individually and as institutions.
0:34:35 But Canelo says he also wants to reform the business side of higher ed.
0:34:39 Higher education is locked in the iron triangle of finance.
0:34:43 That is that the whole financial model is built upon three points.
0:34:45 One is collecting tuition.
0:34:49 The other is philanthropy, and the third is grants that come from outside.
0:34:52 Each of those is problematic right now.
0:34:56 Tuition is rising much more rapidly than families can afford.
0:35:00 The grants and things that come from the outside are inconsistent.
0:35:02 Money is declining.
0:35:08 I think you have to radically reduce the operating expenses of the institution.
0:35:14 Every single blade of grass that’s mowed, every single sushi bar, every single fountain,
0:35:16 all of that is paid for by students.
0:35:19 Administrative costs are vastly overblown.
0:35:24 The recent article that Yale now has as many administrators as undergraduates, it’s fine.
0:35:25 They’re Yale.
0:35:26 I mean, it’s okay.
0:35:27 I don’t know what those people do.
0:35:32 Who’s the institution serving at that point?
0:35:38 Well, you know, I think there are real issues of freedom of speech and independence and
0:35:39 dialogue.
0:35:43 That again is Morty Shapiro, the former president of Northwestern University.
0:35:46 So what does he think of the new University of Austin?
0:35:48 I kind of chuckled when I saw the whole thing.
0:35:52 If you’re going to try to create a school, you probably don’t do it in the most rapidly
0:35:55 rising real estate prices in the world, Austin.
0:35:57 You know, look, I know how hard it is.
0:35:58 This is my business.
0:36:00 It’s hard to create a university.
0:36:05 It helps to have a couple hundred years of history there.
0:36:10 Whether or not it’s successful, the University of Austin is pursuing one traditional model
0:36:16 of the American University, a high-minded exploration of big ideas.
0:36:21 In concept at least, this fits into the elite competitive model of higher education.
0:36:25 So that’s only one of the models we’ve been talking about during this series.
0:36:30 What about all the other students and potential students who are looking for a more practical
0:36:32 college experience?
0:36:37 What if there was a place that combined a traditional college environment with a practical
0:36:40 certification program?
0:36:43 And what if the education was free?
0:36:44 I didn’t go to college.
0:36:48 There was no money, no money for me to go to college.
0:36:53 Coming up after the break, one man’s plan to bring free college to students in Detroit.
0:37:04 I’m Stephen Dubner, and you’re listening to Freakonomics Radio.
0:37:10 At the start of this episode, we met Duane Edwards, who lives in Detroit, but grew up
0:37:11 in Los Angeles.
0:37:14 He was the youngest of six kids raised by a single mom.
0:37:19 And he’d always been a talented artist, and he loved designing sneakers.
0:37:24 I discovered kind of late in my senior year, I wanted to be a designer, and I didn’t know
0:37:26 that you needed a portfolio.
0:37:28 My guidance counselor didn’t know that.
0:37:33 She actually discouraged me from being a designer, telling me that no black kid from Inglewood,
0:37:35 whatever design shoes for a living.
0:37:42 As someone who grew up without college as an option, if you had not had this drive and
0:37:47 talent for designing sneakers, what do you think you would have wound up doing?
0:37:52 In Inglewood, 18 is a win if I can get there alive or not in jail.
0:37:56 21, a miracle if I’m not dead or in jail.
0:38:00 I have some friends that are not here anymore, and I have some friends that are just getting
0:38:01 out.
0:38:04 That’s just part of growing up.
0:38:09 But thanks to his talent, and with the help of some teachers, Edwards took a different
0:38:10 path.
0:38:13 He went on to become one of the top shoe designers in the country.
0:38:18 He spent many years at Nike, working with Michael Jordan and Carmelo Anthony.
0:38:21 He got more than 50 design patents.
0:38:27 Along the way, he started hearing from kids who loved sneaker design as much as he did.
0:38:31 That was the first time they saw someone who looked like them, and so they were just emailing
0:38:36 me saying, “Hey, I really want to be a designer, and do you have any tips?”
0:38:42 So I saw myself and them, and I started mentoring kids, and those kids would go to college, and
0:38:47 then they would become my interns, and then they would become Nike employees, and they
0:38:52 were sitting next to me drawing shoes, professionally getting paid, and that to me mattered a whole
0:38:58 lot more than any athlete I ever worked for or any entertainer I ever worked with.
0:39:04 In 2010, after a long stretch at Nike, Edwards took a sabbatical, and he created a course
0:39:07 on shoe design at the University of Oregon.
0:39:12 That was my first time going to college with teaching, so I’d never been there as a student.
0:39:18 I crafted this two-week program, and it was two weeks, because in real time, that’s how
0:39:21 much time we had to design a shoe from start to finish.
0:39:26 And so I was like, “All right, let me design this course through the lens of either you’re
0:39:31 going to love this or hate it, because there’s so much work in this intent.”
0:39:35 After the two-week course, flew in 38 students.
0:39:40 It was 14 days, 12 to 14 hours, every day straight through.
0:39:42 We didn’t take a break, and the kids loved it.
0:39:44 They didn’t want to leave.
0:39:46 Edwards loved it, too.
0:39:49 He wound up quitting his job at Nike.
0:39:55 In partnership with the University of Oregon, he started the Pencil Footwear Design Academy.
0:39:57 That’s P-E-N-S-O-L-E.
0:40:02 Yeah, so I was born with the gift of drawing that I could see.
0:40:06 Ever since I was a little person, I was using a number two pencil.
0:40:10 When I wanted to create an academy of my own, I started thinking of names, and I was like,
0:40:12 “Edwards Academy doesn’t sound right.
0:40:14 Duane Academy doesn’t sound right.”
0:40:19 And so I looked up the word “pencil,” and the phonetic spelling was P-E-N-S-O-L.
0:40:23 And then I was like, “Oh, well, close to Seoul as in sneakers.”
0:40:27 So I added an E on to it, and ultimately, it’s the marriage between the instrument that
0:40:30 I use and the industry that I use it in.
0:40:34 Before long, Edwards was invited to bring his program to some of the most established
0:40:39 design schools, MIT, Parsons, the Colding School in Denmark.
0:40:44 And so I was just immersed into curriculum and education and all these things, and then
0:40:48 I started to realize school is all backwards.
0:40:51 It’s just backwards.
0:40:52 What do you mean by that?
0:40:58 So, I researched the beginning of education, and it was a place that you would go to learn
0:41:00 a skilled trade and get a job.
0:41:01 Simple, right?
0:41:02 Okay.
0:41:05 Then colleges came, and then universities came, and it became a bigger mess.
0:41:12 The part that was missing was the relationship between the school, the student, and the industry.
0:41:17 School has become about money and not about what the kid is being taught and what happens
0:41:20 when they graduate and can they get a job.
0:41:28 As a hiring manager for 25 years, I’m seeing 500, 600 portfolios every year of some kid
0:41:34 that has a mortgage payment because they graduated, and there’s no way in hell they’re getting
0:41:35 a job.
0:41:38 The school, the student, and the industry.
0:41:42 They were connected at the very, very beginning, and the more we’ve went into this world of
0:41:47 education, they’ve become further and further disconnected.
0:41:51 With the Pencil Academy, Edwards wanted to reconnect all the actors.
0:41:54 He set to work designing a different business model.
0:41:58 One big focus was cutting the costs and not by a little bit.
0:42:00 I knew I wanted it to be free.
0:42:03 I just need to figure out how to make it free.
0:42:07 So, was the answer to that basically have it funded by industry partners or potential
0:42:08 industry partners?
0:42:11 Yeah, because they’re the beneficiaries of the talent.
0:42:16 So far, Pencil has partnered with shoe and apparel firms, including Nike, of course,
0:42:22 but also Adidas and New Balance, as well as Jimmy Chu and Versace and brands like Herman
0:42:23 Miller too.
0:42:26 I went to corporations and I asked them, “What do you want?”
0:42:30 They said that we would want the kids to be mature.
0:42:34 We would want them to be responsible, and then we want them to have the skills and knowledge
0:42:38 to be able to work as soon as we get them in.
0:42:41 The problem was these kids were coming in immature.
0:42:44 They were coming in not understanding time management.
0:42:46 They were coming in not understanding professionalism.
0:42:49 They weren’t taught those things in school.
0:42:52 So Edwards taught professionalism.
0:42:53 Simple things.
0:42:56 Show up at 9 o’clock, 8.45 is on time.
0:42:58 If you’re late, you do 50 push-ups per minute.
0:43:00 Get out of here at school.
0:43:01 At school.
0:43:05 And then it got to a point where the kids were like, “This is not fair.”
0:43:06 So they were like, “Well, what about other options?”
0:43:10 Actually, a really good idea came from one of our employees who was a former student.
0:43:15 He was like, “You should make the students, before the final presentation, explain to
0:43:20 the brand how often they were late and how many minutes they were late.”
0:43:21 So now they have a choice.
0:43:22 Push-ups.
0:43:30 Or you would admit your flaws to the person that’s trying to hire you.
0:43:34 The vast majority of Pencil students so far are young men.
0:43:40 If Edwards can grow Pencil like he wants to grow it, that might shrink the male college
0:43:42 student deficit a little bit.
0:43:48 But where was he going to build this academy that offered a free education and a job afterwards?
0:43:55 Well, he had recently learned about an abandoned college that used to train women for good jobs
0:43:59 in a thriving industry, the Lewis College of Business in Detroit.
0:44:03 A friend of mine, he lives in Detroit, and we were just having a conversation, and he’s
0:44:07 like, “Yeah, Detroit used to have an HBC, I’m like, “Wait, wait, stop, time out, what?”
0:44:13 It took some doing and some legal maneuvering, but with the help of Michigan politicians,
0:44:15 Duane Edwards reopened Lewis College.
0:44:20 It is the first time a historically black school has been reopened.
0:44:25 Edwards thinks the HBCU designation will be particularly helpful in cultivating black
0:44:26 design talent.
0:44:31 We’re still so far behind within the design industry, multiple industries.
0:44:36 I did a study like three years ago, it’s probably worse now, but three years ago, there’s 96
0:44:39 design schools and colleges in the United States.
0:44:46 Average enrollment is less than 10% of African-Americans, 2% graduate, and I would argue 1% of the two
0:44:50 is not good enough to hire anyway, so it’s really 1%.
0:44:53 And that’s the number Edwards wants to raise.
0:44:58 The new college is called the Pencil Lewis College of Business and Design.
0:45:00 Classes have just started.
0:45:05 For now, the program is still relatively short, but they’re growing.
0:45:09 Here this year, state and city leaders came together for the opening of the school’s
0:45:14 Foot Locker Footwear Creation Studio, which mimics a corporate design office.
0:45:18 So we started off at two weeks, now we’re five weeks to 12 weeks, and then we’re going
0:45:20 to grow into two years.
0:45:24 And so we partner with the brands, and when I say we partner with the brands, if you’re
0:45:29 an Adidas and you want to do a program with us, all right, we sit down and craft the curriculum
0:45:35 together, exactly what you want the kids to learn, how many students you want, exactly
0:45:38 what professions you want them to learn in.
0:45:42 So we co-create everything with the brand, so everything we do is really customized for
0:45:44 every person that we work with.
0:45:49 Unlike a lot of college programs these days, the goal here is concrete.
0:45:54 Each of those programs lead to some form of internship for the students, for a select
0:45:59 number of students in that class, whenever we have programs, at the end of it, there’s
0:46:03 kids are getting jobs at the end of those programs.
0:46:07 The school’s graduates have already gone on to work for companies like Nike, Adidas,
0:46:09 and Carhart.
0:46:14 Last year, they launched a three-year partnership with PepsiCo to help develop black designers.
0:46:18 Edwards does not see himself as any sort of college revolutionary.
0:46:24 He sees himself as someone who realized that college has become too expensive, too inaccessible,
0:46:30 and too divorced from its original goals, and then he found a way to do something about
0:46:31 it.
0:46:35 All we did was borrow from nursing schools and welding schools and electrical schools
0:46:37 and carpentry.
0:46:40 We didn’t really invent anything.
0:46:44 Our roots are in those jobs that built this country, right?
0:46:47 So I do think education is headed for a shift.
0:46:54 It is headed from the traditional way of doing things into a more entrepreneurial, more corporate
0:47:01 structure that is more geared towards ROIs and pure career development.
0:47:06 I do think that that is where we’re headed.
0:47:08 Do you think that’s where we’re headed?
0:47:10 Do you like that direction?
0:47:14 I’d love to hear what you thought about this episode and this whole series.
0:47:17 Freakonomous Radio goes back to school.
0:47:21 Tell us what you liked, what you didn’t, what we missed, what you’d like to hear in the
0:47:22 future.
0:47:27 Also, how do you feel in general about these occasional series we produce?
0:47:33 All your feedback is welcome, always, at radio@freakonomics.com.
0:47:37 Coming up next time on the show, there is something that most of us do all day, every
0:47:42 day that we think is good for us, but it is not.
0:47:46 It turns out the faster people switch attention, the greater is the number.
0:47:52 The research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you’re trying to multitask,
0:47:54 just the opposite of what you think.
0:47:58 Why do we humans spend so much time trying to act like computers?
0:48:01 There isn’t a sort of block your bus, like we could build that.
0:48:02 Should we build that?
0:48:03 I don’t know that we should.
0:48:06 That’s next time on the show.
0:48:10 Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.
0:48:13 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:48:18 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app and also at Freakonomics.com where we
0:48:21 publish transcripts and show notes.
0:48:26 This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski with help from Dalvin Aboashi.
0:48:31 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:48:36 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars,
0:48:41 Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neal Karuth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:48:42 and Teo Jacobs.
0:48:45 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:48:48 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:48:51 As always, thank you for listening.
0:48:57 The way that they go to school, you don’t go to work two days a week for a couple hours
0:48:58 every day.
0:48:59 Hey, speak for yourself.
0:49:00 I’m pretty lazy.
0:49:13 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:49:15 (upbeat music)
0:49:17 you
0:00:12 We have been replaying our 2022 series called Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School, which
0:00:14 is about the economics of higher education.
0:00:16 I hope you have enjoyed it so far.
0:00:18 This is the final episode of that series.
0:00:24 It’s called What is the Future of College and Does It Have Room for Men?
0:00:26 We have updated the original episode as necessary.
0:00:31 One thing that didn’t need updating is the trend of men enrolling in college at significantly
0:00:33 lower rates than women.
0:00:37 In fact, that gap has increased since we first published this series.
0:00:44 In this episode, you will hear some explanations, some ramifications, and some possible solutions.
0:00:52 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:58 In 2013, the Lewis College of Business in Detroit shut down and put itself up for sale.
0:01:01 The asking price was $3.2 million.
0:01:05 $3.2 million is not very much for a whole college.
0:01:10 That’s what the basketball coach at the nearby University of Michigan makes in one year.
0:01:14 But apparently that’s all the Lewis College of Business was worth.
0:01:20 It was a small private school, the first and only historically black college or university
0:01:21 in Michigan.
0:01:27 HBCUs have been getting more attention lately, but again, this was 2013.
0:01:34 The funding wasn’t as supportive for HBCUs as it’s been in the last few years.
0:01:39 And this was a smaller school, so it received a smaller piece of the pie.
0:01:40 That is D. Wayne Edwards.
0:01:43 He and his family recently moved to Detroit.
0:01:49 As we’ll hear today, he took a personal interest in the history of the Lewis College of Business.
0:01:55 He tells us it was founded in 1928 in Indianapolis by Violet Lewis.
0:01:59 She was one of three black women to found an HBCU.
0:02:00 One of three, right?
0:02:01 I didn’t know about her.
0:02:03 I fell in love with her and her story.
0:02:09 She started the school on a $50 loan and she borrowed typewriters to teach black women
0:02:14 the skills to work in corporate offices because we weren’t allowed to do that at that time.
0:02:18 Relocating the college from Indianapolis to Detroit had worked out well.
0:02:23 By the middle of the 20th century, the auto industry was massive.
0:02:29 It’s easy to forget now, but in terms of commercial muscle and innovation, Detroit
0:02:32 was the Silicon Valley of its time.
0:02:34 There were a lot of good jobs.
0:02:38 The first black office employees at General Motors and Ford and Michigan were all Lewis
0:02:40 College of Business students.
0:02:45 Lewis was never the kind of college that made headlines or made any top 10 lists.
0:02:48 Few people outside of Detroit ever heard of it.
0:02:50 It worked.
0:02:54 It prepared black Detroiters for decent paying office jobs.
0:02:59 At its peak in the 1980s, Lewis had 550 students.
0:03:05 But as the US auto industry and Detroit began to decline, so did the Lewis College of Business.
0:03:11 Government funding started drying up and in 2007, the school lost its accreditation,
0:03:13 which meant students couldn’t get financial aid.
0:03:18 Ultimately, the doors closed because enrollment started to be reduced.
0:03:23 In closing its doors, the Lewis College of Business was not alone.
0:03:27 Hundreds of American colleges have been shutting down, especially since the financial crisis
0:03:29 of 2008.
0:03:31 Many others have consolidated.
0:03:37 In one single year recently, the number of four-year public universities fell by 2.3
0:03:40 percent, and the number of community colleges fell by 2.7 percent.
0:03:44 Again, that’s a one-year decline.
0:03:51 Over the past five or six years, US colleges and universities have lost around 1.5 million
0:03:52 students.
0:03:53 What’s going on?
0:03:58 A major challenge for these institutions is increasing costs at a time when family incomes
0:04:02 aren’t going up for the students that they’re trying to recruit.
0:04:07 Catherine Hill is an economist and a former president of Vaster College.
0:04:11 She’s trying to figure out ways in which they can get their costs down, and by consolidating,
0:04:15 you can hopefully experience some economies of scale.
0:04:20 But consolidation can create its own problems, like more students per faculty member and
0:04:23 fewer resources to go around.
0:04:27 It’s buying us some time, I think, for innovating and doing things differently in the longer
0:04:29 run.
0:04:33 What is the long run for higher education in the US?
0:04:39 If we were asking that question 10 or 15 years ago, the answer would have been easy.
0:04:41 Things are looking up, we would have said.
0:04:42 Enrollment is up.
0:04:43 Investment is up.
0:04:45 Belief is up.
0:04:50 Belief that college is easily the best route to achieving the American dream.
0:04:53 But today, it’s a different answer.
0:04:58 For the first time in modern history, overall college enrollment is down.
0:04:59 Belief is down.
0:05:05 If you are a college graduate looking at the size of your student loans, you’re probably
0:05:07 feeling down too.
0:05:13 This is the final episode in a series we are calling Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.
0:05:18 So far, we’ve told you how American higher education has two distinct models.
0:05:25 One model is about eliminating people so that there is a special class of achievers at the
0:05:27 highest end.
0:05:30 The other model is about making sure everybody gets through.
0:05:36 We told you how that first model, the elite model, has been accumulating ever more resources
0:05:41 while educating an ever smaller share of US students.
0:05:47 Educating a very small sliver of the American population who already get tremendous resources
0:05:48 allocated to them.
0:05:51 Those elite universities are generally thriving.
0:05:55 Demand for admission has never been higher.
0:05:56 What about everybody else?
0:05:59 What about the less prestigious privates?
0:06:01 What about the four-year publics?
0:06:06 What about the community colleges and trade schools, the HBCUs?
0:06:11 Today on Freakonomics Radio, we take a look at this second model of higher ed and why,
0:06:14 for so many people, it is no longer working.
0:06:21 To see $100,000 as a debt burden is daunting.
0:06:25 We look at why men in particular are skipping college.
0:06:29 Little boy behavior doesn’t fit as well with good student behavior.
0:06:33 And we find out if the Lewis College of Business can make a comeback.
0:06:39 All we did was borrow from nursing schools and welding schools and electrical schools.
0:06:42 Do you still believe in college?
0:06:44 We’ll find out starting right now.
0:07:08 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:07:18 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:07:22 If you add up all the students at all the colleges and universities in the U.S., you’ll
0:07:25 get to roughly $17 million.
0:07:30 Fewer than 10% of them go to one of the elite schools at the top of the pyramid.
0:07:36 The majority attend what are called mid-tier public or private four-year schools.
0:07:41 About 25% attend a community college or other two-year school, although nearly half of all
0:07:48 students start out at a two-year school, and nearly 10% go to for-profit colleges.
0:07:55 Of the total undergraduate population, almost 52% are non-Hispanic white, while 20% are
0:08:02 Hispanic, around 14% are black, and a little over 7% are Asian.
0:08:04 Maybe those numbers surprise you a bit.
0:08:05 Maybe not.
0:08:08 But here’s a number that certainly surprised me.
0:08:13 Nearly 60% of all college students today are women.
0:08:18 And remember what we told you earlier, that U.S. colleges and universities have lost about
0:08:21 one and a half million students in the past several years?
0:08:24 Well, men accounted for the vast majority of that loss.
0:08:29 Well, it’s certainly a big change, but not all that unexpected.
0:08:30 That’s Morty Shapiro.
0:08:35 He is an economist who studies higher ed and he was president of Northwestern University
0:08:38 from 2009 to 2022.
0:08:45 Decades ago, Shapiro predicted that the gender makeup of universities was getting flipped.
0:08:50 Part of it was change in labor markets and change in female labor force participation
0:08:51 rates.
0:08:55 So it wasn’t that hard to predict this so-called feminization of the academy, but I’m not
0:08:56 a sociologist.
0:09:02 I can’t really tell you what’s happening to these poor men and what’s happening to
0:09:07 their image and why their college enrollment rate has not increased the way it has for
0:09:08 women.
0:09:09 I mean, are you concerned?
0:09:13 Because we do see research on the deaths of despair and so on and longevity declining
0:09:15 suicide and ODs and so on.
0:09:21 I mean, wouldn’t one argue that the gain in female students can be a strong positive,
0:09:25 but that the loss in males could be a strong negative and maybe something should be done
0:09:26 about that?
0:09:27 I agree.
0:09:30 One of the things we used to tell all the liberal arts colleges was start a football
0:09:31 team.
0:09:36 There’s sort of a cliff you can fall off once you become 60, 40 female men.
0:09:40 It becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.
0:09:45 So one reason why some really small schools have football teams is because that’s 70
0:09:46 men right there.
0:09:50 And if you’re talking about liberal arts college of 1600, you only need 800.
0:09:55 You get almost a tenth of that just from your football team.
0:10:00 When you add in your ice hockey team and men’s lacrosse, it’s so-called helmeted sports.
0:10:04 It wasn’t always the case that college men were so hard to come by.
0:10:11 If you go back to 1900 or so, there were only around 250,000 Americans enrolled in college
0:10:16 and the overall population was about 50/50 male/female.
0:10:21 Most of the men were getting bachelor’s degrees at four-year colleges, many of which
0:10:26 were all male, including all the Ivy League schools, and many of the female students were
0:10:28 in two-year teacher’s colleges.
0:10:33 At the time, education was one of the few professions open to women.
0:10:39 And around 25% of women in college back then attended women’s only colleges, most famously
0:10:44 the Seven Sisters that were meant to parallel the men’s Ivy League schools.
0:10:50 The Seven Sisters were Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and
0:10:51 Wellesley.
0:10:57 Vassar was founded to be a wonderful liberal arts institution for women who didn’t have
0:11:03 the opportunity to go to the schools that were all male at the time in 1865.
0:11:09 That again is Catherine Hill, a former president of Vassar, which is in Poughkeepsie, New York,
0:11:12 just up the river from Manhattan.
0:11:16 And it decided to go coeducational in the late ’60s.
0:11:18 The late 1960s, that is.
0:11:25 This was a time when many schools were still single-sex, particularly the ones in the Northeast.
0:11:32 And the women’s colleges and the men’s colleges were recognizing that high school students
0:11:35 were telling them they didn’t want to go to single-sex schools anymore.
0:11:41 At one time, there were more than 250 women’s colleges in the U.S. Today, there are about
0:11:42 30.
0:11:45 So the change at Vassar was pretty typical.
0:11:52 Coming out of civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, there was a real shift away from previous
0:11:55 notions of what was appropriate and not appropriate.
0:11:58 The world was just changing very rapidly.
0:12:03 Part of that change, as Morty Shapiro mentioned earlier, was that more women were joining
0:12:04 the workforce.
0:12:09 And part of the reason for this was the widespread availability of birth control.
0:12:13 But also, more women were attending college generally.
0:12:20 While the gender split was around 50/50 back when only a handful of Americans went to college,
0:12:25 that dynamic had shifted, starting in the 1930s and even more after World War II when
0:12:29 returning soldiers used the GI Bill to go to college.
0:12:34 Suddenly, male students outnumbered females two to one.
0:12:42 But over time, that heavy male imbalance began to erode and then flatten and ultimately reverse.
0:12:47 If current enrollment trends continue, we’ll soon reach the point where for every man who
0:12:51 receives a college degree, two women will do the same.
0:12:56 I think this is a huge, huge change.
0:12:57 That’s Amalia Miller.
0:13:00 She is an economist at the University of Virginia.
0:13:03 Why might more women choose to go to college than men?
0:13:06 As an economist, the way you think about it is thinking about the net benefits, the costs
0:13:08 and benefits of that decision.
0:13:13 And so the benefit side of college could be the earnings you get as a college graduate,
0:13:17 where the cost side is the earnings you don’t get that you would have gotten.
0:13:20 And it could be that that’s higher for women than for men.
0:13:24 If you think about some of the non-college jobs in the service sector that women are
0:13:27 concentrated in, these are some really low-paying jobs.
0:13:33 New collar occupations or jobs that sort of paid a decent wage that didn’t require college,
0:13:34 a lot of those were more male-dominated.
0:13:39 In other words, a man who doesn’t go to college might get a job in construction that pays
0:13:44 well, whereas a woman who doesn’t go to college would be more likely to work in retail or
0:13:47 perhaps as a home health aide.
0:13:52 So it could be that even if college women earned less than college men, it was still more worth
0:13:55 it for women because that gender gap was smaller.
0:14:01 I think the problem with that explanation, though, is it doesn’t explain the increase
0:14:06 for women compared to men in recent decades, where it doesn’t seem like blue collar work
0:14:09 has had great growth in terms of number of jobs or wages.
0:14:13 So Miller went looking for a deeper explanation.
0:14:19 She and two co-authors, Sucingua and Elliot Isaac, recently published a paper which found
0:14:23 that college may produce bigger benefits for women than men.
0:14:29 One outcome they measured was future earnings for men versus women who attended an elite
0:14:30 university.
0:14:35 There’s no effect on earnings from attending a more elite school for men once you control
0:14:40 for applications and admissions, but we do find a significant effect of school selectivity
0:14:41 on women.
0:14:46 And then when we look deeper into this effect for women, we see that it is coming from including
0:14:48 part-time and non-working women.
0:14:53 So women who attended a more selective school for college are more likely to participate
0:14:54 in the labor force.
0:15:01 So for women, we find that attending a school that is more selective leads to a 14% increase
0:15:02 in earnings.
0:15:07 In other words, the female wage premium isn’t necessarily driven by having a more lucrative
0:15:08 career.
0:15:13 It’s driven by college-educated women going from not working or working part-time to working
0:15:14 full-time.
0:15:21 So the question is, does this return to greater selectivity also apply to a return to schooling
0:15:22 at all?
0:15:24 I don’t think that that’s a crazy leap to make.
0:15:26 It’s just another logical step.
0:15:29 Miller and her co-authors found another significant result.
0:15:36 So what we find is that there’s a significant decline in women’s likelihood of being married
0:15:40 in their late 30s if they attended a more elite school for college.
0:15:45 If we think of marriage as a positive outcome, then this might suggest a bad outcome.
0:15:50 On the one hand, there’s this career advancement, but it happens at the expense of family formation.
0:15:54 So these women are less likely to marry, but when they do marry, they’re marrying men who
0:15:56 are more educated.
0:16:01 So that’s one possible explanation for the current gender gap on college campuses.
0:16:06 Women simply have more to gain by going to college, especially if they are career-oriented.
0:16:10 But Amalia Miller has another very different argument.
0:16:16 The other argument that I give when people ask me about this is you have to behave well
0:16:17 in school.
0:16:22 You have to have good grades, these cultural attitudes about good students, and then other
0:16:27 cultural attitudes about gender and sort of what’s acceptable behavior for boys and girls.
0:16:32 Typical boy behavior or behavior that for boys is socially rewarded doesn’t fit as well
0:16:34 with good student behavior.
0:16:40 This claim may resonate for anyone who has ever been a boy or parented a boy.
0:16:45 And there’s good evidence that the gender gap in education starts way before college.
0:16:52 In a 2013 paper by the economists Nicole Fortin, Philip Oriopoulos and Shelley Phipps, they
0:16:59 looked at high school GPA distribution for girls and boys from the 1980s to the 2000s.
0:17:01 Here’s what they found.
0:17:09 The most common GPA for girls shifted over that time from B to A. The boys’ GPA stayed
0:17:10 at B.
0:17:18 One label that’s been attached to this phenomenon is leaving boys behind.
0:17:25 I think the problem is the way we treat our boys in K through 12.
0:17:26 That’s Ruth Simmons.
0:17:32 She rose from a sharecropping childhood in Texas to become the president of three very
0:17:34 different institutions of higher ed.
0:17:40 Smith College in Massachusetts, a women’s school and member of the Seven Sisters, Brown
0:17:46 University in Providence, Rhode Island, a member of the Ivy League, and most recently
0:17:50 Prairie View A&M, an HBCU back in Texas.
0:17:53 Boys often get into trouble in school.
0:17:56 They get very negative messages often in school.
0:18:03 They turn away from some of the advantages of school because of those negative messages,
0:18:12 the way that we are orienting ourselves toward particular behavior of children and rewarding
0:18:18 children who are quiet and submissive and do everything that we want them to do.
0:18:24 That’s a formula for girls, because we tend to be socialized in our families to do exactly
0:18:32 that, to be obedient and to not resist what we are told to do and so forth.
0:18:37 So naturally, the one thing girls are good at is staying in school and they can keep
0:18:42 going because that’s what we’ve been told that we should do.
0:18:47 Boys are not quite the same.
0:18:51 If boys aren’t being set up to succeed in K through 12, they would follow they aren’t
0:18:54 being set up to succeed in college either.
0:18:58 And there’s another recent change in college admissions that could be exacerbating the
0:19:01 shortage of male college students.
0:19:07 Here is Zachary Blemer, an economist at Princeton who studies educational and income mobility.
0:19:13 In 1996, California passed a ballot proposition that prohibited the use of race-based affirmative
0:19:19 action at the University of California and all public universities in the state of California.
0:19:24 Consider the effect at UCLA, one of the most selective schools in the UC system.
0:19:29 So the year that affirmative action stopped, the black and Hispanic population of UCLA
0:19:30 fell by 60%.
0:19:38 That was in 1996, between 2013 and 2020, UCLA expanded by 3,000 students.
0:19:42 90% of those new spots went to women.
0:19:47 But it isn’t just black and Hispanic men who are skipping college.
0:19:52 According to a Pell Institute analysis, lower-income white men are less likely to go to college
0:19:56 than their black, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts.
0:20:02 There is one group of men who attend college at rates even higher than women.
0:20:03 Gay men.
0:20:10 More than half of all gay men in the US, 25 and older, have at least a bachelor’s degree.
0:20:15 As the Notre Dame sociologist Joel Middlemann put it, “If America’s gay men formed their
0:20:21 own country, it would be the world’s most highly educated by far.”
0:20:29 But fewer than 5% of men in the US identify as gay, so for the rest of the young men who
0:20:36 aren’t going to college but might benefit from it, what should be done?
0:20:37 Coming up after the break?
0:20:40 I mean, look, I know how hard it is.
0:20:47 What we need is some innovation that would help us educate more students at a lower cost.
0:20:49 I just need to figure out how to make it free.
0:20:53 And if you missed the earlier episodes in this college series, you can find them on
0:20:55 any podcast app.
0:20:58 While you’re there, please leave a review or a rating.
0:21:01 That’s a good way to help other people find free economics radio.
0:21:04 And if you really want to help, recommend this show to your friends and family.
0:21:15 We’ll be right back.
0:21:20 When you’re young, whether or not to attend college is one of the first big choices you
0:21:32 actually get to make.
0:21:33 That is Donald Ruff.
0:21:45 He is the president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation in New York.
0:22:04 They operate five college prep schools in New York City and one in Newark, New Jersey.
0:22:09 Their New York schools are part of the city’s Department of Education, which happens to
0:22:13 be run by the Eagle Academy’s former CEO, David Banks.
0:22:30 But as Donald Ruff tells us, his schools are different from the standard public school.
0:22:35 Another big priority is making sure their graduates get into college.
0:22:40 In New York City, nearly 60% of all public school students go straight to college, but
0:23:01 that number is much lower for Black and Hispanic students in New York and elsewhere.
0:23:06 So Eagle Academy is plainly getting results, but things have been harder recently, especially
0:23:08 with the pandemic.
0:23:13 Ruff says the young men he educates are increasingly turning down college.
0:23:14 Why?
0:23:16 Honestly, I think it’s the sticker shock.
0:23:28 I can’t speak for everyone, but I know as someone who grow up low income to see $100,000
0:23:31 as a debt burden is daunting.
0:23:33 Ruff is a New Yorker himself.
0:23:38 I actually went to public school for junior high school and I was discovered and recruited
0:23:44 by a program called the Oliver program, where they take high achieving, low income students
0:23:48 of color and provide them with a full rights scholarship to attend private school.
0:23:53 So I went to the Brooklyn French school and I ended up at Oberlin College, which was an
0:23:56 incredible experience for me as well.
0:24:00 At Oberlin, he double majored in history and African American studies.
0:24:03 I didn’t even know I was poor until I went to private school.
0:24:05 It was a shock to my system.
0:24:12 And if I’m being honest, I’ve probably lived a lot of my early years after I graduated
0:24:17 from high school and college with a level of survivor’s guilt and survivor’s remorse.
0:24:19 I don’t think success should be a lottery.
0:24:25 And when I compared my school experience with my friends at the time, there was some savage
0:24:31 inequalities, which actually fueled me to do the very work that I do today.
0:24:37 Just seeing the price of college, I remember when we were first taking a look at financial
0:24:41 aid packages and my mother was stating how a year of college was more than what she
0:24:44 made in a year.
0:24:48 And just having those type of conversations makes you think a little bit differently.
0:24:53 He says that type of conversation today among Eagle Academy students have become even more
0:24:54 intense.
0:24:58 Students are making different decisions because from an affordability standpoint, they don’t
0:25:01 believe that they could afford it.
0:25:07 Not that they’re incapable of achieving and doing well in college, but okay, four years
0:25:11 of my life, I could be earning versus accumulating all of this debt.
0:25:13 What is it really leading to?
0:25:18 Throughout this series about college, all the economists we’ve spoken with have preached
0:25:24 that a college education is perhaps the single best long run investment you could possibly
0:25:25 make.
0:25:28 But Donald Ruff’s students don’t always buy that argument.
0:25:33 They’re seeing other examples where guys who’ve gotten degrees are now underemployed
0:25:36 or unemployed, it doesn’t make sense to them.
0:25:41 A college graduate is much more likely to be employed than someone who doesn’t go to college
0:25:43 and they earn more too.
0:25:49 That said, there’s no guarantee, especially these days, around 40% of recent college graduates
0:25:55 are technically underemployed, meaning they have a job that doesn’t even require a degree,
0:25:58 which also means it probably doesn’t pay very well.
0:26:01 And there are other reasons to think about skipping college.
0:26:06 Google has been a major disruptor with their certification programs.
0:26:09 So a student who’s interested in technology, I don’t really need college, I can actually
0:26:16 earn now and get these certifications and end up with a pretty good paying job.
0:26:19 Colleges can’t continue to have these archaic degree programs.
0:26:25 They have to figure out how do they have modern credentials and certifications where the students
0:26:31 who are graduating are now pipelined into employment and there’s not a skilled deficiency.
0:26:36 And some Eagle Academy graduates tell Donald Ruff they’ve got different plans entirely.
0:26:43 Okay, listen, I can invest in cryptocurrency, I can be an Instagram influencer.
0:26:50 What we need is some innovation that would help us educate more students at a lower cost.
0:26:55 That again is the economist and former Vassar president, Catherine Hill.
0:27:01 We need to figure out how to offer a better quality education at a lower price point.
0:27:06 About 10 years ago, it seemed that had already been figured out, at least if you were watching
0:27:09 CNN.
0:27:12 The president of this new online partnership, which is what they’re calling it, Harvard
0:27:17 and MIT says, this is the biggest change in education since the printing press.
0:27:19 Is he overstating it?
0:27:20 Not in the least.
0:27:23 The way in which we educate will forever change.
0:27:25 It has forever changed.
0:27:28 Online education, it’s coming into its own.
0:27:33 A batch of startup companies were promising to make a college education accessible to
0:27:36 anyone with an internet connection.
0:27:42 One firm, Coursera began offering online courses from name brand schools like Princeton, Stanford
0:27:43 and Penn.
0:27:48 They were called MOOCs or massive open online courses.
0:27:54 As the New York Times put it in 2012, they would open higher education to hundreds of
0:27:56 millions of people.
0:28:00 They were also supposed to drive down the cost of education, which for decades has been
0:28:04 rising way faster than inflation.
0:28:08 Why have college costs increased so much?
0:28:11 In retrospect, there are a lot of reasons.
0:28:15 Many schools added layers of administration that didn’t used to exist.
0:28:20 As college itself became more popular, it also became more of a consumer good, which meant
0:28:26 competing for students by offering better dorms, better food, bigger fitness centers,
0:28:29 more extravagant extracurriculars.
0:28:34 The federal government also began making more loans available, which gave colleges the leeway
0:28:36 to raise tuition further.
0:28:42 But also, the primary mode of classroom education, a professor up front, a bunch of students
0:28:45 in their seats, that didn’t change much.
0:28:51 And therefore, higher ed didn’t take advantage of new technologies to become more productive,
0:28:54 which is what happens in most industries.
0:28:59 Colleges may hire a lot of adjunct professors to save on costs, but even so, they’re still
0:29:07 paying humans a relatively high wage to perform a task that is not becoming more efficient.
0:29:13 Economists call this cost disease, when productivity does not keep up with cost.
0:29:17 Using students online, however, that was supposed to solve this problem.
0:29:18 It was scalable.
0:29:19 It was efficient.
0:29:20 It was cheap.
0:29:21 It was perfect.
0:29:24 It was just one thing.
0:29:26 Most people don’t like it.
0:29:31 The best evidence for this was the COVID-19 shutdown.
0:29:36 The whole world went online, and education went online.
0:29:40 And we learned fundamentally that it just doesn’t work.
0:29:46 That is Pano Canellis, who used to be president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
0:29:50 Online education just doesn’t work, whether it’s for K through 12 or in higher education.
0:29:55 That may be an overstatement, but there is evidence that online schooling doesn’t do
0:29:58 what its boosters said it would.
0:30:02 Some research has shown that students who go to class in person do better on several
0:30:05 dimensions than the ones who study online.
0:30:09 The in-person students get better grades, they’re more likely to do the follow-up coursework,
0:30:11 and they’re more likely to graduate.
0:30:15 And some of these are randomized studies, so they’re not just measuring the differences
0:30:21 between the kind of students who choose in-person attendance over online.
0:30:25 And there’s another piece of evidence in favor of in-person attendance.
0:30:28 It’s what economists call revealed preferences.
0:30:33 There are some corporations around Midtown Manhattan that are not fully back in person,
0:30:34 right?
0:30:38 Miguel Urquillola is an economist at Columbia who studies higher ed.
0:30:41 On the other hand, if you go to a campus like Princeton, everyone is back in person.
0:30:45 And to me, that reveals that what they’re selling is in part a personal experience,
0:30:47 and that’s what people want to buy.
0:30:51 So if online learning isn’t the answer, what is?
0:30:54 Pano Kanellis has an idea.
0:30:59 He thinks he knows why so many fewer people are enrolling in college these days, especially
0:31:00 young men.
0:31:07 One of the main promises of a college education is that it opens your mind to new ideas, new
0:31:10 bodies of knowledge, new ways of thinking.
0:31:14 But he says that on many college campuses, that promise is not being kept.
0:31:21 I’ve spent a few decades in higher education, and I’ve had literally dozens of conversations
0:31:28 with students and faculty who have felt the walls closing in the classroom or in the ambient
0:31:30 culture of their institution.
0:31:38 The statistics are out there. 66% of students in higher education say they self-censor.
0:31:43 Self-censor, as in not speaking their minds, out of a concern they’ll be singled out as
0:31:46 intolerant or politically incorrect.
0:31:49 And yes, the statistics are out there.
0:31:54 The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology recently published research which
0:32:02 found that more than 80% of Ph.D. students were “willing to discriminate against right-leaning
0:32:03 scholars.”
0:32:08 Meanwhile, more than a third of conservative professors and Ph.D. students say they have
0:32:13 been “disciplined” or “threatened with discipline” for their views.
0:32:19 It has long been established that college administrators and faculty members lean overwhelmingly
0:32:25 left, so we shouldn’t be surprised they create environments conducive to students who do
0:32:26 the same.
0:32:32 And if you’re asking why college enrollment has been falling, especially among young men,
0:32:38 well, in addition to all the reasons we’ve already heard about, including cost, one reason
0:32:45 may be that a lot of potential college students simply feel unwelcome on most college campuses,
0:32:48 and so Pano Canellis is doing something about that.
0:32:54 The University of Austin is a university that’s in the process of being developed and built
0:32:56 in Austin, Texas.
0:32:59 It’s going to be America’s newest university.
0:33:01 And Canellis is its first president.
0:33:07 The University of Austin is presenting itself as a college devoted to liberal ideals of free
0:33:12 speech as opposed to wokeism and political correctness.
0:33:17 In 2023, the state of Texas gave them the go-ahead to award degrees.
0:33:23 With $200 million in private donations, they plan to take in their inaugural class this
0:33:28 fall, 100 students, and grow the student body to 1,000 by 2028.
0:33:31 Look, universities will never be perfect places.
0:33:37 I think what we need to do in higher education is make sure that we’re looking at these trends
0:33:45 with our eyes wide open and doing what we can to minimize the pernicious effects of
0:33:52 a culture that might be trying to disallow certain ideas or silence folks or punish especially
0:33:58 young people, students for things that they may have said that are out of tune with prevailing
0:33:59 orthodoxies.
0:34:04 I mean, there are heartbreaking stories out there, and I can’t imagine something we should
0:34:10 be taking more seriously than making sure that our students have the ability to be intellectually
0:34:18 risky, to express themselves sincerely, to be wrong, to stand corrected, to correct other
0:34:19 people.
0:34:26 That kind of robust exchange of the things that we think we know or do know or believe
0:34:30 to know, that’s how we learn both individually and as institutions.
0:34:35 But Canelo says he also wants to reform the business side of higher ed.
0:34:39 Higher education is locked in the iron triangle of finance.
0:34:43 That is that the whole financial model is built upon three points.
0:34:45 One is collecting tuition.
0:34:49 The other is philanthropy, and the third is grants that come from outside.
0:34:52 Each of those is problematic right now.
0:34:56 Tuition is rising much more rapidly than families can afford.
0:35:00 The grants and things that come from the outside are inconsistent.
0:35:02 Money is declining.
0:35:08 I think you have to radically reduce the operating expenses of the institution.
0:35:14 Every single blade of grass that’s mowed, every single sushi bar, every single fountain,
0:35:16 all of that is paid for by students.
0:35:19 Administrative costs are vastly overblown.
0:35:24 The recent article that Yale now has as many administrators as undergraduates, it’s fine.
0:35:25 They’re Yale.
0:35:26 I mean, it’s okay.
0:35:27 I don’t know what those people do.
0:35:32 Who’s the institution serving at that point?
0:35:38 Well, you know, I think there are real issues of freedom of speech and independence and
0:35:39 dialogue.
0:35:43 That again is Morty Shapiro, the former president of Northwestern University.
0:35:46 So what does he think of the new University of Austin?
0:35:48 I kind of chuckled when I saw the whole thing.
0:35:52 If you’re going to try to create a school, you probably don’t do it in the most rapidly
0:35:55 rising real estate prices in the world, Austin.
0:35:57 You know, look, I know how hard it is.
0:35:58 This is my business.
0:36:00 It’s hard to create a university.
0:36:05 It helps to have a couple hundred years of history there.
0:36:10 Whether or not it’s successful, the University of Austin is pursuing one traditional model
0:36:16 of the American University, a high-minded exploration of big ideas.
0:36:21 In concept at least, this fits into the elite competitive model of higher education.
0:36:25 So that’s only one of the models we’ve been talking about during this series.
0:36:30 What about all the other students and potential students who are looking for a more practical
0:36:32 college experience?
0:36:37 What if there was a place that combined a traditional college environment with a practical
0:36:40 certification program?
0:36:43 And what if the education was free?
0:36:44 I didn’t go to college.
0:36:48 There was no money, no money for me to go to college.
0:36:53 Coming up after the break, one man’s plan to bring free college to students in Detroit.
0:37:04 I’m Stephen Dubner, and you’re listening to Freakonomics Radio.
0:37:10 At the start of this episode, we met Duane Edwards, who lives in Detroit, but grew up
0:37:11 in Los Angeles.
0:37:14 He was the youngest of six kids raised by a single mom.
0:37:19 And he’d always been a talented artist, and he loved designing sneakers.
0:37:24 I discovered kind of late in my senior year, I wanted to be a designer, and I didn’t know
0:37:26 that you needed a portfolio.
0:37:28 My guidance counselor didn’t know that.
0:37:33 She actually discouraged me from being a designer, telling me that no black kid from Inglewood,
0:37:35 whatever design shoes for a living.
0:37:42 As someone who grew up without college as an option, if you had not had this drive and
0:37:47 talent for designing sneakers, what do you think you would have wound up doing?
0:37:52 In Inglewood, 18 is a win if I can get there alive or not in jail.
0:37:56 21, a miracle if I’m not dead or in jail.
0:38:00 I have some friends that are not here anymore, and I have some friends that are just getting
0:38:01 out.
0:38:04 That’s just part of growing up.
0:38:09 But thanks to his talent, and with the help of some teachers, Edwards took a different
0:38:10 path.
0:38:13 He went on to become one of the top shoe designers in the country.
0:38:18 He spent many years at Nike, working with Michael Jordan and Carmelo Anthony.
0:38:21 He got more than 50 design patents.
0:38:27 Along the way, he started hearing from kids who loved sneaker design as much as he did.
0:38:31 That was the first time they saw someone who looked like them, and so they were just emailing
0:38:36 me saying, “Hey, I really want to be a designer, and do you have any tips?”
0:38:42 So I saw myself and them, and I started mentoring kids, and those kids would go to college, and
0:38:47 then they would become my interns, and then they would become Nike employees, and they
0:38:52 were sitting next to me drawing shoes, professionally getting paid, and that to me mattered a whole
0:38:58 lot more than any athlete I ever worked for or any entertainer I ever worked with.
0:39:04 In 2010, after a long stretch at Nike, Edwards took a sabbatical, and he created a course
0:39:07 on shoe design at the University of Oregon.
0:39:12 That was my first time going to college with teaching, so I’d never been there as a student.
0:39:18 I crafted this two-week program, and it was two weeks, because in real time, that’s how
0:39:21 much time we had to design a shoe from start to finish.
0:39:26 And so I was like, “All right, let me design this course through the lens of either you’re
0:39:31 going to love this or hate it, because there’s so much work in this intent.”
0:39:35 After the two-week course, flew in 38 students.
0:39:40 It was 14 days, 12 to 14 hours, every day straight through.
0:39:42 We didn’t take a break, and the kids loved it.
0:39:44 They didn’t want to leave.
0:39:46 Edwards loved it, too.
0:39:49 He wound up quitting his job at Nike.
0:39:55 In partnership with the University of Oregon, he started the Pencil Footwear Design Academy.
0:39:57 That’s P-E-N-S-O-L-E.
0:40:02 Yeah, so I was born with the gift of drawing that I could see.
0:40:06 Ever since I was a little person, I was using a number two pencil.
0:40:10 When I wanted to create an academy of my own, I started thinking of names, and I was like,
0:40:12 “Edwards Academy doesn’t sound right.
0:40:14 Duane Academy doesn’t sound right.”
0:40:19 And so I looked up the word “pencil,” and the phonetic spelling was P-E-N-S-O-L.
0:40:23 And then I was like, “Oh, well, close to Seoul as in sneakers.”
0:40:27 So I added an E on to it, and ultimately, it’s the marriage between the instrument that
0:40:30 I use and the industry that I use it in.
0:40:34 Before long, Edwards was invited to bring his program to some of the most established
0:40:39 design schools, MIT, Parsons, the Colding School in Denmark.
0:40:44 And so I was just immersed into curriculum and education and all these things, and then
0:40:48 I started to realize school is all backwards.
0:40:51 It’s just backwards.
0:40:52 What do you mean by that?
0:40:58 So, I researched the beginning of education, and it was a place that you would go to learn
0:41:00 a skilled trade and get a job.
0:41:01 Simple, right?
0:41:02 Okay.
0:41:05 Then colleges came, and then universities came, and it became a bigger mess.
0:41:12 The part that was missing was the relationship between the school, the student, and the industry.
0:41:17 School has become about money and not about what the kid is being taught and what happens
0:41:20 when they graduate and can they get a job.
0:41:28 As a hiring manager for 25 years, I’m seeing 500, 600 portfolios every year of some kid
0:41:34 that has a mortgage payment because they graduated, and there’s no way in hell they’re getting
0:41:35 a job.
0:41:38 The school, the student, and the industry.
0:41:42 They were connected at the very, very beginning, and the more we’ve went into this world of
0:41:47 education, they’ve become further and further disconnected.
0:41:51 With the Pencil Academy, Edwards wanted to reconnect all the actors.
0:41:54 He set to work designing a different business model.
0:41:58 One big focus was cutting the costs and not by a little bit.
0:42:00 I knew I wanted it to be free.
0:42:03 I just need to figure out how to make it free.
0:42:07 So, was the answer to that basically have it funded by industry partners or potential
0:42:08 industry partners?
0:42:11 Yeah, because they’re the beneficiaries of the talent.
0:42:16 So far, Pencil has partnered with shoe and apparel firms, including Nike, of course,
0:42:22 but also Adidas and New Balance, as well as Jimmy Chu and Versace and brands like Herman
0:42:23 Miller too.
0:42:26 I went to corporations and I asked them, “What do you want?”
0:42:30 They said that we would want the kids to be mature.
0:42:34 We would want them to be responsible, and then we want them to have the skills and knowledge
0:42:38 to be able to work as soon as we get them in.
0:42:41 The problem was these kids were coming in immature.
0:42:44 They were coming in not understanding time management.
0:42:46 They were coming in not understanding professionalism.
0:42:49 They weren’t taught those things in school.
0:42:52 So Edwards taught professionalism.
0:42:53 Simple things.
0:42:56 Show up at 9 o’clock, 8.45 is on time.
0:42:58 If you’re late, you do 50 push-ups per minute.
0:43:00 Get out of here at school.
0:43:01 At school.
0:43:05 And then it got to a point where the kids were like, “This is not fair.”
0:43:06 So they were like, “Well, what about other options?”
0:43:10 Actually, a really good idea came from one of our employees who was a former student.
0:43:15 He was like, “You should make the students, before the final presentation, explain to
0:43:20 the brand how often they were late and how many minutes they were late.”
0:43:21 So now they have a choice.
0:43:22 Push-ups.
0:43:30 Or you would admit your flaws to the person that’s trying to hire you.
0:43:34 The vast majority of Pencil students so far are young men.
0:43:40 If Edwards can grow Pencil like he wants to grow it, that might shrink the male college
0:43:42 student deficit a little bit.
0:43:48 But where was he going to build this academy that offered a free education and a job afterwards?
0:43:55 Well, he had recently learned about an abandoned college that used to train women for good jobs
0:43:59 in a thriving industry, the Lewis College of Business in Detroit.
0:44:03 A friend of mine, he lives in Detroit, and we were just having a conversation, and he’s
0:44:07 like, “Yeah, Detroit used to have an HBC, I’m like, “Wait, wait, stop, time out, what?”
0:44:13 It took some doing and some legal maneuvering, but with the help of Michigan politicians,
0:44:15 Duane Edwards reopened Lewis College.
0:44:20 It is the first time a historically black school has been reopened.
0:44:25 Edwards thinks the HBCU designation will be particularly helpful in cultivating black
0:44:26 design talent.
0:44:31 We’re still so far behind within the design industry, multiple industries.
0:44:36 I did a study like three years ago, it’s probably worse now, but three years ago, there’s 96
0:44:39 design schools and colleges in the United States.
0:44:46 Average enrollment is less than 10% of African-Americans, 2% graduate, and I would argue 1% of the two
0:44:50 is not good enough to hire anyway, so it’s really 1%.
0:44:53 And that’s the number Edwards wants to raise.
0:44:58 The new college is called the Pencil Lewis College of Business and Design.
0:45:00 Classes have just started.
0:45:05 For now, the program is still relatively short, but they’re growing.
0:45:09 Here this year, state and city leaders came together for the opening of the school’s
0:45:14 Foot Locker Footwear Creation Studio, which mimics a corporate design office.
0:45:18 So we started off at two weeks, now we’re five weeks to 12 weeks, and then we’re going
0:45:20 to grow into two years.
0:45:24 And so we partner with the brands, and when I say we partner with the brands, if you’re
0:45:29 an Adidas and you want to do a program with us, all right, we sit down and craft the curriculum
0:45:35 together, exactly what you want the kids to learn, how many students you want, exactly
0:45:38 what professions you want them to learn in.
0:45:42 So we co-create everything with the brand, so everything we do is really customized for
0:45:44 every person that we work with.
0:45:49 Unlike a lot of college programs these days, the goal here is concrete.
0:45:54 Each of those programs lead to some form of internship for the students, for a select
0:45:59 number of students in that class, whenever we have programs, at the end of it, there’s
0:46:03 kids are getting jobs at the end of those programs.
0:46:07 The school’s graduates have already gone on to work for companies like Nike, Adidas,
0:46:09 and Carhart.
0:46:14 Last year, they launched a three-year partnership with PepsiCo to help develop black designers.
0:46:18 Edwards does not see himself as any sort of college revolutionary.
0:46:24 He sees himself as someone who realized that college has become too expensive, too inaccessible,
0:46:30 and too divorced from its original goals, and then he found a way to do something about
0:46:31 it.
0:46:35 All we did was borrow from nursing schools and welding schools and electrical schools
0:46:37 and carpentry.
0:46:40 We didn’t really invent anything.
0:46:44 Our roots are in those jobs that built this country, right?
0:46:47 So I do think education is headed for a shift.
0:46:54 It is headed from the traditional way of doing things into a more entrepreneurial, more corporate
0:47:01 structure that is more geared towards ROIs and pure career development.
0:47:06 I do think that that is where we’re headed.
0:47:08 Do you think that’s where we’re headed?
0:47:10 Do you like that direction?
0:47:14 I’d love to hear what you thought about this episode and this whole series.
0:47:17 Freakonomous Radio goes back to school.
0:47:21 Tell us what you liked, what you didn’t, what we missed, what you’d like to hear in the
0:47:22 future.
0:47:27 Also, how do you feel in general about these occasional series we produce?
0:47:33 All your feedback is welcome, always, at radio@freakonomics.com.
0:47:37 Coming up next time on the show, there is something that most of us do all day, every
0:47:42 day that we think is good for us, but it is not.
0:47:46 It turns out the faster people switch attention, the greater is the number.
0:47:52 The research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you’re trying to multitask,
0:47:54 just the opposite of what you think.
0:47:58 Why do we humans spend so much time trying to act like computers?
0:48:01 There isn’t a sort of block your bus, like we could build that.
0:48:02 Should we build that?
0:48:03 I don’t know that we should.
0:48:06 That’s next time on the show.
0:48:10 Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.
0:48:13 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:48:18 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app and also at Freakonomics.com where we
0:48:21 publish transcripts and show notes.
0:48:26 This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski with help from Dalvin Aboashi.
0:48:31 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:48:36 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars,
0:48:41 Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neal Karuth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:48:42 and Teo Jacobs.
0:48:45 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:48:48 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:48:51 As always, thank you for listening.
0:48:57 The way that they go to school, you don’t go to work two days a week for a couple hours
0:48:58 every day.
0:48:59 Hey, speak for yourself.
0:49:00 I’m pretty lazy.
0:49:13 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:49:15 (upbeat music)
0:49:17 you
Educators and economists tell us all the reasons college enrollment has been dropping, especially for men, and how to stop the bleeding. (Part 3 of our series from 2022, “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)
- SOURCES:
- Zachary Bleemer, assistant professor of economics at Princeton University and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- D’Wayne Edwards, founder and President of Pensole Lewis College.
- Catharine Hill, former president of Vassar College; trustee at Yale University; and managing director at Ithaka S+R.
- Pano Kanelos, founding president of the University of Austin.
- Amalia Miller, professor of economics at the University of Virginia.
- Donald Ruff, president and C.E.O. of the Eagle Academy Foundation.
- Morton Schapiro, professor of economics and former president of Northwestern University.
- Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University.
- Miguel Urquiola, professor of economics at Columbia University.
- RESOURCES:
- “What Gay Men’s Stunning Success Might Teach Us About the Academic Gender Gap,” by Joel Mittleman (The Washington Post, 2022).
- “We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One,” by Pano Kanelos (Common Sense, 2021).
- “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” by Eric Kaufmann (Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, 2021).
- “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’,” by Douglas Belkin (The Wall Street Journal, 2021).
- “Community Colleges and Upward Mobility,” by Jack Mountjoy (NBER Working Paper, 2021).
- “Elite Schools and Opting In: Effects of College Selectivity on Career and Family Outcomes,” by Suqin Ge, Elliott Isaac, and Amalia Miller (NBER Working Paper, 2019).
- “Leaving Boys Behind: Gender Disparities in High Academic Achievement,” by Nicole M. Fortin, Philip Oreopoulos, and Shelley Phipps (NBER Working Paper, 2013).
- EXTRAS:
- “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- “‘If We’re All in It for Ourselves, Who Are We?’” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).