New Book Ties College and The Divide In American Politics

Welcome in to TYT's The Conversation, it's your host, Adrienne Lawrence. And today, I am joined by Will Bunch, national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the author of a new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics, and How to Fix It. Thank you so much for joining us, Will. Thanks, Adrienne, it's great to be here. Yes, so Kirkus Reviews gave your book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, a star, describing it as a must-read for anyone who cares about education and societal reform. If you wanna give us a taste, what's the book about? Yeah, well, I do think this is kind of a secret history of just an important story of our politics over the last 75 years that really tries to explain the great divide in American politics. In a way that I don't think anybody else has before, because if you look at what the fault line in American politics is right now, it's college, it's higher education. Every election cycle, more and more you see the Democratic Party becoming the party of college-educated people. And you see the Republican Party becoming the party of a working class that generally doesn't have college diplomas. And you see more and more cultural resentment between these two groups. And I think political writers are starting to get their arms around this development. And I spent a couple years trying to get behind it. And I think you can't explain the college divide in American politics unless you explain the American way of college. What's gone wrong? And this great debate that we've been having for three quarters of a century about what is college really for, and just as importantly, who pays for it? Absolutely, and it seems that having this divide about college and the importance of it definitely seems to be drawn somewhat along political lines, as well as possibly financial. And we're seeing a lot of voices being used right now when it comes to President Joe Biden's efforts to go ahead and waive the debt of some college students or some individuals who graduated from college. And it does seem like along the political lines, the response we're getting, whether that's a yay or a nay, in all of your research, I guess, does this actually play out exactly how you would have thought it would have been? Yeah, it has pretty much. I think President Biden's decision kind of opened the floodgates. If you spent any time on social media in the two or three or four days after the debt cancellation was announced by President Biden, I think you saw a lot of emotion. You saw some people on the right really giving voice to this resentment politics, that this idea that certain people got opportunities that not everybody had, that their education sent them in directions that they consider un-American. Because this embracing of tolerance and diversity and political correctness, as they would describe it. On the other hand, you saw just great joy from people who were the holders of this incredible $1.75 trillion mountain of debt, most of which has accumulated just in the last 25 years. And we have a couple generations, mainly millennials and Generation Z now. These are our children and they were sold a bill of goods. They were made promises about the value of a college education. And the college loan racket was a good investment, they were promised. And it hasn't turned out that way at all. And I think you saw some of that anger as well, but you also saw relief that the government finally after years and after much activism really acknowledged that this is a problem. Yes, and it definitely seems to be a problem, especially really this complete and total commercialization of the education system. As opposed to having some opportunity for people to better themselves and to enhance their knowledge so that they can be more productive members of society. But also something I would love to tackle with you, given your book After the Ivory Tower Falls, and its discussion about our college system. Is right now that we know that basically a lot people aren't going to college that we're seeing just this historic decline in attendance and admission levels at the college level as well as the graduate school level. And that's something that kind of started before the pandemic to my knowledge. How would that fit in in terms of the research that you found? Well, people are understandably now taking a serious look at whether college as we've come to construct it is worth it, is worth the tuition, which certainly we talk a lot about the sliver of private elite schools that charge $75,000 to $80,000 a year, which is remarkable. But really where the rubber hits the road is these are public universities, which if you go back to a period that in the book I kind of describe as the golden age of college education in America when college really was the American dream. And I'm talking about the 1940s after the GI Bill going into the 50s, the 60s, the early 70s, the years of the baby boom. In those years, tuition was just unbelievably low by our standards, a few $100 a semester in most states. And some states like California or New York City at the CUNY system, tuition was free in those days. And basically, a profound change happened in America, and it happened without really us having the proper debate that it deserved. And that is we almost during this golden age made college a public good. The idea that it was society's responsibility to provide our young people with this education. We do it with K through 12 schooling, higher education is now essential in today's world, and yet we were almost there with higher education. And then in the 70s and 80s, particularly during the Ronald Reagan administration in the 80s, you saw the privatization of college really take off. You saw tuition start to skyrocket. You saw the government's philosophy that loans should be the primary way of funding education, that this was kind of a capitalist ideal that you're investing in yourself and you're taking out a loan against yourself, basically. And it's a good investment, you're gonna be able to pay it back. And of course, that hasn't happened for a number of reasons. It didn't happen to the millions who went to these scammy for-profit colleges. And it didn't happen to people who graduated into the Great Recession and couldn't find work that was commensurate with their degrees. And it created a system where people had debts that they were unable to pay back. Yes, and so many of us know very much that journey that you've just laid out. I'm a graduate of Cal State Public School, as well as a CUNY for my grad, and then two private schools. It's a complete and total just day and night when it comes to tuition. And still looking at where the state schools are at in terms of tuition, it's crazy as far as I'm concerned. And seeing this political divide push it even further where people are no longer investing in education. And knowing what that'll do to the number of licensed professionals we need in certain positions as well as the overall GDP spending economy. It just seems like it is not a good way to go about it, yet we're seeing so many members of the right promote people not getting college educations. So I guess without giving away the base of after the ivory tower falls, how do we fix it? Well, again, I think turning the battleship around means having that debate that we didn't have about making college a public good. As you were talking, I was gonna mention what happened in my own state of Pennsylvania, which is in many states the same thing happened. Taxpayers used to fund 75% of our public university system, if you go back to the mid to late 1980s. Today that number is 25%. And that huge swing is made up for in tuition. And in tuition, even with the loans and the small amounts of Pell Grants that are given out to students, an average middle class kid's family is still being asked to contribute maybe $10,000 to $20,000 a year towards a public education. In these states where often the Constitution says higher education should be provided to all citizens and instead we've imposed this privatized racket. So we need to have a debate about I think how we can not just forgive loans, although I applaud Biden's loan forgiveness. I think the debt cancellation I think was absolutely the right thing to do. But we're gonna have a new debt crisis if we don't do something going forward. And so how do we find the revenue streams that can make college a public good? Do we look at kind of radical measures like the wealth tax that Senator Elizabeth Warren's proposed or taxes on Wall Street transactions, which was Bernie Sanders' original proposal? Can we do that? And the other thing that's important is, can we broaden our definition of higher education? Because we shouldn't just, even if we can make public universities free, which I think we should, we should also have free trade schools, free apprenticeships. I write a chapter in the book about the idea of a universal gap year for 18-year-olds that would help them on a career path with the government enlisting kids from different backgrounds, from red states and blue states, to get together on public service projects. I think it would kill several problems with one stone. You'd be doing something, I think, to promote a little bit of national unity and a sense of purpose, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. And so there are things we can do. But the first thing we need to do is realize how much higher education is driving this divide in America and put it on the front burner as a national problem. Yes, that is a very, very powerful conclusion. It's one I definitely support. And I know everybody out there wants to get their hands on a copy of your book. And can you tell them where they can do that? Yeah, absolutely. Go to your local bookstore, independent bookstore, support them or your major big-time retailers carry it too. And you can also get the audiobook on Audible or download it on your Kindle. There's lots of ways to read the book. And I hope you will, because I hope it's gonna start a national conversation about higher education. So do I. That is After the Ivory Tower Falls, How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It. Thank you so much for joining us, Will Bunch. Thanks, Adrienne. Thanks for having me on.