1067: Higher Education | Skeptical Sunday

1067: Higher Education | Skeptical Sunday

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I am here with Skeptical Sunday co-host writer Jessica Wynn on the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. The pressure of college and university starts at a young age for a lot of kids. The tests, the GPA, the extracurriculars. Students wanna look good on paper to get into a good school and be on the trajectory towards the American dream.

But what is more important the education received or the prestige of the school? The SATs, the cost. The brutal business of admissions Applying to college as a part-time, job. And everybody wants to get into the best schools because where we graduate from determines where we land after graduation. It's also nuanced, but eh doesn't really matter.

Today I am joined by writer Jessica Wynn, to school us all on schooling.

[00:01:47] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Hey Jordan. Thanks for having me. So, do you even remember the stress of applying to college?

[00:01:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it was a lot of work and I, I don't remember it fondly, right? 'cause you gotta write essays, you've gotta get the applications. You gotta ask your mom for a check for each one.

'cause of course it's not free. And all your friends are telling you what they did and it sounds like better than what you're doing. And then you get waitlisted while you think you're gonna get into that school. And then you cry about it. And then you either never get in or you get lucky and you do. And that was.

I, I wouldn't wanna go through that again.

[00:02:20] Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah. It seemed to take forever, but when colleges opened up in the 16 and 17 hundreds, it, it wasn't quite so complicated. An applicant showed their knowledge of Latin and Greek proved they had good moral character. Also, you had to be a white male and you were in,

[00:02:39] Jordan Harbinger: so it's, it sounds like privilege is a longstanding academic tradition.

[00:02:44] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, uh, it started that way. Uh, the first American University, Harvard College, that opened in 1636 and in 1642 it held its first commencement. The graduating class was just nine white Christian male students.

[00:03:02] Jordan Harbinger: So. Unsurprisingly, a reflection of the American ruling class at the time. And also that's six years.

Did it take six years to go through college or did they just really take their time?

[00:03:12] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I definitely researched why the first class was six years, but I, I don't, yeah, I, I'm not sure. I couldn't find the answer.

[00:03:19] Jordan Harbinger: It's so funny 'cause you wonder like, were they just screwing around or they were like, no, it's gonna take six years for you to learn.

'cause you gotta learn Latin and Greek fluently before you can read any of these books. I just, I do wonder why it's six years long.

[00:03:29] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Just a fun boys club. Um, and then, you know, since then they reinforced this higher education exclusiveness by not ranking the graduates by their grades or even alphabetically.

Instead, these elite men crossed the stage to get their diploma according to the rank their families held in society.

[00:03:54] Jordan Harbinger: That sounds needlessly complicated. First of all, they, they, they couldn't have done that for long. How do you even. Do that. Yeah. I mean, with five families. Okay, fine. But once you got like a hundred, what are we talking about here?

[00:04:06] Jessica Wynn: They, I mean, they did it for just over a century. So until 1801, Harvard classified its graduates by their family status. Also, these first colleges in the US they were all faith-based colleges and just producing ministers. That's what Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were.

[00:04:27] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So I get that, but today is a lot different.

Obviously, I don't even know if those, I assume those places still probably have divinity schools, but it's probably one of their smaller programs. And it's there because it's always been there. I don't think it's probably a huge profit center for the university. I guess I don't really know. But today most people are studying what anthropology and other nonsense that you're never gonna use,

[00:04:46] Jessica Wynn: right?

Sociology department, of course. But it was for generations. So there was a fight to broaden access to colleges and universities because the privilege continues to shape higher learning since that time. So by the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were eight other colleges established in the United States, but today there's over 6,000.

[00:05:10] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I would've guessed a few hundred, not 6,000. That is a lot. I really had no idea. Those are all colleges slash universities. That's almost hard to believe. Like where do they fit? Where do they all go?

[00:05:23] Jessica Wynn: There's so many, I mean, you, you even see billboards for them. 6,000 campuses producing graduates, many that are displeased with the return on investment or their ROI, uh, ROI in higher education seems to be the biggest issue.

[00:05:41] Jordan Harbinger: Well, that tracks people wonder why they even went to college. I'm one of those people, so I get it. I, I look back and I'm thinking like, wow, I really didn't need that for what I'm doing now. And I think a lot of people are probably in the same boat.

[00:05:54] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, same, you of course, everybody wonders what would I be better off if I didn't?

And back in the 1930s, I mean 5% of Americans went to college and the idea of higher education to everyone else was comical. It was silly. Movies portrayed professors and students as oblivious to the real world. The movie Horse Feathers, it came out in 1932. It starred Groucho Marx, and he portrayed a ridiculous, foolish professor.

Fast forward to the 1970s, an animal house depicting the outrageous Belushi as the typical student academia was not thought of as a serious place in pop culture.

[00:06:35] Jordan Harbinger: So were most people going to college by the seventies? That's kind of what I had in my head is that the, maybe that was the tipping point where more people were going than weren't.

I.

[00:06:44] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I should. There was a lot more people going, but America prefers heroes that didn't go to college. Like Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford. Then there's today's dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rachel Ray, Richard Branson, mark Zuckerberg, Charles Lindbergh, straight up failed outta college, and scientists and professors, their seed is kind of lame and we like to make fun of these educated eggheads.

[00:07:11] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. But all of those people are objectively really successful and that's, that's what we respect about them, not the fact that they didn't finish college. And I know that that's lost on a lot of people who drop outta college. Like they think that's the secret ingredient when the secret ingredient is probably crazy amounts of talent and drive.

[00:07:29] Jessica Wynn: Right? Right. That's true. But I mean, higher education hasn't always played a larger role in society. So in the thirties and forties. Many people learned about the Civil War by watching Gone With the Wind, not through a thoughtful study. Movies were shaping what people thought about much of history.

[00:07:47] Jordan Harbinger: Movies still teach history.

For example, I know that the Great pyramids in Egypt were discovered in part by Nicholas Cage and excavated by Harrison Ford. So I guess nothing has changed.

[00:07:58] Jessica Wynn: Well, the misinformation movies gives us, that definitely hasn't changed. But the Second World War that changed everything, including higher education, Hitler came to power and destroyed the greatest academic culture in the world, which was in Germany.

Hitler never went to college by the way. He did. However, fire faculty at German universities and America saw that opening and brought over many intellectuals that were in danger in Hitler's Germany. In fact, Princeton started the Institute of Advanced Study just to give Einstein a home in academic support.

Hitler screwed himself. H

[00:08:38] Jordan Harbinger: how so? Say more about that. I mean, I think I kind of know where this is going, but

[00:08:42] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, because we got the bomb Jordan, like we got the bomb, not Germany. If it wasn't for Hitler, scaring off the scientists and nerds, we would have never gotten the bomb.

[00:08:52] Jordan Harbinger: So what I have learned that in college, or would I have learned that by watching Oppenheimer,

[00:08:57] Jessica Wynn: maybe a combo, and it wasn't just the bomb America gained when the war ended, there were a lot of GIS facing unemployment.

So America created the GI Bill in 1944.

[00:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow. I figured the GI bill was mostly post-Vietnam, but I guess the program started a lot earlier from the sound of it.

[00:09:16] Jessica Wynn: Oh yeah. Roosevelt enacted it in 44. The, the controversies of how it all worked is for another show you can do, but it was aid for Veterans in hopes that about like 200,000 of them would go to college.

[00:09:30] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That's a lot. I suppose that's nice for those who were allowed to take advantage of it. I kind of read some stuff that maybe certain races were not allowed to do it or whatever. I don't know. We'll have to. That's another skeptical Sunday, like you said.

[00:09:42] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the where the controversy lies, but it wasn't 200,000 that took advantage.

It was 7 million gis. Wow. Took advantage and went to college. Yeah.

[00:09:54] Jordan Harbinger: That's great.

[00:09:55] Jessica Wynn: It changed the entire student body, of course, but it also changed the whole faculty. More professors were needed, more classes were needed, and because of this, those Christian male white campuses, they became a lot more diverse.

[00:10:10] Jordan Harbinger: More people means more diversity. Sure, okay. That's, is that a good thing for the schools? It seems like that's a good thing for the schools, right? At this time.

[00:10:17] Jessica Wynn: Well, of course, but this is America, so it's another complicated thing. Pre-war faculty at elite schools, they were all white, overwhelmingly Protestant, and everyone pretty much held the same opinions.

Then came the GIS to them when they started college majors were just guys in the military who barked orders at them. But yeah, now they had to pick a field of study and more teachers were needed, like a lot more. So anyone with a pulse got a teaching job.

[00:10:50] Jordan Harbinger: So that was like peak perfect time to be in academia.

Right, because if you, like you said, if you had a pulse. And you were, you could read, you were basically employed by whatever university to teach this incoming glut of students.

[00:11:03] Jessica Wynn: Oh yeah. It was an academic wild, wild west. I mean, people got tenure because they just needed people with tenure. And tenure is coveted, right?

Even today, it gives you a permanent position to those deemed worthy. It takes at least five years proving one's expertise. I mean, imagine Jordan tenure with no publications. It's it, it's unheard of. And it changed colleges.

[00:11:29] Jordan Harbinger: So for people who don't know, tenure is essentially like, and you'll have to step in here, probably Jessica, but that's when a professor, they're like, okay, we wanna keep you around basically forever.

So now you have all kinds of protections about what you can do and say. And it's sort of like, you can be a free academic here because we can't fire you for nonsense political reasons, which isn't entirely true, but I guess it's sort of. Job security type thing for somebody in that position and

[00:11:56] Jessica Wynn: Right.

It's close to like being appointed to the Supreme Court. You're, you're kind of locked in.

[00:12:02] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. You're a made man in, in mafia terms. Right. You're, you're in right. And you, but usually you gotta like write books and publish stuff and get into journals and back then it was like, oh, you like working here and you're gonna stay.

Here's some tenure.

[00:12:16] Jessica Wynn: Right, exactly. They just were begging you Colleges in California, actually, they needed teachers so bad. They would send people in the Midwest, like little orange trees or oranges or something to entice them to come to California, teach. There's plenty more where

[00:12:30] Jordan Harbinger: that came from, if you know what I'm saying.

[00:12:33] Jessica Wynn: Were like, all right. But yeah, I mean, it just changed everything. And then as the faculty changed, like the country changed, then the model grew. And today higher educations is supposed to be attainable for all Americans.

[00:12:49] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, yeah, it is. You said we have 6,000 colleges and universities in the US that offer a degree.

That's a lot of degrees, man. A lot. Yeah.

[00:12:57] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. That's a big math problem. And of those 6,000 colleges, you can break it down. A thousand of them are Bible colleges. A third of them are for profit, half of them are private. The vast majority are state universities, and then there's the monstrosities that revolve around big sports.

[00:13:16] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Otherwise known as party schools. Although to be fair, I went to Michigan and I can't tell if that was a school that revolved around sports or a real academic institution, and I think it was a little bit of both.

[00:13:26] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, same at Iowa was a little bit of both, but I mean those party schools are popular and many Americans can name their local college athletes and coaches, but very few can name a college president or chancellor like name the chancellor of the closest campus to you.

[00:13:43] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Well, obviously I can't do that. I can't, I don't even think I can name the closest campus to me, let alone the person who runs it. The only president, university president I can name right now is Claudine Gay, and that's because she was all over the news before resigning and it was this big thing. I don't even think that one counts

[00:14:00] Jessica Wynn: or her last name just stuck with you also.

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, also very memorable. Yes, exactly.

[00:14:06] Jessica Wynn: I mean, regardless of the public's, like lack of knowledge, colleges and universities, they're everywhere. Plus, because there's so many campuses, we are overproducing PhDs in the United States. Since 2000, the number of doctoral degree holders has reached 4.5 million.

That's a lot of doctorates and the number of people with a master's has gone up to 21 million. We have over 200,000 professors, and as higher education spreads, forget getting tenure without a publication. Now you need peer review, internal review, outside letters, plus a podcast, a movie deal, a recipe book.

I mean, it's like all these trap trappings of rankings of importance. And it's difficult to get tenure these days because the jobs aren't in demand like they were after the war. So there's this academic job scarcity, but we're still overproducing the PhDs despite the fact there's not enough jobs in academia.

[00:15:11] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. So everybody knows the joke about earning your PhD and then you end up with a job at Starbucks or something.

[00:15:18] Jessica Wynn: Is that a joke or is that just what's happening because it's so competitive? Going to a top college does help in the marketplace and we're told the top colleges through rankings and lists.

Americans love lists, Buzzfeed, top 100 movies, top 10 albums, whatever. We love rankings and lists, and that's what we've kind of dwindled academia to the list.

Uh, US news almost went outta business until they started publishing college rankings and best of lists, and now parents love saying, my kid goes to a school higher on the list than your kid.

[00:16:06] Jordan Harbinger: Of course parents work hard for those bragging rights, man. Um, even my parents who are not those kinds of people, I'm pretty sure they were still like, oh yeah, Jordan got into Michigan.

I know they did it with law school. They called their lawyer friends and they're like, yeah, is Michigan a good school? 'cause Jordan just got in like all playing dumb. They're like, wow, congratulations. I mean, you can't resist, right? It's your kid. I get it.

[00:16:27] Jessica Wynn: Of course you did that somehow, somehow, somehow vicariously you go there.

I was gonna say

[00:16:32] Jordan Harbinger: somehow I, somehow we both did it. I don't know. I dunno how that works,

[00:16:37] Jessica Wynn: right? I mean, people wanting their kids in the best school is American, is apple pie, right? I mean, when we put so much value on elite schools because their prestige leads to a prestigious paycheck, but people have no basis on which to judge the quality of education besides these lists.

You know, is there any way to determine if the legal education at Yale ranked number one is superior to the legal education at the school, ranked 20th or 50th or sixth thousandth?

[00:17:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's tough. I don't know how you can really tell at all. There are different types for law school. There's different types of learning at different tiers.

So a lower tier law school, while it might not be like, oh, I went to Harvard Law, that's actually much more practical. If you go to like a third tier law school, say you go to a third tier law school in Michigan, they're actually teaching you the laws in Michigan. And then when you take the bar, you're like, I know all this stuff already because I learned it in school.

Whereas higher tier law schools like Michigan or Harvard, Columbia, whatever, you're reading Supreme Court arguments and stuff and it's like, what's the philosophy that we have behind this? And then you get out and you have to study for the bar and you're like, what is this? I've never seen this. In my life.

So you probably have better teachers that care more at smaller schools and the information is more practical. And professors of law at Michigan, indifferent doesn't quite sum up what some of those folks were. Sure, some were amazing, but some really resented teaching and they were, they would tell us like, oh, I've gotta teach this semester.

I'm so annoyed. And it was a little bit like, cool, I'm glad I'm paying $42,000 a year to learn from you and you don't even wanna be here. I don't know for undergrad though, what it's like. I mean, I don't know how you can say that one school is definitively better than another school other than to look at like employment rates.

But that doesn't really say anything other than the reputation of the school is good. It doesn't say the education is right. So I don't know.

[00:18:33] Jessica Wynn: Right. I mean, it's hard. That's why it's just so easy to look at the list. It's hard to tell if the undergraduate education provided at Princeton is better than at Puget Sound, but there's just such a heavy reliance on these rankings.

[00:18:50] Jordan Harbinger: So you're saying the quality of education provided at Yale is far less important than the prestige of the Yale degree, and I think that makes a lot of sense. But isn't the quality somehow or somewhat indicative of the prestige, or is that just all sort of fabricated branding?

[00:19:06] Jessica Wynn: But how do you judge the quality of education in the first place?

How can you determine whether it's gotten better or worse? I mean, I'm certain you can have a shitty professor at Princeton and a tremendous professor at a community college.

[00:19:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But wearing a Princeton hoodie at the coffee shop. He gets you the respect you, maybe you get a date on your way out. Wearing a community college hoodie at the coffee shop gets people asking you if you work at the coffee shop.

Oh

[00:19:33] Jessica Wynn: man. Well, I mean that proves the bias these rankings create. Yeah,

[00:19:37] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, you're right.

[00:19:38] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it's kind of easier to cheat the Princeton student, by the way.

[00:19:43] Jordan Harbinger: What do you mean cheat the Princeton student? I wanna hear more about this.

[00:19:45] Jessica Wynn: Well, like for what they think they're getting into. I mean, I'm not sure I would say that an expensive undergraduate education provided largely by graduate students and adjuncts is cheating.

But it is giving students at these elite universities something quite different from what is promised. The quality of education provided at Yale might, for all I know, be terrific, but for most, this is both impossible to determine and it's far less important than the prestige of the Yale degree.

[00:20:20] Jordan Harbinger: So do you find the reputations of these schools problematic?

Is that what it is? Is that your big beef with this?

[00:20:26] Jessica Wynn: Uh, yeah, kind of. I mean, according to one study, just five universities, Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford produce about one eighth of the tenured faculty at PhD granting universities. 80% of them earned their doctoral degree at 20% of the research universities.

And one way for a struggling college to signal its legitimacy and quality is to announce that it's new professor has a PhD from a university with a reputation far stronger than its own. You know, it's like it's difficult for a top graduate of a less prestigious university to get an interview, let alone to get hired anywhere.

But if you can say, I studied under this prestigious degree holding professor, then you might have a better chance.

[00:21:19] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So, so yes. The US news rankings, which were all the rage back when I was going to school, those favor prestige, but I mean, I don't think we can pretend they are outliers. Right. Wealth and prestige sounds like it ruled higher education well before the introduction of these rankings.

And would probably still rule higher education if the rankings vanish tomorrow. Right. The prestige and the reputation and stuff still exists. It might just be less formalized or something like that.

[00:21:47] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, of course. Of course it would still be there, but the college rankings are here and they're failing to measure the quality of the academic experience,

[00:21:58] Jordan Harbinger: which is probably why there's been some backlash to those rankings in the first place.

Right.

[00:22:02] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, there is backlash, but the universities are just as tied to the rankings. In 2022, Yale and Harvard said they would not take part in the rankings by US News and World Report anymore, which it was a start. Berkeley Law followed soon after then Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford. As of today, 10 of the publications, top 15 law schools have said they will stop taking part.

But what does that mean? They're, they're still on the list,

[00:22:33] Jordan Harbinger: so how do they still make the list if they're not doing the list thing? I don't get it.

[00:22:38] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. They just don't quote unquote, cooperate with the publication. So, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't make a whole ton of sense.

[00:22:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So they don't send the data when it's requested and it's like we're opting out and then the US news is like, eh, we're just gonna guesstimate it and put you on the list anyway because we can't not have Yale on there, or Harvard or whatever.

Yeah. So it sounds like a crisis of conscience is contagious if maybe a lot of schools aren't cooperating, or is it just like a few elite universities opted out and it's totally inconsequential?

[00:23:10] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, it seems that it's, there's just this back and forth about who's opting in and out, but any step to loosen the hold these rankings have on the marketplace should be considered a good thing.

These announcements will change nothing because at the same time they say they're not partaking in the rankings. It's, they're still on the list. The funny thing is, is what I've seen is if they are dropped off the list, even though they're not taking part, they complain they're not on the

[00:23:41] Jordan Harbinger: list. So, sure.

So people wanna be told they're great, even if they're like modestly telling you to stop. Uh, we don't wanna participate. Wait, where, where are we? Why aren't we on there? How do, how, what do you mean? We're number six instead of number four. Come on. Yeah. So I guess that makes sense, but only 25 schools can be in the top 25, right?

[00:23:58] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, not really. I mean, they have a lot of ties on the list and people can brag that they're in one of the 70 schools in the top 25. There's an essay called Higher Ed's Prestige Paralysis by Professor Brian Rosenberg, and he makes the argument that with or without these rankings, college reputations are fixed, valuable, and based on almost no hard evidence.

And I love this. It, it makes sense to me because these US News rankings are based on almost no actual evidence of quality, and the rankings reinforce the existing structure of institutional wealth and prestige. I mean, any non-academic can name a lot, if not most of the schools in the top 25 because the list, it's been the same for centuries.

I mean, does that make sense to you? No school can raise its game and get on the list.

[00:24:53] Jordan Harbinger: So there's no underdog, there's no scrappy, like bad news bears of academia.

[00:24:58] Jessica Wynn: Right? Right. I mean, plus college rankings. That doesn't seem to include the quality of the academic experience. They rely heavily on retention and graduation rates and how successful their faculty is.

[00:25:13] Jordan Harbinger: Well, the quality of the college experience is so subjective. So it's difficult to do, right? If it's, if it's even possible at all. I just don't understand how you rate the quality of something like this. I know I said that earlier.

[00:25:24] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. But it is possible, like if I had to measure quality, I'd look at how many students had one-on-one time with a faculty member.

How many participated in an honors program or a research program, and how many small classes they were a part of. You can consider internships, mentored research, uh, study abroad programs. That list can go on and on. I mean, look at how many students shared a meal with a faculty member or visited a professor's house or you know, whatever extracurricular activity.

[00:25:56] Jordan Harbinger: So here's my objection to that. Won't those indicators discriminate against schools that serve large numbers of part-time and commuter students?

[00:26:04] Jessica Wynn: Uh, I mean, not necessarily the, there's a lot of two and four year schools that make student engagement a defining feature of their undergraduate experience.

[00:26:15] Jordan Harbinger: But US News is not the only one doing rankings. Is anyone doing it better or different?

[00:26:20] Jessica Wynn: Not in a comprehensive way. I mean, Washington Monthly, they measure the economic mobility of students and Georgetown Center for Education reports on ROI. But in the world of colleges and universities. Reputation, brand prestige.

Call it what you will it that is more important than anything else, including the quality of the actual education provided. I mean, in fact, it would be difficult to find another industry in which reputations are so fixed, so valuable, and based on so little hard evidence.

[00:26:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess although US News did not create the prestige of Yale and Harvard, the, the list just kind of tell people what they already know.

Yeah,

[00:27:05] Jessica Wynn: yeah. I mean, of course there's no surprises but US news it, it's the is not the cause. You're right. But it's an unpleasant symptom of how higher education operates. It measures quality based on average class size faculty qualifications and standardized test scores. You know, I know, you know, even bar passage rates for law schools can be misleading.

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So come join us. You'll be in Smart Company where you belong. The course is free. over@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Skeptical Sunday. Well, the bar passage rates seem pretty steady over the last 20 years at least. I don't know how those rates stay the same. I'm not sure about that. But what's completely misleading that I've caught onto from, at least from law schools, is the employment rates that they show, and then they report.

So law schools will say like, oh, we have a hundred percent employment after graduation. And everyone's like, wow, everyone gets a job from this school. That means I'll get a job if I go to school. So it's like a good investment, right? You can sort of guarantee ROI. Well, okay, but graduates, there's always a few knuckleheads, right?

And, and they'll get placed, for example, in a mail room of the law school career service office or whatever, making 30 grand a year with 150 plus thousand dollars in student loan debt and not working in the legal field at all. But the school keeps their sort of nonsense, 100% employment record for graduates, which looks great.

On the recruiting materials and law firms kind of do the same thing. They'll do something called a cold offer where they're like, we gave offers to a hundred percent of people who worked here. And it's the, but one of the offers will be like, please don't ever work here. We're offering you a job here, but you really shouldn't take it and you should look for another firm that's a better fit.

And. If you get that, you're supposed to report that to the career services office because they don't like that. But I'm like, but you are doing the same thing with the employment thing. Like you're pissed off at the firm for doing it, but you're doing the same thing with the employment. And so Yeah, it's a whole, oh my gosh.

It's the whole thing. So little scam.

[00:31:56] Jessica Wynn: The manipulations everywhere. I mean, I've read that schools could game the system by restricting admissions into those programs, and those programs can focus just on passing the bar. So you have two things working for you. You have a high passage rate 'cause you're teaching to the test.

You're only admitting a small percentage of applicants, so your school looks really hard to get into. And we equate this with prestige and a higher rank and a better spot in the higher education marketplace.

[00:32:29] Jordan Harbinger: I get that, but I don't think the problems start in college first. It seems like it starts with prepping for and taking, what was it, the A CT and then the SAT.

I don't even know if both of those still exist. I assume the SAT do. Oh yeah. I dunno if the A CT does still exists. So aren't those problematic as well or am I getting too far off topic? I vaguely remember those coming under fire even in the nineties.

[00:32:51] Jessica Wynn: They're problematic. They are both, by the way, like written and graded in Iowa City, like both the A CT and SAT and a lot of people who grade the essays work for both companies.

It's very scandalous. But anyway, I mean, we are examining these exams because. Wealth and prestige are an enormous factor in the SAT and Acts as well. But at the same time, those tests can also show a high school student's potential. So it's another really complicated issue.

[00:33:25] Jordan Harbinger: Right, and that's because studying for and taking the SATs for one thing, it's expensive.

If memory serves, I mean, you might need a tutor. You certainly need. A bunch of courses. I don't know how they run those now, but is it a good predictor of success in college or is that also bunk?

[00:33:40] Jessica Wynn: I mean, again, it's complicated, but a lot of evidence shows that it's not correlated that your high school GPA, regardless of what high school you went to, it's found to be a better predictor by some.

But it seems to me the SAT test itself is not the problem. It's the inequity of students taking the test. So wealthier families can invest in study aids and money buys, SAT prep, which buys a better score.

[00:34:07] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, but there are free test prep courses though, right? Or are there not?

[00:34:11] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's, uh, Khan Academy.

They offer free study aids.

[00:34:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's great. That guy's amazing. Who founded that? So that's gotta level the testing field to some degree. I suppose now that everybody has access to high quality study aids that are free on the internet almost. You don't have internet, I suppose.

[00:34:27] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Which sadly, that is actually a thing.

But yeah, I think it does level it somewhat more than it it used to, and for a while, the popular opinion was that the SATs are just very biased, even with the free prep available and the want for the test to be an objective measure of academic achievement. But there are these intensive and expensive prep classes like Barron's and Princeton Review that they kind of, in a way increase the objective measure when you drop a few grand.

[00:34:59] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, I remember those giant books that were so thick, they wouldn't all fit in my backpack. They were kinda like recycled paper, phone booky things. So yeah, it sounds like maybe test prep shouldn't be for sale. Not that it shouldn't be available to people, but it, it, I don't know. You're right, the, the money advantage kind of sucks,

[00:35:15] Jessica Wynn: right?

And even if the test prep is equal for everyone, there's more to consider than just that standardized tests. They, at all levels have been demonized in recent years on the basis that. They hurt diversity and the pandemic. When that came along, it allowed the perfect opportunity for many schools to drop the SAT and a CT requirements.

[00:35:40] Jordan Harbinger: Oh. So those are no longer required. That's that's interesting. I had no idea.

[00:35:44] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. At some places. And those against the use of the SAT, they like to point towards a bias towards rich kids in the selection criteria colleges use for their admissions programs. Statistics show that kids born into the top 1% of income have a one in four chance of getting into Elite or Ivy League schools.

But kids born in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a one in 300 chance of getting into the same schools. That's 77 times less likely.

[00:36:19] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. But that can't all be due to looking at someone's SAT scores. Right.

[00:36:25] Jessica Wynn: Right, totally. But some will blame the tests completely for inequity in admissions.

There's a lot of research now finding, you know, it wasn't that long ago, people were demonizing the SATs, but now there's new research finding that that school of thoughts mistaken standardized tests. They do relay real hard data predicting college success and a growing number of researchers on the topic, say the SATs, highlight potential in students from lower income and minority groups.

[00:36:56] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, what a plot twist this is. So we used to think. That the SATs kept out the disadvantage, but it turns out that they might actually be a magnet for potential. Or to use a college metaphor, it might be like using a black light in a dorm room

[00:37:11] Jessica Wynn: to would not recommend doing that ever Jordan. Right. Some things you cannot unsee.

[00:37:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, maybe. Maybe a magnet picking up iron filings out of sand is a better sort of metaphor here. Or at at least a less disgusting one. So yes. Okay. So it seems like the SATs provide some empirical evidence, which I think would be a good thing for making a decision about a student.

[00:37:33] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, absolutely. But people wanna hold something accountable for the inequity seen in admissions.

Standardized tests are stuck on this cultural pendulum and the importance of them keeps changing. In 2020, Forbes ran an article like Absolutely Demonizing the SAT, and it had convincing arguments. Then in January, just last month of 2024, Forbes ran an article about what a mistake we have made ditching the SAT requirements.

[00:38:05] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm. If the SAT is the only factor in emissions, I would imagine it would change the diversity of acceptance rates.

[00:38:11] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, of course. But no one is suggesting the SAT be the only factor in admissions, but there are good arguments of why it should be part of the overall criteria. You know, critics like to point out that the original designer of standardized tests was a racist, which, I mean, I'm sure that's true, but one can argue that many parts of the admission process hold racial biases.

I'm not saying the tests are completely objective, but like we have to look at the new evidence that shows the SAT is not the cause, but a symptom of the inequitable society.

[00:38:47] Jordan Harbinger: And um, come on man, like rich parents are gonna spend money on whatever they see as the strategy of getting their kid into Harvard and Yale or wherever.

And I mean, case in point, aunt Becky from full House went to prison for bribing some officials at USC for her ungrateful daughter who didn't even wanna be there and also didn't have the right to be there.

[00:39:08] Jessica Wynn: Oh my gosh. I mean, what an embarrassment. But that happens too. Parents every year she was just high profile.

I mean, there's three big ways money allows parents to get their kids in. Through legacy, admissions, extracurriculars and fancy sports. Plus, if your parents are educated, they can edit your essays.

[00:39:31] Jordan Harbinger: Connections are everything, of course. But what? What do you mean by fancy sports?

[00:39:34] Jessica Wynn: Well, there's like a certain set of sports.

There's squash, fencing, sailing, rowing, polo. Very elite schools tend to over select kids who play these sports, and these sports are also pretty expensive to participate in. The system works if you can afford it, and high income families are more likely to understand this, so people exploit the system and rich people can afford to exploit it.

More

[00:40:00] Jordan Harbinger: schools must have some understanding of the socioeconomics of their athletes now.

[00:40:06] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, for sure. Harvard is trying to set up a non-bias system, but rich people ain't dumb and they know how to work the non lottery way kids get accepted. Hmm. Coaches would say, we just want the best players. We don't care how rich they are, but the richer you are, the more likely you play one of these fancy sports.

So there are some things money can buy like expensive equipment and living in a community that even has these leagues.

[00:40:33] Jordan Harbinger: My high school definitely did not have a polo team. So say same if you could, if you could afford fancy sports, you can obviously also afford fancy test prep. I get it. They're not exactly hiding the weirdly small and not very bouncy squash ball here with these strategies I suppose.

[00:40:52] Jessica Wynn: It's so true. But I mean, some, some disadvantaged neighborhoods have taken this cue. I mean. Look what the Williams sisters did to the City of Compton by building a tennis facility.

[00:41:03] Jordan Harbinger: I remember back in episode 1 21, I interviewed this guy Freeway, Rick Ross, who was a drug dealer who generated something like a billion dollars in today's dollars in the crack trade, and he essentially pioneered wow, the crack trade in in Los Angeles, which we all kind of know what happened after that to the rest of the whole country, especially la.

And he said that his plan initially was to go to college and play tennis, but he had nowhere to play tennis. So after he got past whatever sort of level he was, there was just nowhere else to go. So he instead, he just started to sell drugs and he became one of the world's biggest drug dealers. Instead.

It's so sad to think that this guy would've been like a tennis player if it was up to him. He wanted to be Arthur Ash. Wow. And instead he was like the biggest crack dealer in the history of drugs. Crazy.

[00:41:49] Jessica Wynn: Oh wow. It's heartbreaking.

[00:41:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It

[00:41:51] Jessica Wynn: just shows higher ed is financially and morally unsustainable.

It's totally broken. I mean, elite schools are also buying data from the college board to recruit students. They know that They won't admit because it changes the acceptance ratio, giving the appearance. They're a tougher school to get into. This helps your ranking. I mean, it's all a game. Less than half of college grads even work in their field of study.

[00:42:19] Jordan Harbinger: Wait a minute, wait a minute. So are you telling me that colleges ask people to apply, knowing that they will reject those people just to keep their acceptance percentage low? First of all, that explains why Harvard sent me those letters back in high school. But why am I understanding this correctly?

'cause that sounds al, that's like a weird almost conspiracy theory where I'm shocked, but also not shocked that that happens.

[00:42:43] Jessica Wynn: I mean, from some standpoint it's, that's smart business, you know? Mm-Hmm. Supply and demand,

[00:42:50] Jordan Harbinger: I suppose. So why even, why even go to college in the first place? Maybe I need to back up and ask that fundamental question.

[00:42:55] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, many, many people aren't. 50 years ago, 20% of people went to college. Now it's about 60%, but that is totally declining. So there's 4 million fewer students in college right now than there were 10 years ago. There's lots of ways to succeed in life without spending the time and money on college.

And many young people are skeptical about the ROI. Many companies have removed degree requirements for certain positions like data scientists, software engineers, and graphic designers. 'cause, so as long as you're building your skill, you don't necessarily need a degree, but it has a lot to do with what employers choose to reward.

So are there still a lot of

[00:43:41] Jordan Harbinger: jobs that require degrees?

[00:43:43] Jessica Wynn: Oh, absolutely. I mean, of course, but it tempts some people to bypass the college experience and take the fast track and head to a diploma mill. These are not the answer to anything. So I don't know if you know about these, but they're schools that are handing out degrees for cash.

[00:44:03] Jordan Harbinger: So like a mail order, college degree. Nice. Why suffer through finals week if you can just cough up sun do and get a degree in the mail? That's amazing. I, I have heard of these.

[00:44:12] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, they are just so dangerous, and it's an incredibly insulting thing. I mean, student loan debt is over $1 trillion in this country, so it's not surprising that some people just plunk down like five grand for a master's instead of attending years of classes.

It's possible that you never even go into a lecture hall and you just pay for a degree from an unaccredited school, and voila, you can put down PhD on your resume without ever doing any coursework. But this can land people high paying jobs.

[00:44:50] Jordan Harbinger: That doesn't happen. Really? You get a job with this. Doesn't anybody like Google it and go, oh yeah, this is a fake school.

Sorry,

[00:44:56] Jessica Wynn: Jordan. It it, it does, it does happen though. These fake degrees, they've been around since the 18 hundreds and Oh wow. They work In 2004, it was discovered that the federal government was paying for degrees from unaccredited schools and handing them out to federal employees.

[00:45:14] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. That's ridiculous.

So technically the taxpayers, well, so you and I. Are paying for these BS degrees. I'm paying for this. Who's giving these things out? What's, what's the website so I can make sure I never, ever go there and buy one for myself?

[00:45:28] Jessica Wynn: Oh, well, there's plenty of websites. I mean, you can also buy degrees that say, or anything, a doctor, a teacher, a mayor, whatever.

There was a dog named Chester from Vermont. He has a Master's in business administration.

[00:45:41] Jordan Harbinger: So I don't know what's crazy. You're a dog with a fake business degree or a human with a fake mayor degree. It's like you might wanna look into what being a mayor is. I don't know why a mayor degree. Why does that even exist?

But I mean, then again, I guess it doesn't exist. It's just a, it's fake. So, but still, yeah. Weird thing to even have fake,

[00:45:59] Jessica Wynn: really strange story. But in the case of the dog, the dog's human paid only $500, submitted a resume, and a week later had a packet that included a MBA diploma, two sets of college transcripts, a certificate of distinction in finance, and a certificate of membership in the student council, which.

I mean, what would an online school have student council? I don't know. But this is an extreme problem, like an extreme example of the problem, but it is a problem. In 2007, one out of every six education doctorates was fraudulent,

[00:46:36] Jordan Harbinger: fake doctorates. I mean, employers are not obviously doing thorough enough vetting of their employees, but I'm, I'm still hung up on the fake doctors.

A sham education doctorate. Okay, that's one thing. But a sham medical degree is something else entirely that's far more terrifying.

[00:46:51] Jessica Wynn: Absolutely. In the two thousands, two men in North Carolina bought medical credentials and degrees for $100. It's a good deal. They were arrested for manslaughter after taking a woman off insulin and giving her their own tonic.

[00:47:08] Jordan Harbinger: Ooh, yikes. Okay, so these degrees are not just immoral. They're potentially lethal. That is a special kind of stupid, it's one thing to buy a fake medical degree, but another thing entirely to really believe you're a doctor who's innovating in the healthcare field somehow with sham credentials that you bought online.

That's just delusional.

[00:47:28] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's wild. And this practice, though, it can put people in positions of influence. In 2018, a mayor in Florida was found to be lying about her degrees. Her degree was from LaSalle, not the one in Philadelphia, but a famous diploma mill that sells degrees. I mean, it's infuriating.

Just I think last year a coach at Indiana State, which is like a big sports school, they found out all his degrees were diploma mills, but he still has this high paying job. Employers don't do a lot of background checking on people's education.

[00:48:02] Jordan Harbinger: This is very different though, from exaggerating something on your resume, like I assume many people do, right?

It's not like, oh, I, I played varsity football when I was like the video guy. That's what I did. Right? Right. And they were like, well, you're technically on the varsity team. The coach was like, Hey, you should just put that on there. I mean, I'll validate it. You're, you're still on the team. But I didn't play football.

Right. I was injured. Oh, and, but this is like, you didn't even go to the school that had the football team in the first place. It's just way beyond the pill,

[00:48:29] Jessica Wynn: right? I mean, yeah. You're not alone. I think it's like 25% of people infl educational achievements. So you're in company with George Santos.

[00:48:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Right, right. That sounds low because isn't it like 90% of people think they're above average? Isn't there a number like that? It's like the vast majority of people think they're above average, even when it's really obvious they're not. I

[00:48:52] Jessica Wynn: think so. But yeah, I mean it doesn't change the fact that many companies, they just don't fact check every resume plus diploma mills are, they're quite sneaky.

They accredit themselves through their own accreditation agencies. Only 12 states have laws against using unaccredited diplomas for some reason. And since not many get caught, there's little risk and high reward for the diploma mills and the people buying the diplomas.

[00:49:20] Jordan Harbinger: It stands to reason that something has to be done about this.

[00:49:23] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well there are like ongoing investigations. There's a professor in the northwest trying to get these dirty businesses shut down. He paid a diploma mill and he took their a hundred question test and purposely answered 79 questions wrong. They offered him a 2.7 GPA and an associate of arts degree. I.

[00:49:47] Jordan Harbinger: I think it's kind of funny. Well, no it's not, but it is also a little bit also, how do we know he deliberately answered 79 wrong. Is he just like, is he just like, wow, I got 79 wrong. Alright, so my test was I got 79, like he didn't get 80 wrong. He didn't try to just get 'em all wrong. It's a strange number.

Yeah, yeah. Oddly specific pilot. I think he just failed the test. Okay. So if he only got 50 wrong though, would he have gotten a master's? I mean, getting people who get fake degrees, they know they're paying for a fake degree. Right? There's no wool over the eyes. It's straight up pay to play. Nobody's like, oh, I'm getting a real degree.

When I didn't do any work. I, I would think almost nobody believes it except for those doctors.

[00:50:24] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's pretty clear they aren't legit. But if you're already delusional, get, I mean, who knows how it all works, but. Bottom line is there's a lot of money to be made. Some guy in Romania, he made $50 million in one year selling fake degrees.

[00:50:41] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:50:42] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's hard to read about. Degree info.com and degree discussion.com are two pretty famous, reputable sites, and they compile lists of schools that are believed to be diploma mills.

[00:50:55] Jordan Harbinger: You know what's better than shelling out for textbooks, supporting the fine products and services that support this show?

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. It's funny how we sometimes feel like we're just playing a part, like we're wearing a mask. Maybe it's at work. Maybe it's with friends and family. We just don't show our full selves. We hide pieces of who we are because we think it's easier, more palatable for others.

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Now, for the rest of skeptical Sunday, man, we do love lists. First, the school rankings. Now, a list of fake diplomas you can buy if you don't get in to one of the schools ranked in the other list,

[00:53:32] Jessica Wynn: right? Yeah, it all works out. Mm-Hmm. I mean, a legitimate accredited colleges, they provide an education that meets academic standards.

Diploma mills exist to perpetuate a scam. Accredited schools undergo rigorous review from independent accrediting agencies who evaluate schools based on academic missions, student success, and faculty qualifications that they, it's not a perfect way, but at least it's a standard. So schools who don't meet these standards are not accredited.

[00:54:03] Jordan Harbinger: So diploma mills objectively stupid, but also so is paying $200,000 for a legit degree that gets you little more than a cool sweatshirt and the piece of paper that you could have gotten in the mail.

[00:54:16] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well, your dad likes to wear that sweatshirt.

[00:54:18] Jordan Harbinger: He does. That's true. Um,

[00:54:21] Jessica Wynn: you know, there's, while debt on cars, credit cards, homes and everything else has pretty much stayed the same.

Student loan debt has gone up 700% since 1989. There's a lot more debt and default rates than even 10 to 20 years ago, and college debt has doubled in the last decade. The fundamental problem, like we've been saying is the ROI. Like everyone's outraged about college debt because they're not getting the ROI and we're told college is an excellent investment, but if the rich get better access to college and the best colleges get you rich, we are creating an insane feedback loop in our society.

[00:55:02] Jordan Harbinger: Just sounds like classism in a college sweatshirt and debt in a uniform with a name tag for the most part.

[00:55:08] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And it's financially unsustainable because over the last 50 years. College tuition has increased at four times the rate of inflation. And to what end. You pay these, the institution without knowing what you need, and you're also 17, 18 years old.

They provide you what they decide you need, and in the end, you have no sure way of knowing that you needed it. And college tuitions are going up so fast because technology is expensive. Construction is expensive. And most importantly, it's because they can charge tens of thousands of dollars

[00:55:46] Jordan Harbinger: and the loans are flowing to the students to cover the increasing tuitions and, and then the students hope for loan forgiveness in some instances here.

[00:55:54] Jessica Wynn: True. Yeah. And many students would be happy to have loan forgiven, which is understandable. But forgiveness will not fix the outta control cost of higher education. Student loan programs themselves are robbing people of the American education dream.

[00:56:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I, I never, I was never a fan of this. Like, look, I get it.

People are overburdened with debt. I completely understand. But forgiving loans is going to, first of all, add to inflation, and that's the least of the problems. But the real problem is that if loans are forgiven, there's incentive for schools to then charge as much as they want slash can, and for people to pay those rates because they're like, well, the loan's just gonna get forgiven.

Chances are, or at least I have a shot at this, just being a, a. Kind of lottery ticket for me, so I might as well do it. We, we need to get to the root cause, which is that it's too dang expensive. 'cause the prices are inflated.

[00:56:41] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's not what people wanna hear. I know. But the forgiveness program is not the answer.

The funding model for higher education needs to be totally reimagined. And that should start with the loan programs. You are spot on about incentive to raise tuition, especially if there's no limit to what a student can borrow. Every year tuition goes up and every year there's more students applying than there is room for.

So colleges charge more and more. Like why not? In, in 2016 of the top 25% income households with kids, 58% got bachelor's of the bottom 25%. 11% got bachelor's, so that's critical. When we're thinking about the inequality,

[00:57:28] Jordan Harbinger: it seems like universities are acting more like luxury brands than they are institutes of higher education.

I've heard this from, I think Scott Galloway and other folks like that. With all this debt, I mean, no wonder people aren't buying houses and starting families. How are you gonna do that when you owe $200,000 and now you're making 50, right? A year.

[00:57:46] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. The middle class will rent forever, I suppose. Now.

[00:57:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:57:50] Jessica Wynn: there are experimental, like pay it forward models that some colleges are testing. They essentially make lifelong donors out of graduates instead of charging them, get graduates to commit to donating to the college to fund new students. Purdue University implemented an income share agreement a few years ago, and they were followed by several other schools and it looked like a really good program.

And then federal law got in the way and shut all the programs down. Private schools have a little bit more success. There's Hope College in Michigan, and they're testing a pay it forward model right now. And like I said, they're having more success because it's private. But you know, unfortunately there's just not a lot of conclusive data on how this is working out yet.

[00:58:38] Jordan Harbinger: I'm guessing that's gonna take a few decades at least to, to get the data and figure it out. Uh, another thing that adds to student debt, and it drives me crazy, is once you pay for tuition and you pay for housing, then you gotta drop a fricking grand a semester on textbooks. In many cases.

[00:58:54] Jessica Wynn: Oh yeah, the, the big textbook scandal.

I mean, this is another part of academia that is so super complicated. A study that just came out in October shows that students learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens, though, and students are more distracted by eBooks and over and over again. It's shown that retention and comprehension are better with hard copy print books and print books create a healthier effect on brain plasticity overall.

[00:59:27] Jordan Harbinger: Well, no wonder it's taken me over a decade to learn Mandarin using a fricking PDF, but, but the, the resistance to textbooks, it comes from the cost. It's insane that tuition is huge, but it doesn't include the books. I, I'm already giving you $42,000 a year for room board and tuition. You can't throw in $800 worth of books.

Come on, man.

[00:59:47] Jessica Wynn: It's absolutely insane. And depending on your major, you'll spend from hundreds to, like you said, like a thousand dollars a semester on textbooks. So even if you are from the lower class and you win that lottery into Harvard, how the hell are you gonna buy the books?

[01:00:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. When I was in, of course, undergrad, I bought all the books like everybody did.

And then when I went to law school, I bought all the books for the first year, like everybody did. And then the second year I was like, ah, I'm gonna buy some of the books and then some of the books on the library and I'm gonna borrow some of the other books. And the third year, I didn't buy any of the books because I realized I could probably look up almost every case we were reading online if I needed to.

And honestly, I just listened better because I didn't have anything on my screen. Amazing. Because this is, this was like the laptop transition period where Right, it was like one year nobody had laptops, maybe one or two people. And the next year, one or two people did not have laptops. And I was like, it was like a massive overnight change.

Um, so I believe you about the pdf slash print thing, but yeah, I just stopped buying the books. I was like, I refuse because I'm, I refuse to spend $400 on a book that isn't changed from the previous year. And also is just full of public domain legal cases. I'm paying $400 for a binding at that point. It's just infu.

It's, it's, yeah, it's insulting.

[01:01:02] Jessica Wynn: And some professors who understand this, I mean, they get in so much trouble if they print off, you know, photocopy a textbook and print it off and give it out. Like that's not allowed to do that. I mean, I get why people are attracted to the PDFs. I'm all for. Integrating technology into the academic experience, but the science of our complicated brains, it all points to actually reading a physical book, not scrolling a screen.

So that has to be a part of it. In 2021 though, I mean, you're not, you weren't alone. Like it was found. 65% of college students don't buy textbooks. They can't afford them, or they share them, or they find them online or they just wing it. And I don't know if you remember, but if you went to the library, hundreds of people taking a class, the library would have one textbook, right?

They'd have one copy.

[01:01:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:01:57] Jessica Wynn: It's like insane. Um, but it's shown that if textbooks were included in the cost of tuition, grades and completion rates would be better. Plus it might make sense for that crazy tuition. The college's defense is that textbooks can't be included in tuition because. Different majors require different books, but I don't really see that I, the problem I see is publishers greed and they're just creating this expense.

[01:02:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I'm having a flashback. There was this place, tell me if you had this, when you were gonna school, there was this place on like State Street or one of the main roads in Ann Arbor, and you would go there if you had to copy a bunch of news articles or other data into a binder because the professor, like you said, couldn't give it out, couldn't copy it for you and the bookstore slash whatever, the place where you went to make the copies couldn't do it for you 'cause it was copyright infringement, but fair use or whatever sort of guideline.

You could copy it yourself. So the professor would leave this big bound book in this copy place and it would be like for Anthro 1 0 2 or, or whatever it is. And you'd go, hi, I'm here for the Anthro 1 0 2 materials. And they'd give you this big thing and they would point you to an assigned copy machine and they'd be like, it's gonna be 25 bucks or whatever.

And it, you would just flip the pages, make the copy, hit the button, flip the pages, hit the button, make a copy, and then they would bind it for you. And that was how you got around it. 'cause you were quote unquote doing it yourself. And you'd just end up with all these copies of Yeah, yeah. And it was so ridiculous because they're just, you know, it was like a copy of an article from the New York Times in 1989 about the Iranian revolution or something, you know, whatever it was and stuff that you could easily get on the internet.

Now if they just put it on a syllabus and they were like, look this up, you could find it. Um, but you had to do it yourself. And I was like, how is this place not getting sued into oblivion if everybody actually cares so much about this?

[01:03:48] Jessica Wynn: I, I mean it's, it's just the bureaucracy of it all. I just give the students the information that they need.

I don't understand it. Yeah.

[01:03:56] Jordan Harbinger: Or buy the stinking books. But you know what, if the schools had to buy the books, those books would be 10% of the price they are now, because they would have leverage to negotiate and they'd be like, we need 40,000 copies of this book, or whatever it is, you know, per, per year. I don't know how many people take some of these big classes, but like some of these universities, the Big 10, they could buy all the books in bulk.

Right. And then just, you could really just do some, some major volume discount and we can't have that. 'cause that cuts into the profit margin of the publishers and man, I don't know.

[01:04:28] Jessica Wynn: Right. They'll, and they'll start some weird rebate program or something that Yeah. Gets, it'll get more and more confusing, so

[01:04:36] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly.

I mean students like PDFs and screens. I'm sure probably now you use the internet more than you did back when we were gonna school 20 plus years ago. If using PDFs, using screens, offsets a rise in tuition, I mean, why bother with textbooks? It's gotta just be getting harder to defend those as the years go by.

[01:04:51] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think regardless, tuition rates are going up. Anyway. I mean, maybe it's the funding structure of colleges that needs to change too. Instead of graduation rates, schools could receive funding based on the salary of the students they graduate, for

[01:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: example. That's true. So emphasize the role of graduates wealth on the funding for schools.

I mean, interesting solution. Yeah, I mean,

[01:05:16] Jessica Wynn: I don't know. That's just one suggestion floating around. I mean, these are systemic problems that can't be fixed with just a little tweak. Something very different must happen within higher education. We need structural disruption.

[01:05:31] Jordan Harbinger: So what are the alternatives to the four year college model?

The current model's been in place, what since the 17 hundreds, would that change now? Can it change now?

[01:05:40] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean it's, this is gonna sound weird, but I see higher education making the same mistakes the music and entertainment industry made. They are so pleased with themselves and the status quo, and they're in complete denial of how technology is changing the business of education.

[01:05:58] Jordan Harbinger: Can we really compare, I don't know, Syracuse to Spotify?

[01:06:01] Jessica Wynn: Well, new technology changes existing business models and. It might benefit society and our overall intelligence. If we let technology into education in bigger ways. I mean, think of Netflix, right? It works better than network or cable TV because you can watch whenever you want.

There's no limit on showtime slots, and there's real time data of what people watch to tell them other shows they'll enjoy. So if we opened up education in this way, a lot of the prestige and rankings would disappear. You could go to class whenever you wanted, or if you didn't have to worry about the seats available in a class and were guided to class you're interested in and will succeed in, we might change how we learn and who the experts are.

I mean, the classroom hasn't changed in hundreds of years. It needs to change.

[01:06:55] Jordan Harbinger: I sort of fear you're setting us up for Amazon University or Netflix College.

[01:07:01] Jessica Wynn: Those sweatshirts probably exist. I mean, like, look, I know the Netflix model of education is farfetched, but we must consider new models. Employers need to change their practices and loosen the reliance on four year degrees, making people employable.

Nothing's going to change unless there's a push for innovative public policy regarding higher education,

[01:07:26] Jordan Harbinger: of course. But how would employers get objective data that the people applying are like a talented writer or an excellent manager or qualified lawyer, or whatever it is they actually need?

[01:07:36] Jessica Wynn: Well, if employers can fall for diploma mill degrees on resumes, how objective is the hiring process?

I mean, I get it. Business is not going to change radically overnight. HR still wants to look at the resume and see those degrees listed, but maybe the college board could make a college degree, GED. You know what I mean? Like if you cannot go to high school and get a GED, why can't you not go to college and pass a college level GED?

[01:08:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess you'd have to do it in a way that creates the diversity of what employers need. A generalized test sort of sounds unreasonable at first glance. A fine arts major knows different stuff than a political science major.

[01:08:18] Jessica Wynn: Right. Well, maybe employers would offer position specific assessments. I mean, I don't know, but at least we have to start thinking about change.

People from all sorts of backgrounds should have their individual talents developed, not just rich kids given a path to get richer. The higher education system is resistant to change, but people must try.

[01:08:41] Jordan Harbinger: It just doesn't sound like this is gonna get fixed anytime soon.

[01:08:44] Jessica Wynn: Oh, but it could be. American higher education has tremendous value, but its foundation was built in an analog nation, I mean, to make it work in the 21st century for our digital world, the higher ed model needs to be less structured, less fixed, and more open to a variety of methods To accommodate the diversity of students, there must be an effort to shake up the current system.

Higher education needs higher innovation.

[01:09:14] Jordan Harbinger: Well, everybody listening gets two credits at the Harbinger College. Congratulations.

[01:09:20] Jessica Wynn: That sounds

[01:09:20] Jordan Harbinger: expensive. Well, costs no more than pushing play on your favorite podcast player. Thank you, Jessica. Oh, thanks Jordan. A actually, it's, it's Dr. Jordan md. Now, I just, uh, went and got the mail.

Are you addicted to drama? Check out this preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with psychologist Dr. Scott Lyons.

[01:09:41] Clip: Do you vent constantly? Do you find yourself changing the stories? Do you find that wherever you go, there's always something that's wrong or happening? Do you find yourself. Believing the other shoe will always drop, that no matter how good things are, something bad is gonna happen.

Do you find yourself crisis hopping? If you're in it, you will have no idea that that's what you're doing. And it takes a lot of time for those addicted to drama to recognize, to even be aware of the pattern is happening. Our primal needs as a kid is to be seen and heard, to feel safe, and so you will go to whatever extremes.

Intensely shouting is needed to pierce through the chaos of a family household to be seen and heard. Even if it's burning down the house, a wave of an emotion, it lasts 30 to 90 seconds. Anything after that is the story we're feeding to maintain it. We're trying to keep that emotion. Active. We're feeding off the emotion as opposed to processing or metabolizing it.

We're not letting it go because there's some belief system. If we let it go, we'll be victims. If we let it go, we won't be safe. Whatever it is, why we won't let go of the emotion. Even a small trauma can feel like death because we feel helpless, and if we don't have the resilience capacity to know that someone will help us.

There are tools out there to help us if we don't inherently know that it feels like we're gonna drown in that moment, it feels like death.

[01:11:13] Jordan Harbinger: Learn to recognize and heal from drama addiction on episode 8 36 with Dr. Scott Lyons on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thank you so much for listening. Love that we're able to do Skeptical Sunday regularly now, topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

A lot of these topics come from you, so I am happy to keep that train moving. Show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes right there on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Jessica on her substack between the lines, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. This show is created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Foggerty, Ian Baird, mil o Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday. If you think we really dropped the ball on something, definitely let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that. Y'all know how to reach me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love.

And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.