This is the FCNB podcast network. Our braids a masoda day that we won't with maath then we won't to say oh we got it does? No one can take that Owady, this is gonna be okay. Our prayers as that we won't to maay, then we won't to say oh we got it does No one can take that oway don't ma don't be okay. Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Just Listen to Yourself with Kia Davis. I am your host, Kira Davis, and this is the podcast where we take hot topics and we explore the talking points on those topics and we draw them out to their logical conclusion. It's an exercise in critical thinking, which has somehow become a buzzword these days, and uh, I don't think it deserves buzzword status. It's it's simply an educational term. And there's a term that that means. We need to be able to critique our thoughts and the thoughts of others, and we need to be able to break those things down and analyze them. We can't just take everything at face value. That is the problem with talking points. Talking points are good. I'm not anti talking point By the way, I don't know if I say this enough on this show. I'm not anti talking point. Talking points serve a purpose. They're they're important because they can they can help to condense an argument or condense a thought into a digestible bite. And they're particularly good when you're in an environment where you don't have a lot of time, like if you're on a TV panel or a discussion panel. So and and talking points help you break down write your argument into sections, which is important for the human mind when we're trying to understand arguments. Talking Points are not bad. What is bad is if all you have is the talking point and you don't have anything to back it up. You've never thought about the talking point. You don't know where the talking point comes from or what it's referring to. You just know that it sounds good, you know that it sounds right, and then you can't but you can't back it up. And so sometimes our talking points are lies. But there are lies that we tell ourselves. Their lies. We buy into because it sounds good, but when you dig underneath it, it's not good. A great example of a talking point that sounds good to some people of some ideologies but actually, if you dig in, is really terrible is the argument that abortion is good for the black community and must be protected for the black community. On the surface, it sounds like you're a warrior for racial justice, right, And this is usually the argument that a lot of pro abortion people make that if you're if you're anti abortion, then you are necessarily again prosperity and access to quote, medical care for black people. On the surface, that sounds like a very nice and justice related thing to say, But underneath, what you're saying is we need fewer black people in the world, and we should be advocating for fewer black people in America. So again, example of a talking and I actually did cover that on my abortion episodes plural down the line in the beginning of the show. Maybe I'll revisit someday. I've been looking back through the catalog and thinking I need to revisit some of these and maybe reframe these arguments. I've gotten a little better at framing arguments. I think my listening audience has gotten a little better at hearing the arguments and responding to them. So why not rehash some of those things. I don't know, but today we're going to talk about a subject that is ripe for talking points, and that is college. Why is college so expensive? And it seems like every other year we come up with this subject pops its ugly head again and we have to have this whole discussion about forgiving student loans or making college accessible for everyone. Democrats run on it every time Bernie Sanders was running on making college free for everyone. There's still a huge section of the political landscape that believes college should be free for everybody. And of course, as usual when we have a Democrat in the office of the presidency, this is we're always talking about this, so it's not new and it's not a surprise. But of course now Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are also discussing ways to provide more student loans, make college more accessible to people who maybe are having trouble get making their way through college, and of course for giving student loans. So it's a good time to talk about this. This subject was brought up to me by my community members over at Davis Nation at Davisnation dot org, vocals dot com. We have a growing community over there, and I try to foster discussion. I try to like ask questions every day and get people to just to just think, to lay out their arguments. You know, some of the answers might not be you know, people might feel like, oh, what do I have to add to this conversation. But the point isn't that you're going to say the most intelligent thing or the thing that's going to, like wow, change the face of the planet. The point is is that you know how to say the things you believe. So there's always it's always great to exercise those muscles, and a lot of us don't feel free to exercise that way in our public social media spaces like Facebook or Twitter, because not all of y'all are political pundits like me, and you don't want to have to expose yourself to all of the ugliness that comes with saying what you feel out loud. So sometimes we don't argue in good faith anymore, and there's not as many opportunities to argue in good faith in in public bases that can help you hone those debate skills. I cut my teeth on debate on the local radio circuit and Gary, Indiana. There were two men actually who kind of encouraged me to come on their shows and debate with local callers. One was THEO McClendon and the other one was Raymond Dix. Ray was a pastor in the area and Theo's kids went to my after school program, so we were both very involved in politics and the arts. Ray was conservative, THEO was not, but they both loved the idea of challenging their listeners, so they would invite me to come on their shows every week, and I cut my teeth just debating with the local people who would call in, and that really prepared me for a life of punditry. So I ended up moving on up and further out of the local radio circuit. But I always have appreciated the opportunity they gave me to exercise my debate muscles and understand how to form an argument in a situation that could be tense or combative. And yeah, I've always appreciated that. But not everybody has that opportunity. So I guess that's a long winded way to say, join Davis's Nation, because there you will have the opportunity to cut your teeth on some debate practices and to express your ideas out loud and see how other people are expressing theirs. And then be able to hone your thought process and your arguments. That's what I try to do. It doesn't seem very sexy, Like I look around me and I look at the pundits in my business who are making money hand or or fist and have TV deals and book deals, and you know, everything they do is very sensational, and unfortunately this type of work isn't very sensational. It doesn't carry in the mainstream. And because of the you know, my bank account, it makes my bank account sad. But I also get it because it takes a certain level of attention span and commitment to be able to parse through heady ideas, and not everybody is up to the task, as we've been finding out over the last few years. So thank you for being here and joining me on the journey, and feel free to join us again over at Davis Nation dot locals dot com. I actually have a cool offer going on over there. They've opened up the platform to yearly subscriptions, So if you want to just dump some money into an annual subscription over there, you can get two months free. So that's pretty cool. It's something to try, or you can just do month to month. That's something to try to And if you'd like to talk to me personally and you want to just send me a message, there is a level that you can come in on where you can send me a message and I will respond right away. We can have a back and forth. All of that is open to you. All right, then plugging my sub subscription community. Back to the point of talking points. College is the the concept of college, the idea of college. The arguments around there are ripe for talking points because everybody loves the idea of college, right everybody. Almost everybody wants to go to college. Almost every parent in America dreams of sending their kids to college. College comes with an elite status and often a career boost, and depending on what your major is, it's harder for poor people to go to college. So everything about it is ripe for someone to come and say, hey, you know, I think all college should be free, and that sounds really good, and we can stop there because that sounds good. And if you don't want college to be free, what on earth is your problem? So let's dig into these talking points. I really there are some that we really can can drill down on and expose. Why is college so expensive? This is a question nobody ever asks. We get all the time, all the time. I just laid out all these people who come around every every few years or every couple of years, every election cycle and tell us, but we need free college, or we need to make sure that more minorities get to college, or more poor people get to college. Blah blah blah. We're always talking about the rising cost of college, but we're never asking why the cost of college is going up. We never ask why it's so expensive, that's the real question to ask. Instead, we ask taxpayers to pay for college, and we keep asking them for more money to pay for more college. But we don't ever ask why is the college so expensive in the first place? Why is it unaffordable for a poor black man from Gary and Nanna to go? Why is it unaffordable for that person? That's the question. We said that when don't we ever ask colleges to justify why they cost so much? We always put the onus on the taxpayer or the government, but we don't ever put any responsibility or onus onto the institution itself to explain itself explain its finances. Here's a fun exercise for you to do for your parents out there who might be preparing for college for your kids. If you're thinking that the duation is a lot, go to the college and see if you can dig into their budget numbers at see where they spend their money. It'll be illuminating. But you'll also find a lot of them don't tell you all of where they spend their money. There's not full transparency in college budgeting. And there's a reason for that, right because there's a lot of miscellaneous spending that drives up the cost of the college that they don't want you to know about. Why is college so expensive? The number one answer to this question is student loans. That is the number that is the top issue with why college is so expensive. When the government is involved in something, it necessarily drives up the price because it drives down competition, and competition is what makes things cheaper. Right. Can you remember when the first high depth TV came out? I mean, it's it's such a part of our lives right now, we might not even remember. I remember. I remember because at the time I was listening to Rush Limbaugh and it would have been this would have been way back even I was probably still a liberal, but just kind of listening to Rush out of curiosity, and I remember him saying, Oh, I got this new high def TV. It is so good, it's so it's crystal clear. I paid six thousand dollars for it. He was like, but people don't be mad at me, thank me, because it's guys like me that are going to drive the part the cost down, right, And he was right, Now you can buy a high def TV. I mean, shoot a Visio high def TV. Video doesn't pay me, by the way, but if y'all want to contact me jltya ProtonMail dot com. But Visio, you can go get a decent sized high def TV now for four hundred bucks. It was competition that drove it down when it was just Ge and Samsung in the TV market, and now suddenly it's a lot of like this. Visio popped up, or a lot of different entities got into making TVs. Competition increase and to sell your TV to the biggest market, you've got to make it the best value. Competition it drives down the cost of things. Well, college doesn't have competition. You might say, well, they compete with each other, but not really. Because the government is so involved in finance in colleges that they're that everybody's getting their money no matter what. They don't have to compete for the best students anymore. What they're competing for is the most government dollars. Now, you may be listening to this. I know a lot of my listeners already know this, and I talked about this earlier on in the program. I think one of my podcasts is should we forgive student Loans? And I've kind of talked about a lot of these concepts in that podcast as well, and student loans obviously was a subject. But listen, every time student loans funding goes up, so does the cost of tuition because now the the facility, the college can say, hey, this kid was getting twenty thousand dollars in loans last year and this year he's getting twenty five thousand dollars in loans, and to him, it's free money. Right at that point, you're not you have a concept that this is something I think you have to pay back in the future, but the immediacy of the cost of that is not there. It feels like free money. It's just money you're getting upfront for nothing. There's no cost to it at all. So this kid's getting twenty five thousand dollars this year. That means we can raise the cost of the college by another five grand and not hit this kid for any extra cash. Right, And then the kid is going, well, I have twenty five grand in student loans, but I need another ten because the tuition or whatever raised, And gosh, if only I could get thirty thousand dollars of student loans, I could really this would really be helpful. And then so on and so forth. Just the cost of it keeps getting driven up because it's subsidized by government. There's no incentive for the college to control their costs. They're going to get twenty five thousand dollars from that kid, whether they work to budget at budget well and control their costs on campus, or whether they spend out the wazoo, they're going to get that twenty five thousand dollars. And they can press the government for more every time they raise the tuition costs and say, hey, you know, we'd love to admit more minor poor minority students, but you know, look at what college is costing. You only give twenty five thousand dollars in student loans per person. Maybe if you gave more. We could we could have more minorities. It's a big circle jerk, basically, is what it is. It's like that with anything. It's why governments shouldn't we did fossil fuels last week. It's why government shouldn't subsidize green energy. If you're in favor of green energy and you think we need to be depending more on green energy, then we really shouldn't be having government subsidize it because it makes it more expensive. Because then green energy doesn't have the incentive to figure out how to lower their costs while upping their offer, right, like what's on offer, providing the consumer more value for their investment for their dollar. They have no incentive to do that, so they don't have the same incentive to innovate. Government is preventing green energy from innovating because it's subsidizing it. I talked about government subsidizing ethanol and how that actually makes the food that we would feed our poor population with way more expensive. Government is subsidizingol. Ethanol doesn't the ethanol industry has no incentive to budget and control costs while innovating. Government necessarily bleeds innovation out of any processes. Why I feel that government should not be in the business of scientific or medical research. I really don't outside of what you outside of national defense. I think when it comes to national defense, yes, absolutely, government scientists should be looking, you know, into weapons of war or whatever it is, or whatever other dark projects they got going on, and the recesses of the Pentagon. You know, I'm not naive. I get it, and there are some things that are valuable that a government for national defense needs to be doing. But the government funding arthritis research or Alzheimer's research, or I have the a's in my head because every time there's a government shut down, I go to the list of government departments in Washington, DC and I call to see who's open. You know, like so while Obama was closing national parks and go telling everybody, you can't go see the Washington Monument because we can't afford to keep it open because the Republicans have shut us down. Well, I go to this list of departments and I go down the list and I call and I see who's open during the government shutdown, and it's always like, oh, yes, the Office for Research for Alzheimer's Research, Yeah, they're open. And also, you wouldn't believe how many incredibly redundant government departments there are out there. I think arthritis is one that's on my mind because I think it has actually two departments, two separate departments. One is the Office for Research and one is the Office of Administration, and there are two separate departments. It might be arthritis, there might be Alzheimer's. I just I can't recall now. But the a's are always stuck in my mind because I always start with the a's and I rarely get past the a's because once you get to the end of this long list of a's, you're like, everybody's open. This is a show. Everybody else in DC is going to work except the essential workers. They muscle with the They do that to play with us folks. So anyways, I got that in my mind, if universities were serious about social justice and serious about opening their platforms to disadvantaged communities, they would provide the loan. Right, they would be the loan provider. Government would get out of this and they would provide the loans. And then what happens is when they provide the loans, they now are incentivized to control costs on campus because they don't want to have to fund more loans than necessary. Right, So, if your school costs thirty thousand dollars a year and you have budgeted it to provide loans at fifteen thousand a year, then in order to get the students that you want, you're going to control the costs for the rest of that chunk of change, right, so that you can attract more a broader cross section of society in your student population. Right. Also, the other thing you do that happens is that it makes it picky. It makes the university, the college picky about who they let in. Now it's not just based on grades or whatever, but also based on your temperament. Will you be the person to pay this back? When the loans come from government, what does the university care? And they get all the money up front. That's the other thing. When that student drops out or or moves on to another school, whatever, if they decide they don't want to be there anymore, and they end their college career, that college still gets all that money. All that money is still there. So then really the college is incentivized to take more people who have higher loans, Whereas if the college is providing the loans they're going to do the right thing to control their costs so it's more affordable for everybody, and then they will also actively work to make sure that their student population is financially literate. Maybe you have a financial course that you have to go through to get the loan right, or maybe you know, maybe there are some other educational practices that the college can engage in that would actually be useful for students and help them to understand. And maybe what they do is they pay back the loan as they're in school, you know, either through a work study project or whatever. Like. The point is is that it gives a college more options for cost cutting in a way that is beneficial to the student and to the campus. Otherwise, there's no incentive to reduce costs. Government's just paying for everything and no one's the bill isn't coming due for years down the road, so it's not an immediate concern. Hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more. It's The Outlaws Radio Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts today. That's out Laws The Outlaws Radio Show. N FCB Podcasts Another talking point why college is so expensive is that it's very much in demand. That you know, when you need college, you hear this is a lot you need college to be successful, and we have made it so that college almost has a monopoly on higher education. Now, do you guys remember, in gosh, was it the twenty sixteen I think it was the twenty sixteen primary Republican primaries, Marco Rubio said we need more trade colleges, and the left went nuts, because, of course, we're not allowed to just analyze thoughts on their face these days. Everything's got to have an angle. Everything's got to be related to Republicans good or Republicans bad, or Democrats good or Democrats bad, or we're just we are so incurious these days. So of course left wing progressive media did this. Not necessarily progressive, but the media did this. They painted Marco Rubio is some kind of racist, which is hilarious, but some kind of racist because he seemed to be insinuating that poor people should should be just doing trade jobs. But that attitude in itself is arrogant and racist because it's smacks of elitism. It smacks of the idea that there's something wrong with trade jobs with trade work right, and that that's less. We've convinced people that there is something wrong with going into the trades. That's a concerted marketing effort by the collegiate system to make what they offer invaluable by denigrating every other alternative to what they offer. So now if you unless you have a plan to go to college, you don't count. Like we see this every election cycle. This really bothers me. In twenty sixteen, after Trump won, there's always talk about white uneducated voters, uneducated white voters. No one ever dares talk about uneducated black voters, but whatever, uneducated white voters. And when you dig into that, when you drill into that term, what they mean is white voters without a college education. That is how they define uneducated. We have made it in this country so that you are have somehow failed if if you haven't gone to college, if you don't attempt to go to college. And that is really stressing the system as well, because now we've got a lot of students, a lot of kids who actually have no business going to college. They really should be doing anything else. They should be getting their training in other areas. Some of them may be going into areas that just don't need college education at all, and now we're pushing them into more education that a they don't need, be they're not primed for. Right, Not every student belongs at Stanford, not every student belongs at Harvard, not every student belongs at a four year And then so then when they go, when they can't fit in or they can't make it work, then they feel depressed and they feel like failures, when really they shouldn't have been there in the first place. We've made college a necessity, so they have a monopoly, so they can charge as much as they want, and no one asks any questions about it. We just assume. I can remember my cousin. We have kids who are the same age, and one of her sons was graduating and he had really struggled through school. She's a teacher, she's really smart, and she and her son had all kinds of challenges in his life. You know that weren't really his fault, and she worked her ass off to get him, get his grades up, get him through school. They worked so hard together. It was such a victory when he graduated high school. And then she messaged us and she said, uh, she messaged family. She was like, Okay, now we're moving on to college, and can you contribute to Billy's college fund? And I can remember my father in law, whom you all heard on the show, messaged back and he said, maybe we want to support Billy in any way possible, So of course we will, but maybe you need to consider that he might not belong in college that after he had he went through this momentous struggle just to get through high school, which even in a place like that where we were from, even in a place like that, even if you make it through high school there, you're still way behind the national average and education, and a lot of kids from that area go to college and other places and end up dropping out because they can't meet the academic requirements. They're not prepared. The public school system is failing black children everywhere. Go listen to my episode on school choice. So he was saying maybe, and my point is that it hurt her feelings, and it was very The response was very curt and hurt. And I knew that's what it would be, because she would What she was hearing was your son's not smart enough for college. What my father in law was saying was he might be too smart for college. That's what he really meant. He might maybe he struggled in high school because the way that they're teaching him in high school is actually bulled, you know what, bs, and he needs a different sort of vocation or direction to succeed. That this, the academic aspect of it, isn't where his strengths lie. That's what he meant. But because we are so conditioned to assume that college is the end all, be all of intelligence, we have now allowed there to be a monopoly on college. So of course it's going to be expensive, the way that your heating bill is expensive if you only have access to one energy company, or the way your cable bill is going to be out of control if you only have access to one cable provider, et cetera, et cetera. The same thing happened to me when I was running our school program. A a parent came in and as she had a high schooler and she was bringing her high schooler in for tutoring for a year, for a year or more. I mean, this kid was struggling, and we got him through high school. It was a big victory for us. And then she was like, Okay, we're gonna push him into college. Now, we're gonna take out thirty thousand dollars worth of loans and we're gonna send him to college. And I said, maybe college isn't the place. Maybe we need to consider that college isn't the right place for young Tommy here. I got Billy, I'll do Tommy, the young Tommy here. Maybe we need to consider some other options, like Tommy really enjoys working on cars, which this kid did. It was something that he did with his grandfather, or something a trade program or an apprenticeship program. And she was so angry with me. She stormed out. She was like, no, I don't accept that. And she I mean, she pulled the only God can This is for God to decide, you know, on me. She was like, I believe in the Lord, and the Lord got us as far he'll get us, he'll get us farther. You know. She was raging, and she was so mad at I don't think I ever saw her again after that. What I realized is that when I told her that her son might be better suited for a program like mechanics, what she heard was your son is not smart enough for college. And quite the opposite. I was saying, your son is too smart for college. He can be earning money right away, rather than wasting all this money with all these other idiots out there who are wasting their money on four year degrees that aren't going to get them the status in society that they're looking for. We have completed this complete brainwashing of the American psyche to believe that college is the only way out, and particularly for black people in struggling neighborhoods or struggling regions, it has traditionally been seen as the only way out, which of course we know is no longer true because when you look at the employment rate of of students just out of college programs and the employment rate of students out of apprenticeship or two year degree programs, I mean, the difference is stark. It's stark. You're smarter to go to school for plumbing than you are for women's studies. You are smarter to do that. You will be earning more money and sooner than miss Thang over there getting her women's studies degree. Women's studies. The only thing you can do with women's studies is teach women's studies. Somehow we've elevated that degree above being able to fix someone's car, or fix someone's toilet, or embalm a body, or do taxes, things that we will always need. We have falsely inflated the market. We need a renaissance. My friend Sonny Johnson says that all the time, can you offer black people a renaissance? We need a renaissance. We need to reform our ideas of what it means to succeed and to achieve, and we need to be take making those ideas into the communities like where my family came from and assuring people that college is not the only way up or out. And in fact, these days it might be a hampering because now you're digging yourself into debt that you don't have the education, the financial education to dig out of. Colleges are expensive to run, Kira. That's why they're so expensive. They're expensive to run. You have all these buildings, you have all the electricity, you have dorm life, and you you have to provide food, you have to pay for the professors. College life is expensive, is it? How much does it cost to run a university? I mean, I know that you're saying this out there, imaginary listener, college is expensive, but can you tell me how expensive? Do you know how much it costs to run your kids university? Do you know? Have you ever looked? Have you ever looked to see what their budget is? Have you ever looked to see how much the professors make there? How versus the staff versus you know, have you looked to see what programs the the your tuition dollar dollars go to support on campus and how much of those dollars are going to support it? How much does it cost to keep the lights on in the gymnasium? Right? We can say that, we say it out loud, but we don't know. We don't know. We're guessing. And I'm not suggesting that it doesn't cost a lot to run a college. I'm just saying people who ask you that question they don't know how much it costs to run a college. Or people who give you that statement, they don't know how much it costs to run a college either. Oh, college is don't let anybody get away with that. Make them define what it costs to run the college. You should know what it costs to run your kid's college. It's gonna put the tuition in perspective. For you. I'll tell you that much and you might be fine with it. You might be like, well, yeah, and you know what, this is fair for as much as costs. But you might say, I don't think we needed to spend two billion dollars on a new facility for this program or that this year, considering that it that it represented such a huge chunk of the budget. Let's do some math. I'm not good at math. I used a calculator for a lot, I can admit it, but I do like to break down the math. I do this with school choice too. Every time somebody tells you that there's not enough money in education and public education here in this country, I challenge you to find out what the what the state median is for a funding per student. In some states, it's up around thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars per student, maybe even fifteen in Detroit, in some parts of LA And then I want you to take the number of students in your local elementary school and then multiply that funding per you know, by the number of students in the school, and then tell me why your local elementary school cannot run on two hundred and fifty million dollars a year for two hundred students or three hundred sudents or four hundred suents. Every many are in there, you know. Then tell me why. Once you realize how much money is represented in one single classroom, you start wondering where the money went. So let's do some math here. I picked the one of the most prestigious schools in the country to as an example for this, because they also happen to have wait for it, the largest endowment in the country. For colleges. This is another thing that no one ever asks about or takes into consideration. Every college has an endowment fund. How big is your college's endowment fund and how much money does it disperse each year. Don't be satisfied with the college telling you that they don't have enough money and they have to raise tuition by another twelve percent next year just because they say so. Ask them what they're doing with the free money, the money that's just sitting there earning interest and giving them free money every quarter. Ask them what they're doing with that. How much do they put into their endowment fund every year? Because see an endowment fund, you can't touch the base amount. You can only live off the interest. So there are a lot of schools that will hold back on putting funds into the endowment fund, right so that they can spend the funds. How much more could they be putting into the endowment fund so that they could get a higher return. Harvard has the largest endowment fund of any university in the nation. It's forty point nine billion dollars as of last year, so that is a dispensation of about two billion per year. Would you think that Harvard could run for two billion a year? I mean two billions a lot of money. I know it doesn't seem like in the days when we're talking about trillion dollar deficits, but two billion, that's two with nine zeros. That's a lot of money. Do you think would your mind estimate that Harvard could operate for two billion a year? And that's just the endowment fund. That's not anything that they're making off of sales, off of book sales, off of merchandising rights, right off of their sports teams, off of the tickets they sell for their theater programs, or you know, all of the other ways that you make money capitalistically out of college. That's not including all of that. Just two billion off the top every year, no strings attach their money. Okay, so that's a lot of money too. With nine zeros, there are thirty one thousand, approximately thirty one thousand, five hundred students on the campus, and the cost is about forty six thousand dollars per student. So that adds up to about one billion, four hundred and fifty nine million, seven hundred and ten thousand dollars per year off of tuition. Now you may say, well, students aren't paying that whole cost, right, you got loans, you got grants. Yeah, but all of that money is still going to the school. The school might give out their own grants to be fair. So let's shave off about let's shave off. Let's shave off fifty nine million dollars. Maybe the school does fifty nine million dollars in grants every year. That's still one point four billion dollars. That's a lot too. You add that to the two million dollars that you get from the fund, from the endowment fund, and now you're up over three point five billion dollars a year to support this campus for everything. For the professor's salary. That's another thing. That's what you should ask. What are the professors making at your school, some of them might be worth it. You know, you may look into it and you might be like, yeah, you know what, I think the value that they bring. I mean, this is especially a place like Harvard. You know, you're getting the most elite of the elite to elite set and the most educated. A lot of a lot of times there connected in some way to high power government positions or otherwise in other career areas. So maybe you're like, yeah, I think it's fine to pay the professor half a million dollars a year for their salary. But I think a lot of us would be surprised to know how much money your university professor makes considering what they offer, particularly when you're considering tenured professors or once you don't got to work in the summer, you know, there's it'll change how you think about what they're teaching your kid when you find out how much money these people are making. And again, either way, it could go either way. You might work depending on your school. You might think that that person's not getting enough, but you should know what they are getting, and you certainly certainly shouldn't accept it on face value that college professors are some kind of struggling class and we should feel sorry for them, and that's why we have to raise tuition every year. If someone comes to you with that, then you ask how much money the school is spending on professors for that year. So that's a lot. Now we're up to over three billion dollars a year for Harvard University, and that again, that does not clue. I couldn't find. I did find their budget, but I couldn't find and it's like it was like sixty some pages. I just didn't read all of it, so I didn't find where it said what the amount they make from retail sales are. So but there's all kinds of like licensing deals and all of that. That's not even including that, Like what ifully just estimate another five hundred million, another half a billion a year on licensing in retail and all of that. Now we're nearing about four billion dollars a year in income that a university like Harvard has. That is a lot if you consider it, that's a lot. Don't you want to know? Wouldn't you think that that much money, regardless of how much it cost, how much the building, couse, how historic it is, wouldn't you think that that much money flowing through an educational institution would make it more affordable and not less it wouldn't you think that a place that was motivated could learn to rein in some of their costs so that they could provide more spots for lower income students with that didn't that didn't require those students to take out enormous amounts of loans. People talk about school loans as if they just appear out of thin air, and and and as if there is some big, magical racist in the sky who is making college more expensive for minority students particularly, And no one ever asked why this why the school is making it so expensive for minority students. There might be there may be a big racist in the sky, but he's actually occupying the office of the dean at Harvard. You know that might be it. I'm just saying, ask these questions. We should know why college costs so much before we start asking people to make it quote free. It won't be free. Someone of the taxpayer be paying for it. But that's my other episode on should be forgive student loans? Hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more it's the Outlaws Radio Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts today, that's out Laws, the Outlaws Radio Show, NFCB podcasts. Here in California, we had a scandal that of course has gone away now and people can forget about it so easy. But Janettano, who is Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security during his ministration, somehow inexplicably moved over to become the president of the UC system here in California. Of course, the UC system, just like everything else in California, was notorious for sucking up a lot of state funds but not really producing, and so they got audited for some reason. A few years ago they got audited. Was it twenty twenty one? So I think in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen they got audited, and Napolitano was caught hiding three hundred and thirty million dollars from the auditors for the school. Three hundred and thirty million dollars. When she finally was caught one day, I mean, I know it wasn't her alone, just stuffing three hundred and thirty million dollars with the cash under her mattress. But when she finally was caught, her response was, well, we just we massaged the books because we wanted to get more money from the state. Do you see the state, the state providing these funds public to schooling actually incentivizes schools to to increase their costs. The more things cost, the more they tell you things cost, the more money they get from the state from the Feds. And we saw a perfect example of it here in California. She ended up having to step down. I mean she should have gone to jail, but whatever, that's it's California. That's how it works here. But see, these people are playing games with us. The China tell us that college is expensive because of some big bat boogeyman in the sky. But college is expensive because of college and because of the government. And the government coming in to solve the expense of college is only going to make college more expensive. Necessarily, as exemplified by the Neapolitano scandal, we only incentivize universities to hide money, to hoard money, to charge more so that they can have access to more. It's baseline budgeting basically, right, Like a lot of people don't know. But in government, when when each got department budgets for the year. They have a certain amount of budget. They have a certain amount for their budget. Right but if they come in under budget, which would sound good, which would sound like the right thing to do. If they managed to come in under budget, they don't submit that report to whoever you submit it to so that they can get the budget approved for the following year. They have to spend to that level so that they end more. They're actually incentivized to go over budget because then when they submit the budget for the next year, they can say, well, look what we spent last year, what we had wasn't enough. You need to increase it. That's baseline. Budgeting is nudging up the baseline ever so slowly, and departments will spend It should be a bigger scandal. But again, we're so distracted in this country with the just the childishness of right versus left, and liberal versus conservative, Republican versus democrat, with that basic childish arguments that were always being told our intelligent arguments but are just again childish. We're so distracted by that that we don't actually pay attention to the real scandals going on right under our noses. There are all kinds of stories you can find of departments that hold huge parties or big bashes, or take their members on huge quote exploratory trips or whatever, just because they need to make the budget. They need to inflate that they're coming in under costs this year. Oops, we didn't mean to do that. They look at that money as quote extra money to spend, and so they spend it on perks for the office for the department so that they can again, like I said, go and bump up that baseline for the next round of budgeting. It's the same thing that universities do with their student loan and pel grant systems, right. They keep nudging up the baseline so that they can go to the government and be like, well, gee, we could have we could have more students here if you guys would just fund more. I mean, look at the deficit that we had last year for student funding. Gosh, if we just had more income. Inflation since nineteen eighty five has been twenty percent, So the rate of inflation on your income has been twenty percent, which is which you know, that's some sounds about right. I certainly would like to see it less than that, but that doesn't sound like a shocking number, and everything around you inflates accordingly, right, except college. Since nineteen eighty five, the cost of college has inflated by four hundred and ninety seven percent as we become more adept in education and teaching techniques, and we have more access to technology that allows us to go remote or allows us to create text books cheaper or whatever. Shouldn't that be going down? Why is it going up again? I've already answered all these questions. We're coming to the end of the podcast here. I've already answered these questions. But these are questions you should ask yourself when when you're debating or discussing the cost of college and whether or not the taxpayer should pay for it. Those are the questions you should ask and answer before you ask a lower middle class family who has no intention of getting involved in this ridiculous Ponzi scheme that we've got going on in college right now to pay the loans of people who want to go and get their degree in underwater basket weaving. That's the other thing that makes college more expensive, right that the availability of useless degrees. You go and get degrees and things that have absolutely no value in the real world, in regular life. And now you've got a bunch of people leaving college complaining about their student loans and how they need to be paid off, and then that just incentivizes the government to provide more in student loans. We can educate more people, the theory being I guess if you graduate more people, that there'll be more jobs for those people, and then they can pay back their student loans easier. It's all a big circle jerk four hundred and ninety seven percent. Bernie Sanders said. I don't know if this is true, but Bernie Sanders said recently that since nineteen sixty four, the cost of college has inflated by thirty eight hundred percent. This astounding. The cost of a four year degree in nineteen eighty five was fifty five hundred dollars. The cost of a four year degree in twenty seventeen was twenty seven thousand dollars. That's astounding. If you actually put some thought into that, it's absolutely unreasonable and untenable. So before we start asking other people to pay for college, and that's what you do when you make anything quote free, this is the thing I wish we could express to people who don't understand, who think that it's the government's job and responsibility to take care of every expense in your life. Nothing is free. The government doesn't have money, the government doesn't make money. The government can print more money. This is why we need more financial literacy. We need to understand how the government printing paper necessarily rises the cost of things. The government should not be in the business of printing paper. It's a bad idea, it's dangerous. It contributes to inflation. It's one of the reasons why you're seeing such astounding inflation inflation during the Biden years. They're printing money and it's making everything go up. Just please look up the mechanics of inflation. Maybe I'll do an inflation episode. That's a lot. Imagine if the cost of a gallon of milk went up by thirty eight hundred percent. I mean, these are just that is an astounding number to me. And then that we're, okay, pushing this off on other people to pay for it. Just that boggles my mind. And we can't even have an open and honest discussion about it, Like, okay, fine, let's talk about what would happen if the government provided all of your education. A lot of people will tell me that Canada is superior because they pay for college. Now, I left Canada and paid for a US education. I paid for a US education even though I could have gone to school for free in Canada. Well, let me ask you this. If it's going down across the globe, are you calling Canada or are you calling America? Case dismissed. Just making something free doesn't make a country better, doesn't make a country a bigger player or more valuable on the global stage. There's a reason why the US is the world's loan superpower right now, folks. And I'm sorry that some of those ideas that some of the things that make us a superpower make you uncomfortable. But you can't just pull off the legs of the stool and expect the stools to stay standing. What we need is transparency in college education. What we need is for parents to be more curious about why college costs so much. Now some of us may just have to end up paying for it anyway. You know, maybe you know all this and you decide this is the game I'm playing, and this is what I choose to do, This is what my kid wants to do. And that's that. Okay, great, no judgment, Like, if that's if you want to engage in that, that's fine, that's totally fine. My kids going to college, totally fine. It's not it's not college that is the enemy. It's the idea that college is somehow so significant and so special that we should spend whatever it takes on it and never hold them to account for what they offer for what they give us some return for the money for the investment. College finances should not be exempt from examination or scrutiny. As a matter of fact, if we are trying to be this in this era, if we want to be in this era of saying that college is the end all, be all of intelligence and accomplishment, then we should absolutely be making sure that we're holding colleges accountable for what they're providing to our children. Hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more. It's The Outlaws Radio Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts today. That's out Laws, The Outlaws Radio Show, n FCB podcasts. College and government, even private colleges are they're too mixed up and it de incentivizes colleges to be just in their spending and just in their charging. And of course colleges, it's always colleges that are advocating for higher student loans, for more student loans, for forgiving student loans. It's not their money. They don't care. They get the money, and they get more of the money the more loans you get, so of course they're going to advocate for them. It costs them nothing and gains them everything. So if you want to go to college, and like college obviously, if you want to be a doctor, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be in some highly specialized area, of course you need college. Like, who's anti college? I'm not anti college. I went to college. My husband went to college. Is where we met. My son's going to college. Guess what my daughter asked me the other day if she had to go to college. She's thirteen, though she don't know what she wants, but she was like, do I have to go to college because I don't think I really want to? And I was like, no, of course not. You don't have to go to college. In fact, you should only go to college if you think it's going to be helpful to you. But if you know what you want to do, then we'll find a way for you to do that. All you need is a plan. I don't need you to go to college. She actually even asked me if she could drop out of high school. I was like, look, her father and I don't agree on this, but I was like, yeah, sure, if you want to drop out of high school, be my guest. You have to have a plan, Like, you can't run around with no high school degree, So how are you going to get the high school degree? You need to go go to a GED program and get it. Are you smart enough for that? Do you know enough? Maybe you need to stay in school until you learn what you need to know to pass that GED. Great, you got your GED. What next? You need a plan cause you're not gonna be just sitting in the house watching YouTube all day at thirteen fourteen fifteen because you're not in high school. That's not an option. So show me a plan that is worthy of me supporting that is better than you going to high school, and yeah, we can do that. I'm totally for it. Highly doubt she's gonna show me one that's better though, but absolutely not. I don't think college is necessary. I think even more so to this day. I think with the advent of the Internet and YouTube and information at your fingertips, and you know, being able to break into business and break into different areas so much easier as an individual. You know, the value of college is really decreased even as the cost increases. We're I'm in a I'm in an industry that I was not trained for. But I am an opinion journalist. I wasn't I'm I'm an actor, and most of the people that I work with, we're not trained in journalism. It's why progressive journalism really hates us on this side. They think that we're not worthy of our titles because we didn't go get those four year degrees. But it's Journalism is a subject that you can train yourself in, and you can even train yourself professionally in because you can go and you can you can find go to clubhouse, you know what I mean. Go to clubhouse and get in a and get in a chat room about journalism and figure out how that experts do it. And go get the AP Style guide book and you can figure out what your what your post is supposed to look like. And go to YouTube. It's the world's largest dictionary or encyclopedia and go look up how to be a journalist or how you know what I mean, you don't need the four year degree. The four year degree is for the name. It's for the prestige. If you want to work at the New York Times, no comment. If you want to work at the New York Times, yeah you probably need that four year degree, but just for the name, not for the knowledge. I can guarantee you that I have enough knowledge to work at the New York Times and do a good job there. But I would never get I mean, I'm a conservative, so I would never get hired their period. But my resume would never You know, if it doesn't have a Harvard on it, it's not going to get accepted. So sometimes it's just the name that's the value. Whatever it is, you have to decide if it's right for you. But but the question we should be asking isn't how can we afford college or how can we get more students to college? How can we get more black student to college or more women to college? Wrong questions. The question is why is college so expensive? I wish more people would start asking that and then start answering it. Okay, guys, if you have anything to add to this conversation, you can email me Jlty at ProtonMail dot com, j lt Y at ProtonMail dot com. And I'm aiming for a thousand reviews of just listening to yourself on iTunes. So if you haven't reviewed the show yet and you like what you hear, please do me the favor and go drop me a review. I think I'm up. You guys are really chipping in. I'm seeing the numbers go up, so I think I'm up over six hundred now it's a little under four hundred to go. I appreciate your help. Go go ahead and drop a review, but a good one. Please. If it's a bad review, then just talk about being behind my back like a normal person. Okay, help us is out. Give me a good review and I will talk to you next week and until then, don't forget every now and again. Just stop and listen to your song. O Braiders all masodad that we won't with bathe then we won't to say oh we got it? Does no one can tag that owen this don't be okay, O Praiders all Mesoda that we won't with Maathe, then we won't to say, oh, we got it does no one can take that Owen was made. This don't be okay. This has been a presentation of the FCBT podcast Network, where real Talk lifts visitors online at fcbpodcasts dot com
