story of the militia and the people's army coming over and really giving the british what they deserved. any other questions? >> you gave three different generals and each was in a different setting and my question was were there any skills or abilities showing through especially across the street because they would have to know staff, war, mechanics geography as mechanics geography as well as the things you mentioned plus the dynamics of family versus their mission so what were the things that most implements their success and were there the hardest to

overcome and if he could touch on what those different things were? >> i would have to make the distinction of those three men between knox and green on the one hand and richard montgomery on the other hand. i think it really shows what the continental army consisted of was men who taught themselves war, who were really amateurs and who had to learn as they were going along. where's richard montgomery was a professional soldier. he was much more like the british officers and he would have seen things in the british fashion where as green and knox had to make it up as they went along. i think one thing some people point out isn't it ironic that

henry knox who is a bookseller and becomes a soldier, it wasn't ironic at all. it was the access to informati information. that is what those two have in common. green could afford the books, knox had the books in the store. most people have no access to the really sophisticated military information because books were very expensive than most people could not afford them. so those two men, it was kind of the information age at that time. they became generals and became who they were partly because they have accessed information and even george washington when he was named to be commander-in-chief he went out and got a book on how to wage war. i am not sure if that answers your question entirely but i would make that distinction at least between montgomery and knox and green.

>> you started with the french and indian conquest and washington's blunder but what accounts for the fact that canada was right up there. canada never seceded. >> that's a very good question and it's quite a complicated story. canada was predominately french at that time because the british in and the french and indian war of course took over canada which were an entirely french possession. quite a few americans had gone there and some british and settled there but it was still predominately french. americans thought like what you are saying the welcome listed as liberators and they got up there in the french were much more cautious than that. they had been treated quite fairly by the british.

they let them keep their religion, keep their social structure and some of the governmental systems out there so they weren't that eager to get involved in what they saw as a losing cause really. the americans went in 1775. they lost in the end of 75 and they were would then push down and after that canada became a british base. twice the british launched invasions from canada down to lake champlain down the hudson river. so i think it was actually a good political strategy by the british they kept the canadiens canadiens -- and there there were canadians who did fight for the americans but they were also coming -- canadians that were essentially loyalists and fought for the british so that was

pretty much the answer to that. okay i want to thank everybody for coming. [applause] up next on booktv "after words" with guest host chester gillis. this week william deresiewicz discusses his book "excellent sheep" the miseducation of the american elite and the way to a meaningful life. and it mr. sentry argues the most sought after universities in the country fall short of providing the key components of a good education that every student should have, lessons on

how to think critically, be created and maintained goals in life after their university education. this program is about an hour. >> host: thank you for this insightful book, "excellent sheep" which has been provocative in higher education circles and students and families. terrific contribution for the literature and i'm grateful for it in the nation should be grateful to you for it. i have a series of questions about it and i will start maybe the more difficult one. it appears you didn't receive tenure at yale. you had a great run and he did wonderful work. he didn't acknowledge that in the book and i'm wondering why not. >> guest: that's a question that comes more often from fellow academics who wonder and specifically comes from people in the ivy league. i didn't want to make my story part of it anymore than i needed to. the book is really for general

readers and students, for their families. perhaps in retrospect it would have been a good idea to get that out of the way and i'm glad you asked me so i can get it out of the way. no one of any sense expects to get tenure at a place like yale. i'm not angry at yale for that. i left academia because i was able to get a job somewhere else on the main reason for that is academia is drying up because increasingly schools are hiring adjuncts rather than professors. it's really a larger problem and that's part of what i talk about in the book. i'm glad we were able to clarify. >> i certainly understand. interestingly i'm at georgetown and it's a jesuit catholic university and i had a particular and just in that domain. you mentioned one catholic

university university in this book, catholic university of chile actually size wondering if you think none of the catholic universities are elite or you don't happen to know that domain or don't have the same kind of student body that yale or the ivy leagues have. >> guest: it's not that. i do mention a fair number of schools in the course of really talking about what students have written to me and what fellow professors have told me about things at their school but to a certain extent it's a bit arbitrary. it's not that i think the elite catholic universities of which georgetown notre dame d.c. clearly are among come it's not that i think things are radically different there because it's all one system. the main aspect of the system is the kind of students that are being produced before they even get to college. it's really about the admissions process -- you know i have a half a paragraph in the book where i say i think in some ways religious colleges and that would include the catholic

universities do think better because they are still paying attention to the higher purposes of a higher education. it seems to be one of the ones that is the most annoyed ivy league professors. people like steven pinker to incense with the idea that the word religious and the word good can be in the same sentence. >> host: i would tend to believe that religious schools and catholic and jesuit schools do have the value-added in what they do and i think i am trying to shape students for life and i tell parents for example you have given us a gem and we polish it and give it back to you with a conscience and responsibility to give back and the ability to lead and that's what we do. what i want to your sons and daughters to when they leave

here, they were smart when they come in and they will have a georgetown degree or a yale degree or harvard degree. that's a given for the students. it's what happens at the margi margins. it's more important than simply the credentialing. i think that hensarling will happen. that's not really what i'm interested in. >> guest: i realize families are just in this and students are just sitting credentialing as well but we have to open their horizons to something beyond that. the most disheartening thing for me about the reaction to the book is that a simple paraphrase i said many of her most of these schools are not giving students what i would call a real education which is what you just described and the response has often been from within those institutions are people who recently graduated not as we do give a real education but who wants a real education these days? this is about jobs. this is about careers. this is about return on investment and the kinds of

things you just talked about that it's about life and not just about your job this is increasingly difficult argument to make and it's one of the main reasons i wrote the book to try to push back against this intensely pragmatic and self exceedingly pragmatic idea of education in general and higher education in particular. >> host: for example liberal arts schools are designed and professional schools are designed to teach her how to make a living. liberal arts schools teach you how to live a life and why it's worth living, the larger question. i will leave you with an anecdote -- antidote -- anecdote of a student that was being pressed by one of the board members what are you going to do with that? would you going to do and she expressed how it will probably stay with her for her life. she has an aesthetic sounds. it was very eloquent and i

pressed again when we going to do and she said well if i have to i will fall back on my second major which is neuroscience. [laughter] and that's often the students i'm sure you saw that that we see in my own view is i agree with you completely. he should pursue your passion and knowledge. he should pursue your passion but i'm a pragmatist too so for example you can be a history major in english major but also i put in a minor in business for college students, a minor so you can read a spreadsheet. no matter what you are doing even as i do i'm doing management and doing budgets. i'm an academic by training so i haven't given up the core of who i am but having other requisite skills are helpful. it's not something that i think liberal arts students should pursue full-time. i want to be clear and i hope i'm clear in the book i'm a pragmatist too. i do not want students to think that the world is always them a

living. there's a difference between compromise and capitulation. figure out what you want to do. figure out where you care about the most meant a drop hopefully with the help of college how you were going to translate that into a career that can sustain you. it's also important for students to know that is not just about the first job and if you look at people who have been successful especially people who have been successful and done interesting things that almost never a linear path. that is why i say in nearly practical terms it's pragmatic approach is self-defeating because you want to compare people to bail to navigate a career which means having all these intangible or soft skills that you don't get from a technical education or business minor. you get it from learning how to be the kind of person the kind of thinker that a liberal arts education gives you. someone i heard recently described a liberal arts education as -- majoring in

english or art history or whatever. only america does this. only we allow students to take classes across the curriculum so they are learning different ways to think and therefore they are better at each of those ways because they have learned all the others. plus i agree. i think it contributes to mental agility and flexibility in that distinguish between a job and a grand a career, you'll have more than one career. most people will have multiple careers and certainly multiple jobs. if the measurement is exclusively her first job and a salary attached to it it's probably not an accurate measurement where you are going to go in your life. if you measure liberal arts people 10 years out they seem to do equally well with people who are trained in other skills. >> guest: i believe there's a study that says that. >> host: it does close and i think for me these are four

years or you can explore a range of issues that i think in my own view have intrinsic value not some pragmatic value but intrinsic value that will inform you in shape you as who you are. so we couldn't agree more on that. one thing we try to do you also talk in the book about how practical and driven for credentialing students are and not reflective often. i think that's true. i think they are on a treadmill to get to the next thing. we try to have them -- contemplation and action. you step back and we ever retreat center in virginia way from the campus and a retreat center does not mean that religious retreat. one is called escape. simply getting away for a weekend in reflecting on what are you doing? why are you in college? what does it mean? independent of the pressures

from your peers right there, you have a small peer group and someone to guide the conversations but also away from your family. those weekends are transformative for many studen students. they figure it out. i need to do this more often. i need to reflect. >> guest: i believe they are transformative and i think it's great you guys are doing that. i wish i could have known about it and would have talked about it because what i do say is i don't have a lot of practical suggestion to make because i don't know you as an individual but the wing -- the one thing i says you need to step away. whatever it is it's precisely the act of getting away from that peer pressure, the parental pressure the incessant busyness that comes with the drive the credential is meant of hoop jumping. college in general used to be should be is supposed to be that in itself.

college in general is supposed to be there for your timeout but it's been so pervaded by these pragmatic pressures by the credential's arms race. insofar as i blame the college is for that goes back to the admissions process and how it creates a childhood and adolescence it's all about jumping to the next hoop. secondarily unlike what you just described a georgetown many colleges and i think many especially elite colleges don't do anything to disrupt the momentum of the hoop jumping. i think they think because her our kids are so smart and of course they must be smart, they must be smart because we let the men then we don't need to do any of that work of getting them to be reflective about what their education is for. they take it for granted. >> host: i agree. we have to do that. we have to force them into that process, that kind of conversation with others about

the meaning of all this. i think is the foundational question. we have to come back to it again and again. there are also pursuing other and just and doing many things. they are doing internships and volunteering and taking five courses and they are in three groups and they had to there's groups. what would you say for strategy and it's easier to do it in an office -- harvard and yale and i'm not sure of a double major. for example i often advise them to pursue their passion. people don't notice much anymore. i think you should because there are for privileged ears you can never get back and you will never get a chance to do this again and the reading and writing you will do in college. but pursue your passion and one major and do mom and dad's major if you want is the second major for the one that will set you up for his professional career.

>> guest: i'm fine with that. you want to be a doctor but you want to be a well read well grounded author. what a think about that? >> guest: i know it has been common. one for me and one for my parents. i'm a little skeptical of that. again they can be the right choice but i think it misunderstands the role that passion or it just is supposed to have. i don't think it's something you should just do on the side because it's a neat thing when you're 20 years old. you know it should be the foundation of what you do in life. again compromises will have to be made. i have made compromises and i'm sure you have made compromises. the world will demand that a few but we need to start -- i tried to get away from the word passion because of starting to become such a cliché and students say i don't know what that feels like. i prefer to work purpose because that unites the inner with the otter.

what do you care about and what you see in the world that need your attention? this will differ for different kids, different circumstances. that is what should motivate what you study in college and do afterwards. i don't make this bifurcation. that's exactly where we start to get into trouble where we think life is over here and work us over here. the idea is to find the kind of work if you can that's going to reflect what you care about most deeply. common sense tells us that will often lead to the most successful even in vocational terms kind of existence. when you want to get out of bed and do what you're doing and it's meaningful to you. psychologists tell us the two main constituents of happiness or connectedness to others and a sense of purpose which for us in the 21st century general means

purposeful work. >> host: this is true, something that is purposeful and meaningful work. >> guest: you are doing something that is worthwhile. >> host: shifting a little bit my head is filled with things that i want to ask. one is the grade inflation issue. i think all schools across-the-board but not necessarily all schools. some schools have clearly heavy grade inflation and students are complaining about ironically. they are saying we want a clear differentiation between who is outstanding into is good. we are not getting that from our grades. the grades are very high for everybody. how do i know that i'm outstanding? how do i know i'm meritorious for the next person i stand out if we are all teeth on a comb on

the gpa scale? as classmates when they say that if their gpa goes down they will complain and say we didn't mean that but it's an interesting argument because increasingly a large number of students are gaining honors at elite schools. many of them merit it. they come and highly qualified and it's not unusual but students are actually saying, some are saying that's a good idea and others are saying i don't want to be left out in the want to be competitive for graduate school or a profession. >> guest: first evolved this is an interesting thing because as you know princeton tried this and despite the fact that apparently there was no evidence and advancing students after graduation the students were so freaked out by the possibility that they insisted they go back to the old inflated grade as the average gpa like north of 3.5. what is especially interesting

to me about what you said is it resonates with the sense that i had and speaking to students since then that they want honesty. they know that the system,, they become so cynical about their education because it is i spend so so much like a video game, just get to the next level. because they know, one of the things that is driving grade inflation is this ridiculous busyness the way extra curricular has expanded weather in college or high school. how do students deal with that? how do you do with the fact that you are doing 10 different things and you still have to carry a courseload? to put more and more pressure on your teachers in high school your professors in college to inflate grades. but this is part of what contributes and the sense that students get that they are not getting real feedback and i don't know where they stand.

i found students to be surprisingly grateful for honest feedback which i try to give them which i think is good. i think the best professors are very good pedagogues and inspiring teachers and all but they are also -- and the only b they got they thought was the best course they had. >> host: you hear that from people that have been out of school for 10 years. >> guest: again it's an exception and as you say grade inflation is an increasing problem that speaks to the fact that learning is not at the top of the agenda in college anymore. that can be a problem. people talk about the mutual -- between students and professors. it's an illusion among the professors. >> host: professors are incentivized to teach.

if it's a b you have to explain it to them and help them get better. that's the key part in that's important part helping them get better. for example the rewrite which is a good idea i think because that's how you learn. let's try this again but it takes a lot of work. if that's your primary mission you were there to enhance student learning but most places have a dual mission in producing a scholarship. to challenge. >> guest: look this is the make contradiction in american ad for a long time. there are forces and we can talk about them academic job market forces that are making it worse and worse. as student shift their attention away from their regular to their extracurricular it becomes more of a problem.

no one's primary interest is what's going on in the classro classroom. in the library or the lab the students want to be in a club or their internship so we need to think about it. >> host: there are still people who care that the direction is that way. and speaking of that curricula and all what do you think of the efforts to change curricula through technology and all that's happening and you don't address that much in the book. >> guest: i have a few choice paragraphs that issue pointed out i try to cover a lot of ground because i want to describe what i think is a large system and the parts need to be inventoried but i can't talk about everything and i don't want to try to talk about everything.

as a general rule surely there are ways that technology can enhance learning. as another general rule i think americans prefer to solve problems with the machine then with the human being. we prefer technology to teachers or psychologists or sometimes even parents. education is a human relationship. i really think it always will be. i don't think we will ever be able to teach people as well by turning them loose on a computer program then we will one-on-one and small classrooms of teachers who are rewarded for poor teaching. people think that they can solve the problem and colleges, governors and politicians think they can solve this problem with technology and efficiencies of scale. i think it's a huge mistake and as i'm sure you know the completion rates are dismal.

they are in the single digits. even among the people who finish they tend to be older people who are to have college degrees. >> host: is not the democratization of education and making a more accessible. >> guest: it's not about the kid in outer mongolia is not just that they are doing it for personal and richmond. they been to college so they know how to teach themselves. the whole point of college is to learn how to teach yourself. but you can't do it by yourself. >> host: a slight shift again. i had a transfer student i was talking to a georgetown, a wonderful young woman and she had come from a school that and this sounds arrogant not delete but a very ordinary kind of place. she was very bright.

she had gotten into several very good schools including georgetown and columbia and chicago but didn't have the money. she went to another school thinking that the good student can get a good education anywhere and she found that ought not to be true. the particular place you want to -- the pedagogy and also the peer group she is with that they are serious about education and their ambitious and work hard and they do their reading and all of that. they are conscientious and if you want to be academically inclined this is okay. the other culture was it's not a good thing to be academically inclined. i'm not sure that it works everywhere. >> guest: listen i don't disagree with that. i'm not going to romanticize or idealize public higher education as it exists now. to me the ultimate solution is

to refund a public higher education to make the commitment we once made to have high-quality low or no cost public higher education but given the stat the state of thes have reached at most public universities because of the relentless refunding kids have trouble graduating for years because they are close out of classes. classrooms are giant lecture halls and they are teaching assistants. elite private schools are well-resourced institutions and they can offer an opportunity. i would say they always offer students an opportunity to get a great education but in a lot of schools and georgetown is one of them but certainly a lot of the ivy league schools, you have to fight to get the kind of education at the school is supposedly set up to give you because your peers by and large are not interested in what's going on in the classroom and

your professors by and large do not want to take the time. people have written, people at harvard and u.k. have written about this. you have to fight your institution and i'm simply saying first of all that's ridiculous and second of all there are schools where that's not the case. i single out a liberal arts college and colleges that don't have a yard -- large university etiquette where the emphasis is more on teaching and they still defend the liberal arts. public honors colleges more and more try to replicate that model of large public campuses. to me that's that's what a college that's what a college should look like where students go supported by an institution and their peers. not because you should major in the, to wall street. >> host: there are small liberal arts colleges that do that and i admire them and they do it well.

the advantage might be for student who goes to research university that has liberal arts college with and if they get both in a sense. they get access to high-quality research and a high-power institution and that way they hopefully get the personal attention and the teaching is required in a college environment. to balance that some try to turn it into both. tesco i think the university of chicago which has a great reputation for intense intellectualism. i think of the university of chicago seems to be departing from its mission. i don't know if you want to get into this. >> host: my old alma mater. >> guest: you should be concerned about this and i care about this from other places. brown is most like a liberal arts college i hear they're there there's an institutional convergence, there's an institutional homogenization by u.s. news and practical factors where more and more colleges are looking more and more like each other. and they are converging on that.

research university model and they were sense where humanities have shrunk until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub because sciences bring you the money or supposedly bring you the money. >> host: chicago i went for graduate school and at that time it was two-thirds graduate and wondered undergraduates at the high-powered research institution. it puts maurice's -- resources into a public but you better be singly focused when you go there on what you might be doing. >> guest: i don't know if we want to talk about harvard presciently but i see it differently. it is eyes had a reputation for a very intense intellectual experience like a graduate school for undergraduates. that's what they seem to be moving away from. a lot of kids don't want it and they have changed their admissions policies and they are

very happy about it but it seems it's made it's own unique place. >> host: that is something that's unique in the sense that there's a lot of homogenization across higher education to be distinctive. i think he can be distinctive still in certain places are but unique is probably not a term we would use for higher education because we do look a lot of light. >> guest: maybe you can explain this better because you are in management but it would seem to me you'd want to to have a differentiated product. >> host: absolutely we are not berkeley and not brown and their wonderful institutions with an embedded value structure that we are clear about and one of the phrases at the school men and women for others and we expect them to give back. it's part of the culture.

to give to the common good is what we expect of them. and when they leave the seniors they understand what that means that as a consequence one of our biggest employers teach for america you do service for two years and some will stay in education domain and go onto other things things that i think it's a good thing and you are doing something worthwhile. the postgraduate world would you advise sometimes for example advise students who want to pursue a passion. this is happening more and more for the media industry. they want to go to hollywood and be a screenwriter and that's okay. i say go for a couple of years and put parameters around it. if you are getting coffee for director eight years later you should get out. but you should be free to do things and not feel constrained it enough to immediately go and get your mba or your j.d. has some students feel. >> guest: again it does sound -- depends.

you haven't experienced the world yet until you get out of college. how were you going to figure out what you want to do in the world until you've had exposure to it. i agree with that and especially if we are talking about a law degree or business degree. i think it's much better when you're a little bit older. >> host: i think taking a risk is a good thing at some point. you don't want to take a risk when you're 35 and you have a mortgage and family and responsibilities but when you're 22. >> guest: part of the problem is these kids have been taught to be risk-averse from the very beginning because they know they have to get that perfect gpa to get into the namebrand college. risk aversion is one of the things that and i'm not the first person to write about it. it's one of the main things that people have identified for a long time and it's something we need to really worry about. just one quick thought we are

preparing students for an increasingly unstructured job market economic world. we have had increasingly structured education so this is not serving them well. >> host: what about the professoriat. how do you think that is changed in the last 20 or 30 years? >> guest: it contains its own melancholy. i think the most important thing to say about that is at this point only 25% of people who teach in college are professors. the rest are adjunct or a very large class as you know a full-time -- this is kind of a shadow, this is a way that schools have gotten around tenure without saying they are abolishing tenure.

a lot of these people are great teachers. i would say especially the full-time. if you're an adjunct you are teaching a three or four places. doesn't matter how committed you are. it's going to be hard to be good teacher. his long-term contract employees are often the best teachers on campus but they are still not rewarded. salaries are still low. job security is low. institutional validation and prestige, everybody knows they are second-class citizens. i think it's time we got serious about the idea of the teaching faculty in parallel with a research faculty. either or. you are hired promoted and tenured either for your research or your teaching or some combination of the two not just research as it is now. we already have this second faculty but we need to, we need to pay them and respect them

equally to the research. >> host: i would agree. i think we need to give them the visibility for their career give them an institution to some degree and they will be more deeply committed to you and they often are. the research part i would like to see them teaching. if it's strictly research faculty you have a two-tiered university. sometimes those were the research stars never see a majority of the students. their classes are small graduate only and therefore students who know they are there don't have access to it. my ideal is teach at the undergraduate level and an elective and the graduate level. you should suit -- you should do both exclusively one or the other. teaching undergrads with

high-power students, i get that. only doing that and issuing the undergrad enterprise and saying others can take care of it won't take care of itself. you need cutting-edge people in your classroom. >> guest: right the institutional structure has been pushing any of the other direction. what has caught the gentrification of the faculty? is a cost saving measure for universities. as i understand it the academic budget that is grown at the slowest rate is at the instructional costs. in other words you're not spending more and teaching than you were 20 years ago. the football stadium, the football coach, the football team, the fancy dormitories, the debt on the money you have to borrow to pay for all of these things. it has to do with this move to consumer model. customers who have to be

appeased what's going to appeal to an 18-year-old to bring the tuition dollars to our campus. listen these are long-term structural problems and they are also problems people have been aware for a long time it seems all they do is talk about them. >> host: they are also providing a large infrastructure people basically providing a city where profession doesn't require it past the military that you have to house and feed the people and all the things they universities required to do these days. >> guest: sure. >> host: that creates culture for people to be in. >> guest: you need dorms and unique cafeterias. it's not as immediately obvious to the eye when you have the equivalent of a dowdy dormitory in the classroom. in other words an adjunct

professor. >> host: it's not as evident burst some people don't understand what it cost to run a university. i know they say their runaway costs and they go other places for increases sometimes but it's a very resource intensive enterprise to run. most schools and up paying more per student than they charge and tuition even though most will don't know that. >> guest: i think people also don't know that real cost for students have been flat at private universities for 10 years. tuition has increased but the actual sticker price that they are paying it's been almost flat for 10 years. it has continued to rise significantly at public universities because we are funding them. >> host: some public university presidents will say that my state -- run at the state regulated but not state-supported institute and

that is changed since the land-grant time. they are underfunded and is difficult to do a so therefore it's carried on the backs of other state students. >> guest: listen to me this is the most important issue. it's the fact that we have transferred the burden of paying higher education from the taxpayer to the student and family. so instead of taxes we have student debt and if people want to see those responsible for the chilean plus that they should look in the mirror. >> host: i would imagine taxpayers would agree with you on that. >> guest: course not because taxpayers want something for nothing. we are not spending on our infrastructural --. >> host: this is the dilemma if you live in a state with a fine public university and its competitive and you pay taxes

and your kid can get into that university. that's another issue. now your student does have not have access to what you pay for. >> guest: i understand that but i would argue i would question the idea that there are any states that are supporting a public universities and education. look at the university of california. >> host: it is facing severe hardships financially. other state instructions especially large that are very capital-intensive are finding it hard to keep them going. that is why we have elite schools. >> guest: it's also why they're such a crazy stampede to get into the elite private school. >> host: as long as the elite private schools can provide an meet the needs of that the kids come from a somewhat disadvantaged background has

access to this education which for me is a moral value i think. it would be shame on us if georgetown was not open to all students. >> guest: at the same time they schools have low retention rates of family know -- families know if i can get the kid and he will be taken care of. but can you give in and i don't think we have the same pressures that the kid who can't go to uva or berkeley for nothing or not just for a thousand dollars a year. my slogan now i believe china had a slogan they are going to build a 100 harvard equivalent. i think we need to build 100 berkeley's. we need to have two or three dozen every state so we don't have every high school kid in america competing to get into one of 12 schools in some of those can go for free.

>> host: if you get and, true so you want great access but you also want standards for the schools so they will still be competitive. >> guest: let's be clear about this. for the kid who can get into princeton or harvard it's amazing. three or 4% of their student body our kids from the bottom quarter. we are not talking about a lot of kids. >> host: we are trying to increase first-generation students and we have a program for an additional scholarship at not only a scholarship at a mentor -- mentorship. they are mentored by all kinds of alumni in its negotiating an environment that is very different than the one in which they came so they are comfortable. they are bright enough to get through it and do well but there are cultural issues that are very challenging for them and when to provide for that. only if you do that can they be

successful. they flounder on other domains. you want them to have a good experience a positive experience and a rich and full experience. but you have got to provide a lot. >> guest: i think we should only ever responsibility. but i want to emphasize it's admirable that you guys are doing that in other places are doing that. we are never going to be able to educate the bright low income kids, enough of them at these private schools. it's just a question of scale. >> host: we need to expand the capacity in america. >> guest: i think that's public universities. there are hundreds of thousands of smart poor kids who never get to college. they need to be able to go to their state institution for a nominal cost and get a good education. >> host: some are doing big community college route at a

much reduced cost and then go to flagship university. it's a good policy in a good idea. >> guest: again i agree and in a few locations i think tulsa is one of them and perhaps tennessee that are trying or have already installed a policy of free community college so again it's free. it's the beginning of returning to free public ire it. it's going to cost a little money but what do we want to spend their money on? >> host: we have seen american higher education has slipped a little bit in the international rankings. >> guest: it's just like our health care system. people from around their world send their kids to our college but our college completion rate used to be first announced 12. we need to take that seriously. >> host: if you look at how many years it takes to get to college georgetown was for years

but another may be five years. part of that is they have to work while they are there and it's a burden. >> guest: there are funding issues. >> host: there are both because they're not enough classes for everybody and then there are they in the economic challenges. >> guest: there's also a funding issue. >> host: yes and no. if you allow a major to be the major exclusively of course there will never be enough room for econ majors. like the lemmings going in that direction. it's a discipline that is not the exclusive discipline in college. there should be a wide variety. >> guest: if we are going to talk about that it's important to emphasize that is not just

humanity that is suffering because everyone has been told to take the pragmatic. there has been a huge drop in basic sciences chemistry biology and it's because students are being steered by all types of pressures saying like the present thing don't major in -- [inaudible] >> host: the national national foundations have defined a lot of the research and it's very competitive so it's hard to maintain a good science faculty for grants to support the research they are doing. although we have seen a significant uptick in the stem students particularly in biology. we had 12,000 applicants to thousand of whom were for biology.