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Welcome back.
We are talking about higher education in America with the president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber.
He's also chair of the Association of American Universities.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So you just started your term as chair of the Association of American Universities.
Tell us about that organization, the mission, and who the members are.
Yeah, it's a great honor to be chairing the board for the Association of American Universities.
This is a group of about 70 of America's leading research universities.
So it includes public flagship universities.
It includes private universities.
What we share in common is a commitment to educating students at the highest level and a commitment to research of the highest quality that enables our country to enjoy prosperity and promotes the security of the country as well.
So what are your goals and priorities going to be for this coming year?
I think it's important to continue to, for the government to continue supporting the kind of research that we've had in the United States.
We've benefited tremendously in this country from having a partnership between the government and its universities that has produced both practical applied research and basic research that has laid the foundation for later discoveries.
So one of the things that I want to do is work very carefully and closely with the president of the AAU, Barbara Snyder, to support that funding in Congress.
We also need to protect the freedom of our institutions and help to make the case for what those institutions are doing for our students, for the country.
Well, make that case.
I mean, how would you describe the current state of higher education in America?
I think the current state of higher education is terrific in the United States.
Part of the evidence for that is that people all around the world seek to come to these universities as students and faculty members.
The return on investment from a four-year college degree, which is what all of us in the AAU offer, is tremendous.
For many families, that investment in higher education will be the best investment that they make in their lifetimes, judged just by the financial return.
And of course, there are lots of other benefits to getting a four-year college degree.
And the research that our universities produce is a difference maker in terms of our health, in terms of information technology, in terms of innovation, and in terms of jobs for this country.
You talked about return on investment.
I mean, a college degree has become extremely expensive, and it continues to get more and more expensive, outpacing inflation, and it has put it out of reach for a lot of American students.
Why is that?
Why is a college degree so expensive these days?
So, Mimi, I'm really glad you raised the point because I think there are a couple of things in what is a very common narrative that I would love to be able to correct.
One is the actual cost that people pay for higher education over the past four to five years hasn't been going up.
It hasn't even been going up at the rate of inflation.
It's been going down.
And that's something you can find in college board data.
There's a great article in the Hill.
Tuition itself has been going up.
The sticker price in tuition has been going up.
But what people actually pay is the sticker price minus financial aid at institutions.
And institutions, including mine, have been raising dollars from alumni and from endowments so that in fact our educations are more affordable than ever.
I'll just use some of our own data around that.
71% of the students at Princeton are on financial aid.
71%.
And that financial aid involves scholarships that are larger than the tuition price.
So the average student on financial aid at our university is getting a part subsidy for room and board at our university in addition to full coverage of the tuition price.
When people are looking at education, they have to keep two things in mind about it.
One is what matters is the net price.
And all of the AAU institutions, for example, are offering significant financial aid to their students.
So people have to look carefully at what they're actually going to pay if they come.
And then the second is the critical question about education is that return on investment.
Figure out exactly what the net price is, and then pay attention to what you're getting back from that.
Education isn't a consumer good that you simply use up in the way that some things that we purchase are.
Much more like the kinds of investments that you make for a lifetime.
And when you look at that investment, it is one of the best investments that you will ever make.
Nonetheless, there are people taking out a lot of student loans in order to pay for college.
Do you take a position on student loan forgiveness?
The AAU doesn't have an official position on student loan forgiveness.
We have a commitment to affordability.
We believe that the government should increase, for example, the Pell grants that enable students from low-income families to attend college and flourish when they go there.
We and other associations have supported the idea of doubling Pell.
Again, one of the things that I think people need to know as these narratives get out there through stories that I think often cover outliers is that these financial aid arrangements often enable students to graduate without any debt from college.
So our university, Princeton, makes a commitment to its students that all of them will get financial aid that will allow them to graduate with zero debt.
More than 83% of our students graduate every year debt-free.
The others are taking out relatively small loans on a discretionary basis.
So the reality when parents are taking a close look at what these leading research universities and other colleges are offering is different from what's often out there in the narrative.
Well you've got to get into Princeton first to get that financial aid.
Well that's why I say that's not easy.
No, that is not easy and we have extraordinary students who are applying to us.
But what I've just said is true in differing ways across this entire extraordinary group of 70 universities and at many universities and colleges that are outside of that group.
So it's not just the very selective universities where this is true.
There has been a decline in enrollment across the board of American universities.
Is that a concern among university leadership and what's being done to address that?
Yeah, we're seeing a generational shift right now.
Just as you look at demography, we have known that we will see declines in the numbers of college-going students as demographic patterns change.
For the leading research universities in the country, the applicant pools remain robust and the sets of students who want to come to our colleges and universities from within the United States and outside the United States remains very strong.
But I think we are going to see effects in the sector more broadly as these democratic demographic shifts take hold.
And if you'd like to join the conversation, if you've got a question or a comment about higher education in America, you can give us a call.
Our guest is Christopher Eisgruber.
He's president of Princeton University.
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There have been fewer protests on the Gaza war than we have seen in the past.
How are schools addressing this issue this school year?
Well, I think what schools have to do around this issue is to respect basically the principles that are part of our United States Constitution that for most of us are part of our university rules as well, which means we respect free speech.
And at the same time, we insist that students and others comply with what are known as time, place, and manner restrictions when they are protesting.
So in this country, in the city of Washington, D.C., where our government is located, you have more freedom to criticize our government than you do in just about any other country in the world.
I think that's a good thing.
And you have to have that kind of vigorous free speech on college campuses where people can speak up about controversial topics like the Israel-Gaza war.
On the other hand, we do have rules in the United States and on our college campuses.
You can't just pitch a tent in order to protest on the Capitol Mall.
You can't occupy a building here in Washington.
You can't spray paint your message on the Washington Monument.
And we have to have the same kinds of rules on college campuses.
So that's what we've done at Princeton.
It's what other universities are doing around the country in order to enable people both to speak up and to make sure they do so in a way that allows everybody to go about their business on the campus and doesn't disrupt the activities of the campus.
I'll say two other things about what we have to do there.
We have to be elevating the conversation.
So you get talk, again, in our country and on our campuses.
A lot of it is shouted.
That gets covered a lot by the news media.
You can have a lot of discussions going on in seminars that are balanced, rational, and thoughtful.
What gets the pictures are the students with the signs.
But we've got to take those conversations on tough issues that are happening on our campuses and elevate them.
I think we're doing a good job with that.
The second, I would say, is that we do want students to be engaged around these issues.
So there are people who just go about their business and don't pay attention to the issues that are happening in the world.
We want our students to grow up to be engaged leaders.
And so I respect the right to protest.
I don't respect the right to disrupt.
That's not a right that people have.
What was your experience on the campus of Princeton University?
And also not just the protests, but the freedom of speech aspects.
I think we did a good job at Princeton.
That's what we hear from our students when we survey them as well.
When we ask them about their student experience, and we do this every year, last year, students continued to report a high sense of satisfaction with their student experience.
In fact, it was a little higher than the previous year.
And I mentioned that because it's important when you have these tumultuous events, and they are tumultuous, the feelings are raw and people can hurt during them, that you're able to give students the kind of educational experience that they want.
We had a lot of people who were upset and upset with me about various things that happened on the campus.
We had students chanting slogans.
I will say I'm Jewish.
I have relatives in Israel.
I found some of those slogans very offensive, but I also felt I had an obligation under the Constitution and under our free speech rules at Princeton to protect the rights of people to say things.
We also had to enforce our rules, including through arrest at Princeton when people were violating time, place, and manner rules.
We were very clear about what those rules were.
And that enabled us to get through the year.
But what I'm proudest of is that we had a number of different events that allowed people to explore these issues in more detailed ways.
So I'm just going to mention one very quickly.
Our dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Emanage Mall, is probably the most prominent Palestinian-American political scientist in the United States.
She did a couple of sessions with her counterpart at Columbia's policy school, Karen Yarhi-Milo, who was an Israeli who was previously in the Israeli military.
The two of them became friends when they were assistant professors at Princeton before they became deans of these two schools.
And they, in the fall of last year, not so long after October 7th, were doing public events at both Princeton and Columbia in order to model for students what it meant for people with very different backgrounds to disagree with one another and disagree civilly.
Those don't get, those kinds of events don't get the kinds of attention that the protests do, but that's the heart of what's going on on college campuses, and I don't think it's happening in many other places in our society.
There's an article here from Higher Ed Dive, Why Colleges Are Turning to Institutional Neutrality.
Can you first explain what that means and is that a good approach?
Yeah, so institutional neutrality is a kind of slogan that describes a view about when universities should take positions and when presidents should make statements on issues.
This had been something that had been discussed among university presidents and other people in higher education for a period of time.
It kind of exploded into view after some of the unsuccessful statements that were issued last year.
Institutional neutrality reflects the view that universities at a broad level ought to be very circumspect.
They ought to be restrained, which is a word I like better than neutrality, about when they speak out.
The idea behind it is that, to take a broad phrase that I agree with, that universities ought not themselves to be the critics.
They ought not to be taking positions as Princeton University that are, for example, critical of our government.
They should be the sponsor of critics.
They should be enabling faculty and students to raise their voices.
I'll just note, I personally don't like the phrase institutional neutrality.
I don't think I've got a neutral institution.
I've got an institution that stands for the value of research.
It stands for the value of free speech.
It stands for the value that people of all backgrounds should be able to flourish on our campus.
And those are real values.
So I think neutrality doesn't express this idea well.
But I do agree that universities have to be careful not to be taking positions as institutions, except in a very limited set of circumstances.
Let's talk to callers.
Chuck is calling from Syracuse, New York, Republican.
Hi, Chuck.
Hi.
So I'm a little bit surprised that we have this gentleman out here that's saying that you have to base putting forth college.
You have to go to college to be successful.
Princeton is worth the money.
You had Mark Zuckerberg, you had Bill Gates.
You have other people who've been really successful.
You have Mike Rowe, who has a show about dirty jobs, about plumbers, electricians, other jobs that you don't have to be successful.
But I think one person who would agree with you that it is a good idea to get a college degree would be Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, who is a math professor who went to Berkeley.
I'm sure he put his degree to good use.
What do you think, President Iceberger?
Gruber.
So thank you.
Thank you for the question.
And thank you for the opportunity to clarify what I think about this.
I agree entirely that you can be successful in a number of different careers without going to college.
And I don't think that everybody should go to college.
And I think it's very important for us to recognize that as a country and for academic institutions as well as the government to support people who make other choices.
On the other hand, what I do believe and what I did say is that for people who want to go to college and people who make that choice, it's going to be a spectacularly good investment to go to college.
So if you just take a look at the data about my institution, the institutions in the AAU or four-year college degrees more generally, the return on investment, judged in economic terms, is very strong.
And it provides you with a lot of other opportunities as well.
Doesn't mean it's the right choice for everybody.
It just means that for people who are thinking about this choice and asking themselves the question, hey, I'd like to go to college.
The kinds of careers that you get by going to college make a or sound attractive to me.
Will that investment pay off?
The economic news is very good about that.
But it's not the right investment for everybody, just as other good investments are not right for everybody.
Michael in Denver, Independent Line, you're next.
Yeah, thank you so much for taking my call.
And Mr. Ice Gruber, thank you so much for being here this morning.
And I just had a quick kind of comment and question.
So what I was going to bring up is the issue of mental health at colleges.
You know, statistics have shown as high as 40% of students on college campuses are experiencing some form of mental illness.
And, you know, many times I think the problem is a lack of access that students have in many cases to forms of treatment or services.
And so the question I was going to ask you about this is what have you implemented or feel should be implemented in terms of making sure that students have access to mental health care and furthermore, identifying mental health issues kind of before it's too late.
Yeah, Michael, thank you for this question, which is so important for our colleges and for our country.
What I would say, first of all, is we're facing a mental health crisis in the United States right now for much of our population, I would say, but it is especially acute among young people, and that includes both high school aged and what we typically think of as college-aged students.
I put it that way because it's not as though this is worse for students who are actually in college.
The numbers I've seen suggest that it's actually a bit better for students who are in college than it is for peers of the same age.
But you are absolutely correct that this is an issue that we need to worry about on college campuses, and it's an issue that we need to worry about in the country.
I'll just give a, to respond to your specific question, a little bit from my own institution at Princeton, because it's the one that I know best.
We've worked very hard to increase the availability of counseling and psychiatric services at Princeton.
We work hard to educate our students as well as our faculty to recognize signs of distress in themselves or in their peers.
But we've taken a comprehensive approach to mental health on the campus, recognizing that mental well-being isn't just a matter of counseling and psychological services.