Is College Worth It? Re-Imagining Higher Education | Janine Davidson | TEDxMSUDenver

[Music] I am what's known as a non-traditional president that's right I took a very different path to get to where I am today at Metropolitan State University of Denver and this TED stage I began my career in the US Air Force this is me as a c-130 pilot I must have been 25 years old flying somewhere over the Pacific this is the beginning of about a 25 or 30 year journey of me climbing a very different ladder than most university presidents instead of being a professor and then climbing the ladder into university administration I climbed into a very different administration the Obama administration this is me a few years back as the Undersecretary of the Navy for those of you don't know much about the military that's kind of a pretty high position one of the top positions in the Pentagon actually the number two position civilian appointed by the president for the United States Navy so you might ask you know why would somebody like that want to come here and have a job like this well the short answer is I got fired [Laughter] like all of us in the administration we had to move on but that's just why I left but why did I come here the truth is 2016 was a bit of a wake-up call for me personally I had been climbing this ladder I had been focused externally on America's role in the world and what I realized during that year during that election year was that something else was happening in this country that I hadn't really noticed well I hadn't paid as much attention to but other people had been there was a group of economists led by this guy Raj Chetty out of Stanford that put some research together to demonstrate that there actually was something happening in this country and it was the fading of the American dream now this chart shows that it actually wasn't just a fiction or something people felt it was something that was real if you were born in the 1940s the baby boomer generation had a 90% chance of doing better than your parents that was sort of the definition of the American dream if you're born in the 80s and those are the Millennials today you had a 50% chance you can say well so you know the economy changed and you know post-world war ii era or whatever else but there's something else got my attention to that was in their report and that's the what I would call the big American dream the chance that if you were at the bottom part of the socio-economic scale if you were poor what are your chances of getting up into the higher reaches of our economy and in America today your chances are only 7.5 percent which sounds pretty bad but here's the kicker in Canada 13.5 percent so I'm not cool with that right I mean Canada is kicking our ass in the American dream like how did that happen right so I mean a lot of dialogue and debate over this issue ensued that I was reading about and a lot of people pointed to the elite universities in this country and they said you know there are more people at those universities and the top 1% than there are in the entire bottom 16 that's not cool we need to get more people in to those schools so that they can achieve the American dream that's pretty good argument but I kind of took a different tack I came here instead MSU Denver is what's called a regional comprehensive University and it's open access and what does that mean it means that if you grew up poor if you grew up one of those high schools that wasn't exactly college prep if your parents didn't have the kind of money to get to send you to those Gucci SAT courses so that you could up your scale and get into those so-called elite schools you could still come to a place like MSU Denver by passion by purpose and actually as it happens by law we will take you and what that means is that people like Theodore DeWeese who grew up low-income first in his family to ever go to college didn't quite know what he wanted to do wasn't very well prepped came to came to this school he had to take remedial math he had to work hard in an outside job and an auto shop and it took him just over six years to graduate but he did magna laude so it wasn't about that he wasn't capable and said he wasn't as prepared as he might have been because of his background and today he's the vice dean at Johns Hopkins University one of the top cancer doctors in the world so that's the kind of thing that happens at schools like this and these kinds of schools it's not just here there there are a number of them around the country and they're right under your noses that's the kind of thing that happens that can happen but there are some challenges that I've learned as I've been told being a university president is the hardest job in the world and one of the things that makes it hard is what people say about higher ed okay so people say yeah it's getting expensive it's out of touch and here's the one I really don't like and you know college it's not really for everyone you know maybe not everybody knew what you know is that what you tell your kids I know it's not what the rich people tell their kids no I know that because some of them are going to jail for spending five hundred thousand dollars to get their kids in the side-door those other schools now why are they doing that right because we know the truth as my dad likes to say you're entitled to your opinions but you're not entitled to your facts and it just is the fact that in today's highly globalized information oriented complex economy and society you actually need a higher degree in order to make it not only that you are exponentially more likely to make more money you're gonna make by some research over a million dollars more in your lifetime you have better health outcomes you're gonna be much better off in your retirement so all those things lead to the obvious conclusion that you should go to school okay but it's also a good idea for you go to school for society because let me so well I shouldn't have to pay for other people to go well it turns out that the Lumina Foundation has has demonstrated that not only is it good for you and your own economy you're an economic purpose but it's also good for America you are much more likely to pay into the system than to take from the system and here's a good one you're 4.9 times less likely to go to jail that's a big deal it's not trivial actually turns out Fitch you know we spend a lot more money on jail than we do on college so our investment strategy is a little bit twisted now let me walk you through a little bit of the math okay in nineteen in the 1980s it costs 800 dollars a year to go to a university of public university at 3 dollars and 10 cents an hour which was the minimum wage that meant you needed to work 6.5 weeks in the year in order to pay your tuition or 8.7 part-time now that's a summer job folks and that's how a lot of us did it that's how a lot of the Fortune 500 CEOs did it actually but they're kids twenty eighteen ten thousand two hundred thirty dollars a year $7.25 an hour means you got to work 35 weeks to pay just your tuition and nothing else so what does that mean it means there literally are not enough hours in the day weeks in the year to work your way through school like people used to do right those are the numbers so how did we get here well it turns out that all of us who sort of thought we put ourselves through school in the 1980s we had an angel investor and it's called the American people paying 60 to 80 percent depending on your state of the tuition and the students paid the rest but today in Colorado its flipped that's the primary reason college is so expensive today is the disinvestment the systematic disinvestment that we have made in our in our society I'm not okay with that either frankly and we also not only have we disinvested I mean it's but we basically pulled the ladder up behind us we achieved the American dream turned around pulled the ladder up on our own kids right and then we do something else that's even worse or not not even worse but also it complicates it is that we tell them they still have to do it the same way we did it we still tell them there's this four-year path and you need to work really hard and it's not just people and parents it's policy the basically citizens in scholarship money that says you have to be in school full-time when we know like I just showed you that the math doesn't work so what we've are telling our kids our students and they're not just kids anymore we're giving them a false choice you can either quit your job so you can go full time or you can you know or or you you you're not gonna make it in time well what is in time right four years or six years you can have a six year path and you can actually do pretty well you can work along the way right and then when you graduate follow me on this take a little bit longer than four years work along the way now you graduate with less debt and a job job skills or you go for years maybe cram it into that mop that model forces you to take out more day that all works if the parents are paying right I know some parents in the audience we're saying wait a second I want that kid out in four years well if you're paying good for you and you're probably right get your kid out as soon as possible but that is not the reality for the vast majority of Americans today okay so what can we do a couple things number one let's fix this okay legislators taxpayer let's reinvest in our future okay number two push back on this narrative that college doesn't matter College does matter we need it for our country to be competitive we need it for a civil society to be robust and healthy and everybody needs an opportunity because that's the American Way number three calm down just breathe through your nose a little bit stop trying to cram these students into this four year model that doesn't work for them stop telling them that they're not doing it right they're working their butts off we're the ones that aren't doing it right we're the ones that aren't telling them the right way to do it we're the ones that make your guys so if you're an employer out there partner with schools like ours get left of the graduation timeline and help students along their way give them two ition assistants give them flexible work hours and if you're a university craft different kinds of pathways we can do this if you're a donor we think that full-time requirement for your student because most of them are working 30 to 40 hours a week and why I just told you about how the math doesn't work so what I'm saying is join me on this mission it's going to take all of us to toss that ladder back down for the next generation it's gonna take all of us to ensure that the American Dream isn't just a dream but that it's a possibility and that is what is worth fighting for thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 30,929

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Dreams, Higher education

Id: Do92KeSE7jE

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 24 2019