The College Crisis: Heads of Dartmouth & Berkeley Debate the Decline of US Universities
I was just sitting here contemplating how I’m gonna pay back all my student loans. I’ve applied to over 300 jobs. I don’t have a job. Student loan debt just reached an all-time high: 1.48 trillion dollars as of June of this year. A historic drop in US college enrollment.
We exist to educate, to teach you how to think not what to think. We’d better be thinking about big transitions or transformations, if I can use the word, because there’s a lot of new competition coming into our market.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and Dartmouth President Sian Beilock.
Hello, sir. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much. Hi. Nice to see you. Good to see you. Hi. Good to see you. Thanks for being here. Nice to meet in person. Nice to see you.
Yes. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. All right. All right. Big green. Let’s not forget the big green. Welcome.
Okay, so what an interesting time to lead a university in America. So many things to talk about, but I wanted to start with the premise that student loan debt seems to be a challenge on the young population, the emerging working population today.
At the same time, government research funding seems to be getting cut back, and there seem to be questions about the administrative overhead fees that are getting paid.
What is the business model of the university today? The revenue and the expenses? What does it look like going forward from your point of view? How are you planning for that? Let’s just start with that broad picture about the business model and how it’s changing.
There’s a lot to that question. I’ll start, and Sian will certainly have lots to contribute.
You know, at the top level, if we think about how we sustainably provide the fundamental and translational research that we’re so good at, that we’re built for, the education, really transformative educational experiences that many of you have had in these great universities.
So, one way to think about that is:
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On the research side, if there is less federal funding coming in over time — and I think that’s a good bet.
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Can we partner more with industry?
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Are there other sources?
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Is there a way to gear philanthropy even more toward the kinds of research that we need to make sure we’re doing?
So we are thinking about what that bundle, that funding model looks like on the research side and on the education side as well.
You mentioned debt as an issue that’s become prominent. I think what you would find, whether at Dartmouth or at Berkeley, is that if you’re coming to one of these institutions from a lower-income family, you’re probably paying no tuition and many of them are leaving with very little debt.
So to say there are all these higher education institutions and then to talk about averages, I think you would be surprised at how much support lower-income students are getting.
Yeah, and I would just add to that, that I don’t think education is one size fits all.
At a place like Dartmouth, which I would talk about as a different kind of Ivy, it is cheaper to go to Dartmouth if you’re lower or middle income now than it was 10 years ago. And that’s because of the philanthropy that we receive from amazing alums and families.
And that is what we want to do. We want to make institutions a place where anyone can go, regardless of background, bring the best and brightest together and send them off without a huge debt burden.
We package without loans; a third of our students go for free and they come out on average making more than they would otherwise if they hadn’t gone to a school like Dartmouth.
But I think it comes down to the institutions having some responsibility for putting out students and making sure that they’re not serving them in education that then they can’t find jobs in.
And so, as we think about loan burdens and others, I do believe the institutions have a responsibility to their students and I think we have to do a lot more in talking about ROI (Return on Investment) than we do right now.
So, in that case, though…
Sorry, let me just ask one follow-up to that. Does that mean that we have too many universities in the United States and they charge too much generally?
So, you guys are leading two of the top institutions in the United States.
Are all of the second tier, the third tier, the fourth tier that are providing perhaps negative ROI on the cost of their education, do they need to kind of get shut down or reformed? What’s the future of that?
I think if you aren’t thinking about the ROI and that is part of what you’re delivering, it’s a fair question to ask.
And I also think that we’ve pushed too many people to think that college is the end-all, be-all.
There are different ways to be successful in this country.
I certainly think there’s a place for an amazing, elite education like Dartmouth if we are teaching students how to think and not what to think. But the idea that everyone needs to go to a four-year college or university, I think that’s outdated.
Let me ask you about different degrees and loans and the risks that you take. I mean, $70,000 a year tuition, but you’re not on the hook for it. Students who take these loans are on the hook for it and their brains are not fully developed. Would you?
I can confirm this, okay? Well, the neuroscience data suggests that your front of the cortex isn’t developed. Yes, 25 years old. Boys a little bit later than girls, by the way. Right, and you can’t.
- I did okay. I went to Fordham, I did okay.
The point I’m trying to make here is, shouldn’t you, the university, be on the hook for these loans? And shouldn’t you be responsible for the outcomes for these students?
And would you be in support of having the loans and the amount of the loans match the desirability of the degree and its ability to monetize in the post-graduation? Or said differently, would you guys underwrite the loans?
“Yeah.”
Look, I think we do at Dartmouth because we don’t, our students are packaged without loans. They don’t take out loans. And in fact, for a student in a middle-income family, lower and middle-income family, it’s about $5,000 a year to go to Dartmouth. So we do underwrite in that way.
Now, you asked the question about other institutions where students are coming out with high debt and low ROI. I think it is fair to ask what share of responsibility the institution should take. And I do think that that’s part of the reforms that we need to think about in higher ed writ large.
So you’re in favor of it?
“I’m in favor of the institutions having some responsibility. But, and at Dartmouth, we take that responsibility very seriously.”
Do you think they should take responsibility? Should you take responsibility for the outcomes?
Well, the word responsibility, I’m an economist, is a responsibility the financial liability at the end of the day? Or, as people have been saying, look, if we are not providing an economic pathway for our students on average at Berkeley, you’re talking about Berkeley now or Dartmouth, you know, that people will stop coming and they will stop taking loans. So that market mechanism is working pretty well as it is. And we are producing really wonderful outcomes.
I think the earlier question about what about, you know, more than 1,000 higher ed institutions in this country, and I think there is pressure on the whole system. But we are certainly making sure we have a brand new program called Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program. And so we are launching lots of new things just to make sure that we are providing that kind of support.
I’d push back and say I don’t think the market’s working exceptionally well because I think students are coming out overburdened with loans without the kind of job prospects that we have responsibility for.
What would happen if we ended the federal student loan program?
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. What I don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. And that there are student loan programs that are really helpful to some students in terms of being able to go to the school they want and to get the education they want.
Is DEI the bathwater? Let me ask you guys actually a question. What is the correlation between DEI and scholarship? Is there one?
I don’t think having a diversity of thought and thinking about merit are mutually exclusive. I think that’s a false dichotomy.
We were the first Ivy League to bring the SAT back at Dartmouth and many of our peers followed. And the reason is we looked at the data and what we found was that it was a great equalizer in finding students from lower income backgrounds and higher income backgrounds who are succeeding in something that’s less actually susceptible to financial input like letters of rec and what you did for the summer.
And a better way for us to find lower income students who are excelling where they are but maybe don’t have the prep or the background.
So I think it’s a false dichotomy that there was no impact to the quality of the actual scholarship, what the professors taught, the language that was used, all this concept of microaggressions, all this stuff that got in the way of teaching math and science.
You don’t think that happened?
No, I think that we have to focus on our core subjects and merit, but I think the idea that I believe in diversity.
I think we should have a diversity of people at the table from lived experience to political ideology. I think we have better outcomes if we can sit together and push at each other.
And I have conservative views on my campus and more liberal views on my campus. And I have students who come from veteran families and students who come from the middle of the country and students who come from the coast. Bringing people together with different perspectives, allowing them to push at each other, you get the best outcomes.
And do you notice that the schools veered away from that or did we spend any period of time, I’m just curious, veering away from what you just said or no?
Yeah.
Is there nothing to see here or is everything fine?
Of course, no.
I mean, I think I’d be the first one to tell you that I think higher education has a responsibility to reform from within.
What is the reform that, what happened?
I think we lost sight of what our mission was.
We’re educational institutions.
We’re not political institutions.
We’re not social advocacy organizations.
How did it happen, Sian?
Thank you.
How did it happen?
And just to say, when we lose sight of that mission, people don’t trust what we produce.
100%.
Whether it’s the students or the knowledge.
How did it happen?
You know, there’s a lot of theories for what exactly went wrong.
I think having strong leadership and being clear about what your values are is a really important part of this.
I spent much of my academic career at the University of Chicago and I think that’s a place that was very clear about the fact that institutional neutrality is the way to get the best outcomes.
That we don’t shout out, that we don’t shout down speakers, that we don’t set up encampments that declare a space for one ideology.
Those are all things we’ve been pushing at Dartmouth and we are excited about where we are going and the outcomes, but we have work to do.
Rich, how should I end up?
Same at Berkeley?
Same at Berkeley?
How are we doing at Berkeley, Rich?
Hey, no, beware the caricature problem because Berkeley undergraduates produce more funded new businesses than the undergraduates at any other universities.
We lift more people further up the economic ladder than any other university in the country.
And so the caricature problem is very real here.
Berkeley, I have been saying very publicly that we need to, I’m agreeing with what she just said, that we need to move in the direction of view, of institutional neutrality.
I’m talking about viewpoint diversity all the time.
Do we have some getting better to do?
You better believe we do.
We were thinking we were so tolerant.
I think we weren’t very tolerant of viewpoint diversity.
And we have a new course called Openness to Opposing Views.
It got launched this summer.
- 5,000 people have signed up for it.
We have something called the Berkeley Liberty Initiative.
It is exploding on campus.
Do we have people on all sides of the spectrum?
We sure do.
But people keep pointing to one side of the spectrum.
It’s like, look what’s going on at today’s Berkeley.
And how should Chamath or I explain to our Asian daughters or sons if they don’t make it into one of these schools because you have to admit somebody for diversity who got lower grades and a lower SAT score?
Or how do we explain that?
We don’t admit in that way.
Nor do we.
We’re looking for students with great scores, great grades, and who have grit and ambition and allow us to bring a class together where people can push and make better ideas.
Sorry, it’s been the law since 1996 in the state of California.
We can’t use race or gender or affirmative action.
It’s literally illegal.
We get audited for this all the time.
So if that’s what you meant by your question, we don’t do it.
And it’s part of the California Master Plan for higher education, that a third of our incoming class every year are community college transfers.
They’re grittier.
They’re older.
They’re more first gen.
If that’s the diversity you’re worried about, then I think we have a different view.
I’m talking broader, not just to your universities, but to what we’ve seen at other universities.
Perhaps Harvard would fall into this category or others.
And, you know, we do think about that.
What are we explaining to our kids in terms of?
Or maybe the general question, what Jason is trying to say is,
“What message does that give the broader American student and the broader American parent about what is actually happening in higher ed when a case like that gets litigated to the Supreme Court?”
Look, again, in a place of viewpoint diversity, you can have different views on affirmative action, and we have different views of that on our campus.
Our goal, and as we’ve always done at Dartmouth, is we’re looking for the best and brightest students.
And that’s not only just a test score or a grade, because that doesn’t tell the whole story, but we’re certainly bringing students together based on all of the things they do, and we’re not picking students to fit any sort of quota or system.
And the University of California has effectively been aligned with that decision since 1997.
Tell us about the growth of administrators versus professors. There’s another sort of common, maybe it’s an accurate statement or a misconception, that many of these elite institutions in America have been overwrought by administrators. And they get in the way, they gum up the system, they have all these ideas, they turn out to be idiots, ideas are idiotic. That’s a theory.
Have you seen that play out at your two fine institutions, or nothing to see there either? Do you want to go first?
I will start. We, for years, and we have further to go, but we have been talking about bureaucratic burden. We actually have an initiative, and we just call it bureaucratic burden, and there is too much of it at Berkeley.
Berkeley’s a very, very large organization with lots and lots of people. So, as we think about how do we make some of the hard decisions for making things faster? And we’ve been working very, very hard at that.
The clock speed of the world is going up so fast, and the clock speed of these institutions’ pace for change. That gap is widening, and we need to get better at getting better.
So, I promise you, with AI and many other things, it’s like, well, academic advising, how is that going to change with AI? It’ll change a lot. We’re going to always need human academic advisors, in my view, but that world is going to change a lot.
How do you navigate what’s on campus?
Last point is, you know, when you talk about the mental health of our students, I think if you went back to when you and I were undergraduates at our universities, the idea that the university would help people with, like, scaled mental health services, they weren’t there. They are there now. So, you could say you shouldn’t be doing that, but the expectations of what we are providing have risen quite a bit.
Yeah, and I’ll say that I think it’s a totally fair question, and we always need to be thinking about moving our resources more towards the academic enterprise. I mean, Dartmouth is a place where you’re in a classroom with a faculty member and six to 20 students. It’s a very special thing that doesn’t happen at all institutions.
But we also have a lot more compliance that we have to deal with that’s come in from government over the years that we have to staff up to deal with. And I like the idea of rethinking that relationship in a way that allows us all to do our work better.
Let’s talk about, for one second, what President Trump has done with his settlements with Columbia and the proposed ongoing thing with Harvard. There’s going to be some settlement.
Just walk us through what the implications of that are and the cascade effect and the waterfall as it trickles through to other institutions and whether you guys will have to be party to something or what that means.
Look, I believe in the fierce independence of our educational institutions, and I worry that if we are swaying in one direction or another based on who is in office, then we don’t have the trust of the American people. And I think we failed in some ways to show that we could self-regulate and do that ourselves.
But the goal in my mind is to get back to a place where it’s clear that universities aren’t political organizations, aren’t taking a position, that we are focused on bringing the best and brightest to go out and contribute to our democracy, and we can do that ourselves.
Rich?
Yeah, and I think that, you know, if you look at trust and confidence and when it started to diminish across all kinds of institutions, but including higher ed, you know, that predated by quite a bit the election, which was less than a year ago. So I don’t want to confound things where they really shouldn’t be confounded.
Why have we been losing trust and confidence? To grossly oversimplify:
- Cost
- Career
- Culture
And we could go into each of those and talk about it. The cost thing came up, you know, are the career opportunities there? And by culture, it sort of have things got too progressive or not a tolerance enough of viewpoint diversity. Those are all reasonable things to talk about.
But so I think part of the questions that are being asked under this administration and even before that, many of them, it’s like, yeah, we need to be more reflective. I just said, I think there’s too little viewpoint diversity.
Let’s go to culture.
David, you know, you had a great career at Stanford, and that was during the politically correct era. And then we saw safe spaces, trigger words, and students feeling they were being harmed by words. I’m curious what your thoughts are on culture on campus from your perspective, having lived through it, because this does seem to reemerge every couple of decades.
Well, political correctness never ended. It just got renamed. I mean, I think they renamed it woke. There may have been some other things in between.
You know, Peter Thiel and I wrote an article for Stanford magazine back in, I think it was 1995, so 30 years ago, The piece called The Case Against Affirmative Action was basically making the case for completely colorblind admissions, having it be strictly based on merit and not taking race into consideration. And obviously, that argument did not prevail and win the day because we had the Supreme Court case a couple of years ago that basically said that, I think it was at least Harvard, I don’t want to speak for every college, but basically was still engaging in racial discrimination.
So I think, you know, that article or that argument clearly was losing in practice for 30 years until the Supreme Court reached that decision. So I think this is why there’s a lot of skepticism on these issues. And I think you have a wave of presidents, and I think leadership matters, coming to the forefront and talking about what we need to do in this space.
At my inauguration two years ago, I just finished my second year, and I’m the third longest-serving Ivy president right now. Just a side note. There’s been a bit of turnover. A little bit.
So tell us, like, did you watch the Claudine Gay testimony, and what did you think when you were watching that train wreck happen? Yeah, what was going on in the group chat? While it was hurtling in the Ivy group chat, as the train was hurtling into the brick wall.
Look, I mean, I think we have a responsibility to be different kinds of campuses. And the testimony, I think, was an outcome of being a campus that wasn’t protecting the people, wasn’t inclusive, and wasn’t calling balls and strikes when we need to.
And we’ve been very clear at Dartmouth that we value free expression, but your free expression can’t rob others, which means no shouting speakers down and no taking over parts of space and declaring it for one ideology. That’s not free expression. It’s just John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of spheres of influence. Just don’t intersect with others.
But let me just ask one another.
No, I just want to follow on that.
Rich, isn’t the, like, best part of Berkeley shouting over the speakers? I’m trying to get through traffic over there sometimes, and you’ve got a thousand students on the freeway. It’s, like, kind of the tradition.
There’s a difference between free speech, protest, and protest, and stopping speech, right? I think that’s a really important distinction, and it’s really important for leaders to be clear.
- Protest is fine.
- I have protests outside my office all the time.
- I have students chalking messages.
That’s fine.
But the problem is when one person’s free speech takes precedence over another. And nobody’s disagreeing with that. The heckler’s veto is something we talk a lot about. We are coming down on people. It’s not appropriate, right?
So, people are outspoken. People are, you know, that’s part of Berkeley’s tradition. I will often say to people, “free speech university, hundreds of ways and places to express your free speech rights.” And no more tents. And no more blocking, say, their gate.
So, it’s sort of like, look, we need parameters that help this to be as constructive as possible. But the John Stuart Mill marketplace for ideas, we’re trying to keep it as open as we can. And that is something I’m just going to, I worry about.
The idea for our faculty and our community, the idea that we’re going into a world where there are acceptable questions and unacceptable questions.
That’s a bad problem. That’s a problem. That’s 1984. That’s a problem.
But going upstream, and I just want to go upstream with you guys for a second. Where is this coming from? And what’s going on in K through 12?
Yeah, I think we don’t talk about K through 12 enough. I think we really have to go back. Our students are landing on our campus without having civics, without having practice engaging in difficult conversations.
I mean, I think we really have to move backwards and not just think about the university setting because we’re getting them much later. And we train all of our students at Dartmouth, go through Dartmouth Dialogues, to learn how to have conversations with people you disagree with. I believe it’s like a muscle. You have to train it through practice.
Are they showing up basically just unprepared? A lot of them through COVID didn’t have these skills. And we’ve seen this in different ways where you, at one point when we were in school, if you had a fight with someone, you’d have it face-to-face. Then it went to text messaging. Now it goes to you leaving a long voicemail on someone’s voice memo and then not even engaging.
And if anyone who has teenagers out there, when I tell my 14-year-old to pick up the phone and call someone, “what are you talking about?” You know, we have to get those muscles back. And a university setting, a college setting, is the place to do it. We’re not just about knowledge transfer. We’re about forming the identities of our future leaders. Well, to Friedberg’s point, though, I just want to ask the point of question. I think it came out today, but high schoolers are graduating woefully unprepared. It’s not just the skills of debate. This is fundamental math, science, English. They can’t read. They can’t add.
What is happening in our primary and secondary high school education system? What is broken there that’s delivering these kids to you so academically unprepared? I understand emotionally, but let’s just first address the first part.
No, I think they’re both. And I mean, I’m not an expert in K through 12. I don’t have all the answers there. But I’ll say that one thing is that we’re not getting rid of income gaps in achievement in K through 12.
Students come into kindergarten at very different levels depending on their parents’ income, and they leave at those same levels. If we were doing something important and successful in terms of education in the U.S., we would see differences and changes there.
And I think we have a lot of work to do to think through a K through 12 system that’s not serving the entire population.
Is there any low-hanging fruit there? Is it like having the ability to have more tutors, extending the school day to 5 p.m., having summer sessions? If you could, as an educator and somebody who works in this field, is there any low-hanging fruit that we could say, hey, President Trump, we need $25 billion more a year to do this?
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I would say one thing is making sure that we’re putting good teachers in the classroom. School unions are a problem.
What does good mean?
- Competent and able to teach at different grade levels
- The ability to measure their outcome
- Hold students accountable and push them forward
And my research before I became a college president, I studied performance under stress and anxiety. So it’s been helpful the last few years. But one of my findings is around teachers, especially in lower grades, being really unprepared in terms of math competency and transferring that on to young students.
The teachers themselves don’t know how to add.
Well, I think there’s a very—
No, I mean, I think what’s interesting is there’s probably a very good teacher emerging, which is AI.
How are you guys thinking about whether higher education should even exist and what the role of higher education and classrooms and teachers and textbooks are in a world where I have a personal tutor available to me to walk me through the knowledge transfer at my own pace, to think critically?
AI seems to have the potential to play so much of the role of what higher education and even K-12 education has played historically. How are you guys calculating for your strategic planning with AI and what does it do?
Absolutely. Well, I’ll start with that. So my daughter just graduated three months ago. I have two kids. She just finished college and I’m astonished by how much she has developed. And I think most parents would have a similar experience.
And I think if you stripped out sort of the knowledge, the part that you could easily access with AI, she would still astonish me in how much she has developed. That’s a residential university and all the interactions and all the things and the challenges and the overcoming them.
And so, you know, the idea, people were predicting with massive open online courses, the death of universities 15 years ago. And I really think that when you start realizing, that’s what makes it so darn transformative and at least any AI I’ve seen so far is not getting close to what we’re able to do.
I think these uniquely human skills, there is such an important part of a residential community that allows that to come together.
I’m a big proponent of how we think about integrating AI into what we’re doing. Dartmouth actually was the birthplace of the term artificial intelligence in a 1956 summer conference where people got together and talked. We developed basic. We were the first institution to put it in all the math classes.
I think thinking with technology is so important, but there is a human element of developing young people 17 to 25 that universities really can excel at.
And I think that’s one of the reasons that the culture issue and the idea that we’re teaching students what to think instead of how to think, I think, has hit such an important point.
It is because this is exactly what we should be doing, we should be thinking, teaching those kind of critical skills that allow students not to be in a safe space, but a brave space where they learn how to be uncomfortable and interact with others.
Fair enough, but I predict AI will play an important role and I predict that the teachers’ unions are going to fight tooth and nail from seeing AI show up and it’s going to challenge our… The ability to kind of provide this advantage for our students and meanwhile, in other countries around the world, particularly looking across the Pacific, things are going to be very different than they are here.
What is the conversation with the teachers’ unions who are so politically connected, who can be so troublesome? We saw this recently with the longshoremen’s strike that happened where they didn’t want to have automation that would provide faster, lower costs, unloading and loading of the docks and so on. It made it really hard.
What’s going to happen with respect to the teachers’ unions and their ability to kind of move through this accelerating transformation that’s going to be underway?
Well, I’ll start. I think categories of labor across the economy are going to be under threat. So it’s easy to start with thinking about organized labor, but not organized labor is going to be terrifically under stress.
And I think that a lot of people are going to be pushing back on what’s about to happen. So I think that’s the larger frame. It’s really how jobs across white collar. In fact, I think a lot more unrepresented jobs are going to disappear as a result of AI than represented jobs over the next 10 years.
We don’t know. But I think overframing in terms of representation, at least for me, is missing really the core issue here.
There’s been a lot of talk about recent graduates having a hard time finding jobs and that for at least male students, the degree versus non-degree in terms of unemployment has now shown no difference.
It used to be if you had a degree, you had roughly double the chance of getting a job. Are you seeing that on the ground? I know you have elite institutions, but are you starting to see that even at your incredible universities? And are you concerned?
Yeah, I mean, I think again, we have to talk about what the future of work is. We haven’t seen that at Dartmouth. Our students are succeeding in getting jobs. But again, we’re not just teaching students how to code.
Everyone who gets an engineering degree also takes classes across the sciences, across humanities. We’re teaching them how to think across difference in many ways, which I think are these uniquely human skills, I hope, that will be important for being a leader.
What’s on that small list of uniquely human skills or attributes that you most want to get into those students?
I really do believe that the ability to:
- listen and have a conversation
- speak face to face
- have eye contact
- have empathy
- understand that even if I don’t agree with you, you are a human, we have these things together
- work towards some sort of positive democracy
I would say is at the top of the list.
We’ve been working with the two Davids, in fact, we’ve been working with that.
It’s a muscle. I think you can build it over time.
They’re getting there.
Yeah, look, there’s no question. I was talking to an alum and somebody who’s close, very senior, and I said,
“What should be in our strategic plan?”
And he said,
“Keeping humanity relevant.”
If that’s not a big deal, I don’t know what is. And as we think about the sorts of skills that we’re going to need in our students, I think, you know, a sense of agency is something that pops to mind for me.
It’s like a sense of agency. I can act on the world, I’m not purely acted upon, and it’s partly my responsibility. And that goes so far beyond the way we think about education, at least traditionally, as mostly knowledge transmission. I think we can do that in our classrooms. We have some curriculum that does that.
Because they do perceive themselves as victims at times.
Let me maybe shift it for the last question and end maybe where we started to end. One of the things that has happened is that with the costs of higher ed, there’s been the emergence and the importance of endowments.
And as these endowments have emerged, there’s been a perception, and then those things have been laid bare, that there are side doors and back doors and all kinds of different ways in which to get into schools.
The Varsity Blues thing is like a perfect example of just the manipulation of the system that just again, to your point, people lose trust.
What role do endowments play? How much influence do they exert when it’s good? When they can’t fund a budget? What happens? Just walk us through that cycle where there’s a perception that they could be doing more. Harvard’s got a $55 billion endowment.
But just walk us through that for each of your institutions, how reliant you guys are on this and the impact it makes on you being able to be totally meritocratic.
Yeah, I mean, I will say very clearly that we are looking for the best and brightest students. Our endowment is a way that allows us to fund students regardless of their ability to pay. And our financial aid, from our endowment, hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support students so that they come out without loans and they’re ready to go. And that is because people believe in the institution.
So it is a way, an important way that private citizens give back to support what they’re doing. And I think it is extremely important to what we do. It also funds our research.
There’s a lot of talk about indirect costs and what those actually mean. We lose money on every research dollar we bring in. We spend our endowment to create the buildings, to create all of the compliance.
You can’t make discoveries in the middle of Main Street. You’ve got to do that in a scientific enterprise where we are putting the skin in the game.
And I think it’s great that people are giving back to be able to do that. But it doesn’t drive our decisions. What I think of it as a support to do the good work we need to do.
Yeah. And if I may just add a little bit, I know we’re out of time, but I think, you know, our endowment per student is far, far lower. And like Sian, it’s going into scholarships for our students and the accessibility.
It’s like, what’s the effective cost of these educations, even with our lower, lower prices. And also on the research end, right, we’ve got something called the Innovative Genomics Institute.
A lot of that was philanthropic capital that came in and went into an endowment and CRISPR comes out of it and some other things that are changing the world. Right. So, so it’s really important that we have that kind of funding, both on the education and research side.
And, and I just say that there’s multiple inputs into the system. I think the endowment is important. I think having a really robust partnership with government that makes sense is really important for the American innovations and discoveries that we’re doing. And then for people who can pay the tuition, paying tuition is another aspect of that, but all of those come in to, to try and create what we’re trying to create.
Before we wrap, we’ve pointed out a lot of problems and challenges and left you guys in a kind of defense state. I want to just give each of you an opportunity to talk about what you’re excited about at the university that you’re leading.
Maybe just take a minute. What gives you kind of optimism? What are you encouraged by? What are you looking forward to accomplishing as we kind of finish up the segment?
Well, thanks. I’ll start, you know, true of Dartmouth as it is for Berkeley. We view these things, we hope you do too, as some of society’s most valuable assets. To what use shall we put them over the next decade? That’s sort of what we’ve been entrusted with, right?
And so if you said on the education front, for example, economic mobility, right? What would it look like to double down on economic mobility when a third of our students are already transfer students from community colleges?
It’s sort of like, wow, could we get even better at that? I think we can and we can do better at that, right? And as we think about the research, it’s like, what are these fundamental seismic shifts?
You’re thinking about the biology revolution or the AI revolution or planetary and human health. I mean, these are things that I believe we all need these institutions to be contributing to massively. And that’s part of what’s going into these strategic plans. So I think you should be rooting for us.
We are rooting for you.
Yeah, and I would say a few things. One, Dartmouth has the most rural academic medical center in the country. We serve a huge population of people not connected to the institution. And I’m excited about how we double down and make health systems better. I think that’s such an important part of what we do as universities.
And the second thing I’ll say is that I am very excited about our students. Just one other thing that Dartmouth is doing that is so impressive is that we have one of the only bipartisan student-run political unions in the country, co-chaired by the Dartmouth Conservatives and the Dartmouth Democrats. And those students are changing the culture at institutions.
Last year, we had a debate between Kellyanne Conway and Donna Brazile. We had Cornel West and Robbie George. They’re dealing with DEI, immigration. They are talking about the issues and putting it out there.
And they’re creating a culture where it’s cool to have conversations and be uncomfortable instead of shout each other down. We should be excited about that because they are the next leaders of our free world.
Awesome. Thank you both. You took on tough roles. We appreciate you being here today. Thank you.
Thanks for coming. Thank you so much. That was awesome. Appreciate it. Appreciate you.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.