"What other industry would you accept a rate of 68% completion or success?" - Andrew Rossi, director Ivory Tower
I have been concerned hearing talk about high school graduates not wanting to go to college anymore. That’s missing the best part of school. High school sucks but once you get to college, you get to have fun and be independent. In the short term it may seem like a way to save money, but you’d miss out on the long term benefits of training in a specialized field. Plus, college is fun! Hasn’t the word gotten out about that? I’m not talking about sleazy debauchery, but it’s fun to be independent in a place with other people learning the same thing as you.
Andrew Rossi made a movie about just this concern. His documentary Ivory Towerexplores the problem of increasing college tuition, students unable to take on rising student debt, and possible alternatives to institutional education. Rossi spent some time at Deep Springs College, a free private college that teaches students to work on the farm while they take classes. Some colleges tried Massive Open Online Courses, where for a lower fee students could take the class online, with unseen teachers behind the cameras. Only 25% of students passed the MOOC courses shown in Ivory Tower. True, some tech startups can be successful without a college education, and Peter Thiel created a grant to pull 100 of those potentials out of college.
I sat down with Rossi over lunch at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. On a Wednesday afternoon, we had the restaurant all to ourselves. We discussed the problems outlined in Ivory Tower and hopes for solutions. If the conversation intrigues you to get involved with college and tuition issues, the film opens in theaters June 13.
SG: Don’t kids know that college is fun? I’m not even talking about party schools, but just being in a place with other people your age interested in the same things, studying whatever you want for the most part.
AR: Exactly. I think that’s part of the ideal of college that maybe has gotten lost a little bit, this sense that it’s an opportunity to experiment with different things, to find out what you like, what you’re good at and have an experience of character formation. We see that very strongly at the school Deep Springs, which is free. It’s in the desert of Death Valley and students are able to have that kind of challenging experience while milking cows and while butchering the meat that they eat, and while governing themselves and the whole school. Rather than kind of participating in this party atmosphere that is celebrated in movies like Neighbors or 22 Jump Street, the idea that you’re going to college to have a perpetual Spring Break experience.
SG: It’s funny you mention Neighbors. I was wondering is one of the reasons kids don’t think about how fun college is because we haven’t really had a movie like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds in a while?
AR: I think that that celebration of the freedom of college and transitioning from being an adolescent to an adult is fun and great, but there’s also potentially something insidious about that kind of depiction of school if it leads people to focus only on the partying and then take on all this debt and start to feel anxiety that they’re not going to get grades that are good enough to get a job. Halfway through their college tenures they end up dropping out. If you look at the statistics of completion rates at public universities particularly, it’s not very good. What other industry would you accept a rate of 68% completion or success?
SG: That’s funny, in a completely different issue, researching film success rates, the MPAA has a statistic that only 11% of the population are considered avid moviegoers, meaning 12 movies a year. I thought how can the film industry survive on an 11% success rate?
AR: Do you know if that number is specifically about going to a theater, because obviously they see them on demand.
SG: That’s a good point. That was going to a movie theater.
AR: That’s very depressing.
SG: You’re right, the fun of college as championed in movies has an insidious side. We’re seeing evidence that people are expecting the Animal House experience and not adapting well to the reality of college. Is that a problem that has faced college in the past or is it a newer phenomenon?
AR: I think what it definitely does is it glorifies a path through school that is focusing on just having fun. Having fun is fine, but partying and using substances can be really dangerous, particularly for disadvantaged students who can’t keep up with that lifestyle and literally cannot afford to go to the bars and take the cabs into town and rack up bills and spend their money instead of on books, on partying. That’s where the danger is.
SG: I was lucky that my parents paid for college for me. I understand the burden of spending that much money, especially since I was so fortunate, but is there anything empowering kids to find a way to make it work?
AR: I hope that Ivory Tower, in addition to putting together a lot of different arguments about how college has become so expensive, also reinforces the value of a college education when it’s delivered in the ideal way that does not leave students with student debt and introduces them to a wealth of knowledge and experience that otherwise they wouldn’t have had. So again, models like Deep Springs I think, the class CS50 that we see at Harvard, even the student from Bunker Hill Community College who says that it’s not necessary to focus on elite prestigious films. We see in the film how there’s so much obsession with these rankings of prestigious schools, but rather the opportunity to set a goal for yourself and to keep with it and to challenge yourself to learn more, that that can be very rewarding. That, at least for that student is what he’s interested in.
SG: That’s funny, I think my high school counselor wanted me to go to a more “prestigious” school because I had the qualifications. I chose Ithaca College because it had the artistic side I was interested in. I didn’t care about status.
AR: So basically, your path was exactly what we’re trying to encourage young people to do.
SG: But my parents had the foresight to prepare for my college. I’m not married and don’t have kids yet, but I can’t see how I would prepare for that even with an 18 year head start. Is there a solution to that concern?
AR: I have kids who are six and four and my understanding is that when they are college age, it will cost $500,000 to $550,000 for each of them. It’s an insane amount of money. I hope there is a movement, whether related to this film or to anything else in which universities consider putting a cap on tuition or at least pegging it to the rate of inflation. If state funding can increase to public universities and if senators like Elizabeth Warren are able to pass legislation to allow students to refinance their debt and to have deb relief for student debt holders. I hope that that happens. Also I hope that there is a reduction in the stigma associated with not going to college because I think that it is a legitimate choice for some people if they don’t want to go, that they should be able to explore alternative options.
SG: I’m not worried about the stigma anymore. It seems people champion the rebellious nature of, “Oh, I just won’t go to college.” Is that sort of rebellion also cutting your nose to spite your face?
AR: It can be for sure. One of the interesting moments in the film is when Peter Thiel admits that his fellowship doesn’t work for every student, particularly for disadvantaged students for whom a college degree would be the ticket to the middle class. Certainly with the student David Boone, who’s the African-American student who was homeless at one point and now is at Harvard, he says point blank, “If I drop out of Harvard, I’m not going to be able to better myself and I want to better myself.” He’s not on some journey to make a billion dollars as fast as he can. He’s instead on a journey to, as he says, better himself.
SG: Exactly, Thiel’s grant is good for 100 tech geniuses, but I don’t think he’d give me a journalism grant.
AR: Right.
SG: Deep Springs is a nice idea and a great atmosphere, but that’s not for everyone either. Are they aware that working on a farm isn’t an alternative for everyone? Are there Deep Springs paradigms in different fields?
AR: Absolutely, so Deep Springs has about 24 or 26 students total. It’s a very unique and small operation. I don’t know that it would be able to scale to a bigger student body. They have a very selective admissions process though.Many people apply and are not able to get in. There are other schools like Antioch College and Berea College that are similar in paradigm, although the degree to which there’s self governance at Deep Springs I think is unique. In Ivory Tower we look at Deep Springs just to suggest that there are students who enjoy being in a school where they’re not treated as customers and they don’t feel that they want an array of perks like climbing walls and student centers, but rather are interested in hard work.
SG: The climbing wall infuriated me. They had a gym at my school, but if it’s so elaborate it’s raising tuition, can’t you just join a gym near the school if you choose to use that facility?
AR: Precisely.
SG: So what leads them to go overboard in designing a gym that competes with Crunch or 24 Hour Fitness?
AR: I think that there are a lot of students who enjoy that kind of physical activity and want to be able to do it on a grand scale when they go to college. Certainly there are also athletic programs that are key to a university developing a brand that is on national television that helps them to attract students who are applying and want that sort of brand recognition in a school. Unfortunately if that results in higher tuition and corporate minded environment on campus, it can lead to these perverse incentives that we see in the classroom where the student as customer feels entitled to a curriculum that’s not particularly challenging, can lead to grade inflation and is a big problem.
SG: The Massive Open Online Classes seemed like a good alternative, but that’s only an option, not a replacement for college, right?
AR: And I also think it’s something that can be added to a traditional course in a flipped classroom context, but it should not lead to the replacement of the professor completely. So I think when we saw the pilot that was done at San Jose State, those classes were delivered exclusively online without any kind of human being seeing the students on a regular basis. The pass rates were abysmal, but when we looked at a flipped classroom setting at Bunker Hill Community College, we see that the students are able to watch videos at home, basically watch the lecture at home and then come into the class and do homework with an instructor who’s there to guide them through some questions and encourage them.
SG: So online can be a component of a class, but the professor is giving a lecture and available for office hours should you need him or her.
AR: Precisely.
SG: Is there any sort of reform to the student loan process that’s making that more manageable?
AR: Yeah, we discussed in the beginning that Senator Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts is trying to propose legislation to try to refinance loans. That would be one of the key things, and then there are some state based initiatives to do that too, for example in Wisconsin, to refinance your loans which is basically what you can do if you have a mortgage or an auto loan.
SG: But the way it works for a home loan is once you’ve built equity, as in you’ve paid it down a little, then you can refinance for a new term. How would that work with a student loan? What’s the equity?
AR: That’s a fascinating question because the only sort of collateral for a student loan is your future earnings,and is basically the education you’re supposed to be getting that powers your future earnings in your college career. I’m not sure exactly how the mechanics work in Warren’s legislation but I know that the key goal is to provide relief to student debtors who just are not able to pay, because when they default their interest becomes compounded into their principal, so the whole loan grows larger and that’s why we see some students who have much more debt than the average of $30,000 when you graduate, but after a couple of years are getting into the $50, $70, $100,000 range.