well on to our bit of washington d.c. and here is what's coming up tonight on the big picture as the costs of higher education continue to soar what innovative and alternative ways are there for americans to obtain a quality education at an affordable price pose that question more than to on your comments in tonight's conversations brutalize also as mitt romney bullied his way into power all his life and should losing two billion dollars be a red flag of more financial regulations are needed in america all that and more in the nights big picture rubble. and in tonight's daily take the justice department is suing him for those arizona sheriff joe arpaio is

a new civil rights violations were republicans continue to stand by their man and continue being the party of a trid bigotry. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by anya kamenetz a graduate of yale college on your covers technology sustainability and social entrepreneurship as a staff writer for fast company magazine in two thousand and five she was nominated for a pulitzer prize for a village voice comment a column generation debt which became her first book in two thousand and six anya has appeared in multiple documentary films has appeared on media outlets like c.n.n. and n.p.r. and has been featured as a yahoo finance expert she's also submitted testimony to congressional committees and state legislatures on numerous occasions on his newest book d. i y. you. ed you printers and the coming transformation of higher education is

a study of how technology and increased individual choice can tackle the current higher education crisis and joins me now from new york city on your welcome. thanks so much for having me tom thank you for joining us tonight unlike so many of your peers you graduated from college without debt please correct me if i'm wrong on that but how would your life be different if you've grown if you had graduated with a large student debt that had to be paid off immediately for example would you have been able to pursue life as a writer well tom the research shows that for students graduating with high levels of debt that they are really it's affecting their lives in all different kinds of ways they're putting off starting a family putting off buying a home they are moving back in with mom and dad and as you mention they're often not choosing the jobs that are the best fit for them because they're not able to take those kinds of risks when you have a lot of debt hanging around your neck as an albatross it really subtracts from the value of that higher education so the the consequence of this

one of the proportions of this i know if we hear this number one trillion you know that the student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt in the united states this is something that was largely unknown in the united states for most of our history thomas jefferson started a free university the university of virginia. sixty two abraham lincoln signed the moral act which which gave seventy million acres and all the wealth associated with it to a state colleges and a new land grant colleges right up until the forty's not only did they give you a free tuition they even paid for your real travel to go to school i mean how did we get to here and what are what are the what is the what are the proportions of. well you know i cover the history of this in my book there where you and right here in new york city all the way up to the one nine hundred seventy s. the cost of a public city college you know sin city college of communities those are all completely tuition free and so part of our legacy in the united states has been

free access to public higher education because we do believe that you know we have a meritocracy and if you study hard you ought to be able to get ahead if you do have that merit but since the one nine hundred seventy s. the growth of student loan debt has gone hand in hand with a popular kind of conception that college is a private consumer goods that only benefits the individual rather than a public good the benefits all of society and that is really the philosophy that we're staring down right now where people don't understand why it's so important to have publicly funded access to higher education so really the problem we're identifying here seems to be that we've lost the concept of the commons and we've lost the concept of an intellectual infrastructure as being as important a commons as the interstate highway infrastructure is to the more obvious cause. i mean i think that's a great analogy and it's very ironic because business people will go on and on about the importance of intellectual capital and their relationship between

universities that produce research and then go and create great businesses i mean silicon valley really owes its history to stanford university for example they're very very related but they don't look at the broader social good that's produced when people have simply access to get the higher education regardless of their family incomes and so tom since the one nine hundred seventy s. what's actually happened is that. for poorer families students have lost ground and in fact since the ninety's the most high achieving poorest kids in the bottom quartile of income are less likely to achieve college to go to college than the highest achieving those are the lowest achieving rich kids so the dumb rich kids are more likely to go to college than the smartest park heads this is the rigid officiation of a society this is the end of the american dream and in a very real way. to some extent. i'm old enough to remember the seventy's

and you know ronald reagan ended free college education in california and when he did so he was quite outspoken in fact just a few weeks before kent state he came out and he said that these these snotty brats was afraid to use the so that they needed to be slapped down that that he didn't want to be paying for their education i mean it just went on and on and on and and that mind seems to echo through has echoed through the forty years since that. that has shaped the the landscape we have today do you see the uprising against student we're seeing right now i mean literally with the occupy movement kids coming out young people coming out and saying you know let's have a jubilee let's just you know yes i have twenty five thousand dollars and wipe it out that kind of thing do you see that as the as as a as a as a little cry in the wilderness or as the beginning of

a giant movement. well you know when i first came out generation dad and i was writing about this in the village voice you know way back in the two thousand and four presidential election people really dismissed this is an issue and a big part of the conversation was about why don't students stand up for their own rights in their own economic self-interest because it's always been historically true in the united states that that a positive social movement is based around people standing up for their own rights be they you know workers in the labor unions or african-americans or women you know you have to kind of march on your own behalf and i really see that happening with the occupy wall street movement it's very very gratifying to me personally been involved in the teachings and kind of getting involved in those conversations and i do see it as the approach is something much bigger because obviously we struck a nerve here when students are graduating with twenty seven thousand dollars in student loans and they're trying to start their lives and over half of recent college graduates are they're unemployed right now or they're in jobs that do not

make use of their degrees so you know this is a mass movement it's not just a bunch of you know a few small number of malcontents but this is something that as you say it really confronts what the american dream is about and and. we have plenty of time to get into the details of things like do it yourself education and the things even talked about but just to finish up this kind of money and of those what what solutions do you see short of reinventing education i mean at a certain level you know a classic educational institutions are never going to go away we've rebooted the number of times you know states from you know as i said before jefferson and lincoln to to. well to the g.i. bill and do it the g.i. bill doubled college graduation rates the united states and educated entire generation my father's generation he went to school the g.i. bill is is it time for another g.i. bill that doesn't maybe involved you guys. well the problem that we're running into

here is really a problem of the structure of the market and it does get very complicated but i'd just like to say briefly is you know do providing aid directly to students and then allowing college financial aid offices to oversee how that aid is tributed and then the way that we rely on loans over grants those two things are really fueling the college cost crisis and they're fuelling the transfer over where colleges are putting more and more of the burden of their whole entire budget on tuition rather than finding efficiencies in other ways or look back to the states states to provide the funding so you know i don't think that necessarily a large handout of distributing more money directly to students is going to be the best way to do it i think that we need to be very very smart about how we structure these things to a limit the growth of student loans and b. make sure that the money is going to the people that needed the most and in a way where it's incentivizing you know more productive activity on the part of the

institutions so you're suggesting the road the road in the money through the students it should just go right to the institutions like it did before reagan. you know i really think that first of all a big reason that public institutions are raising tuition is because they're seeing a decline in state subsidy levels so obviously you know there needs to be some action on the state level this is this is the cost shifting that you wrote about the phrase that's exactly right car shifting in this goes the best research on this is being done with the delta cost project in in there in d.c. but they basically say the reason that that public institutions they're seeing you know historic lows and every time there's an economic downturn of course there's cuts to higher education those cuts the cost of them passed directly on to students as you say and through student loans through the magic of student loans and financing those purchases and students and families have been less sensitive to those cost increases and so that's why it's allowed to grow year after year what role does for profit education play in all this in the health care field we see

switzerland for example has no national health care system you have to buy it sorta like romney care or obamacare you have to buy it from private companies the difference is that as a country they've made it a crime a felony to offer health insurance on a for profit basis it has to be not for profit and as a consequence they deliver health care which has better outcomes than we have for about half the cost of america is there a an economic is there an educational analogy to that. you know these stork lee higher education institutions in this country have been the more reputable ones have been nonprofit and public and the current growth of for profit institutions they're obviously fulfilling a need they're serving the students that are least well served but they don't have the best outcomes i mean they have year after year there are scandals about mr acted incentives about recruiting the students who go to those institutions default on their loans at very very high rates so i think the existing crop of large

publicly traded for profit companies that aim to offer a university education are really not. showing that kind of structure in the best light that's not to say that i don't think there's a role for potentially other kinds of mean evaders that are coming in i mean i am writing a story right now working on about coursera which is a a for profit start up started by two stanford professors but all of the courses are going to be completely free to students so that's a very very different model and more conversations with great minds with on your commitments right up to the spring. download the official anti up location to go on the phone the i pod touch from the q.'s ops two. one jaunty life on the go.

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talk about your conversations with great minds on your comments are graduating college on your covers technology sustainability and social entrepreneurship is a staff writer for fast company magazine on his newest book d i y u and you punks and you printers and the coming transformation of higher education the study of how technology and increased individual choice can tackle the current higher education crisis let's get back to it anya what is d i y u. well you know this phrase is really standing for what i see as being the solution to the cost quality and access crises facing traditional higher education

institutions and it's really very simple i mean we're living in an age right now where knowledge is no longer scarce no longer has to be transmitted in the same thousand year old fashion of simply having a lecture stand in front of a group of people that it's being constantly traded and people are communicating all over the world and you know the the great vast innovation of the internet is that it's a network that that connects people and i think what a lot of people don't understand when they look at higher education the word university really needs guild and the word college comes in the latin it's means basically like colleagues a group of people together and so through communities of learning i think that people are really finding alternative paths to the same kinds of knowledge gathering that existed only within the walls of institutions before so what does that look like. i was a working well i think that you know the beginning of this revolution started with mit which started putting all of their courses online for free and two thousand and

one indies the growth of these video libraries like khan academy that's being used now in elementary school institutions to flip the classroom to allow people to watch a video at home covered in material then go into the class time working one on one with the teachers you can see the growth of wikipedia which is really this broad research you know organism that's being. added to and constant contributed to so all of these types of things you know they're still very informal and they're still very out of school but it's especially in fringe or frontier areas of knowledge such as computer programming where traditional curricula can't always keep up and this kind of learning is increasingly important makes a lot of sense the open sourcing of this. on the flip side though. with regard to the development of it i feel couple of years ago i was a guest walking through one of the large right wing think tanks here in d.c. and there was an entire room filled with cubicles with what looked like in turns

and every single page was wikipedia and you know i mentioned earlier to you the swiss switzerland has a private health care system but they require the companies to be nonprofit if you read the wikipedia page on switzerland you will not get the nonprofit piece of that what you'll get is that's what it was doing wonderful with just corporations providing health care it has been scrubbed similarly land grant colleges lincoln made langar and colleges free tuition plus fair you know round trip fare on the train as often as you needed to get these vouchers none of that is in the in you know the the stories of how what we're going on a rant about this how do you keep open source information from being corrupted by very wealthy private interests that really want to control what you know or what an entire generation knows. i mean this is a really huge question obviously it's a question about digital culture and the digital age affects every single one of us

i happen to believe that the types of coping mechanisms and the type of pedagogic that's required to get students learning in digital open networks that is what they're going to need to do in the twenty first century and so if you bring students up in a culture where the answers are at the back of the textbook or you know they don't bother learning something if it's not on the test and that's unfortunately our mainstream academic culture particularly at overcrowded state institutions they're not going to be equipped to make that kind of critical determination you really need people out there in the world of open knowledge and open frameworks to be able to learn how to to work in them and function in them and so i you know the the impetus to transfer to this kind of open learning future is not just because of the cost but it's really because i believe it's a superior form of learning and more suited to what we need today so. are there or are you envisioning i mean we compete is free you can go online and

read read something it doesn't give you a diploma when you're finished are you envisioning a university that is open sourced that is free that when you're finished there's some sort of a. determination that yes you're finished that you could then take to for example an employer and say here's my diploma. well you know i don't have to envision it tom because it exists today i have been talking in the last few months to students in open source learning networks and massively open online courses like the ones at mit x. which they've just announced they're offering like harvard a slate of a full slate of courses they had an initial course that was offered in the fall and some of the students there in pakistan they're in indonesia they're in south america they're in greece they're in japan and they are there already taking the knowledge they've picked up in the six week an eight week courses and they are taking them to employers and they're saying you know when you go into an interview for a technical type of job they're not necessarily just looking at what's on your transcript

but they're actually going to give you a problem to solve in that interview and if you can solve that problem you are on your way to getting a job and so there are a lot of fields right now today where the knowledge that you gain through an open free or open source type of venue is able to be applied and is actually counting towards people's employment right now to what extent do you see those kinds of institutions. either a being competitive with traditional learning institutions or be. essentially merging with them over time becoming an adjunct. well you have to see it to appreciate the scale that we're operating in right because the world wide in roman and higher education is due to expand over this decade from one hundred twenty million to two hundred fifty million in india alone they've got to open a new. few thousand people college every couple weeks just to keep up with demand and every year a million and

a half people are so apply for the indian institutes of technology only a few thousand can be accepted south africa in january was a stampede for places in the university there someone is actually killed in the stampede because there's so many people who want knowledge around the world there just isn't enough place for them so i really see you know these massively open online learning institutions as being filling this incredible need and desire and really you know it's human right right access education is universal human right so to the extent that we can promote institutions that are able to to serve with quality hundreds of thousands of people i think that you know there is an imperative to figure out how we're going to be able to do that to what extent do you think the the experience of your generation the shaped digital access. well i mean it's almost a question that's getting to the point where it's hard to ask it because it's like asking you know how is your experience if i access electricity right it's all around us it connects everybody it is the framework of our most basic interactions

in our most basic needs you know obviously there is still a digital divide will be our living in a world where up to eighty percent of the entire world's population has access at least to a cell phone and so you know i think we're just at the very very beginning early years of what that might mean and how does that make the generation different from other generations throughout the history. of gosh i mean that you know this could be a very very long conversation but one of the most interesting points of it to me is is really that you're not defined necessarily by the national boundaries that you're living in right because. we do have that option to connect and to cross borders and to be with people all around the world and be connected in what feels like a single moment and i think that's probably one of the most inspiring and frightening aspect of this entire digital experience that we're in and there's

around the world we see explosions of nationalism and you know rising in the united states. the rise of a kind of an ugly form of nationalism. how do you balance those two things. well you know you have to walk it back a little bit and say technology is a tool it does offer you you know we're talking right now about the ability of technology to connect you with the world's greatest mind the greatest thinkers to collect connecting the dots galileo and darwin but you know the facts are that are is that you can also use the internet to connect with hate you can use it to connect with pornography or crime and so it's not necessarily something that is always going to be you know a perfect. environment but you know that the the act of the possibility and i guess i just tend to be an optimist and look at the ways in which we are capable of expanding our our generosity and our culture them to others because we do have that feeling of close connection there are

a lot of products out there that started out as open source products and some of them still are you know firefox mozilla whatnot. operating systems many of them however end up being commodified and monetized and owned once they have some value do you see that kind of arc happening yet or at all with open source education. it's so interesting that you ask that there's actually a maelstrom of controversy right now because the blackboard which is the kind of microsoft of the learning systems world they you know they sell software to the vast majority of colleges and universities in the country that use some kind of online learning and just for a regular in person class but they'll be the place where you post the assignments on the worksheets blackboard has purchased one of the largest open source turn it is and they've been attempting to sort of co-opt the whole idea of having open source learning pearson education which is also one of the largest textbook

companies has launched its own learning service that they actually you know they label it with the term open even though it's not actually open source so you know there's a lot of what david wiley is called open washing which is kind of the desire to present these things to be open and free when in fact they're nothing of the sort and so you know it's very very difficult because i think the position that people that traditional institutions are being put into is you know be keeping up of the lives technology is not something that has always been part of faculties job description is another be asked to not only do that but also to understand the political implications behind the tools that they're using and so i think that it's kind of incumbent upon everybody who cares about education to actually look at these debates and see you know what's the best outcome going to be for learners and in a certain level isn't this also a method to the debate about whether the internet is going to remain open and at what level giant corporations like comcast can throttle what we see or determine

you know they could say oh it's from the judicial institution we're in charge of three times as much for the. i mean it's a direct connection right because the internet was spawned partially or largely within the internet within institutions of higher learning creative commons licenses which many people are familiar with the license digital content for open use were originally created actually for educational content so this is a very very large area of intersection and i think everybody can agree that when material is being produced and being shared and treated for the purpose of learning you know it ought to be freed up to the open license it should be locked up and yet we can see now you know in the legacy publishing world that paper hardcover textbooks are when the last cash cows actually produce no paper publishers and they're charging students in some cases when you look at community college students they pay the same amount for textbooks or they do for tuition so you know this is a need to be broken open students need access to open source digital resources and i think it's coming very very quickly it's coming more quickly actually than the

legacy providers can actually prepare for it so i don't think they're going to be able to completely capture the market but it's also really important to look like you say you know who's writing this stuff and how and what is the license for brilliant on your thank you so much for joining us thank you to see this in other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations the great minds dot com. coming up after the break mitt romney told yet another law i do in a campaign stop on wednesday is there any way he can win the presidency without line all that and more into night's big picture rubble. wealthy british style.

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