The College Crisis: Heads of Dartmouth & Berkeley Debate the Decline of US Universities

[Music]

I was just sitting here contemplating about like how I'm going to pay back all my student loans.

I've applied to over 300 jobs. I don't have a job.

Student loan debt just reached an all-time high $1.48 trillion as of June of this year.

A historic drop in US college enrollment.

We exist to educate, to teach you how to think, not what to think.

We'd better be thinking about big transitions or transformations, if I can use the word, because um there's a lot of new competition coming into our market.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and Dartmouth President Sian Beilock. [Applause]

Hello, sir. Thank you for joining us.

Hi.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Hi.

Hi. Nice to see you.

Good to see you.

Hi. Good to see you.

Hi.

Thanks for being here.

Nice to meet you in person.

Nice to see you.

Yes.

Go Bears.

All right.

Big Green, let's not forget you, Big Green.

What an interesting time to lead a university in America. So many things to talk about, but I wanted to start with the premise that student loan debt seems to be a challenge for the young population, the emerging working population today. At the same time, government research funding seems to be getting cut back, and there seem to be questions about the administrative overhead fees that are being paid.

What is the business model of the university today—the revenue and the expenses—and what does it look like going forward from your point of view? How are you planning for that? Let's just start with that broad picture about the business model and how it's changing.

There's a lot to that question. I'll start, and she'll certainly have lots to contribute. At the top level, if we think about how we sustainably provide the fundamental and translational research that we're so good at, that we're built for, and the really transformative educational experiences that many of you have had at these great universities, one way to think about that is on the research side.

If there is less federal funding coming in over time—and I think that's a good bet—can we partner more with industry? Are there other sources? Is there a way to gear philanthropy even more toward the kinds of research that we need to make sure we're doing? We are thinking about what that bundle, that funding model, looks like on the research side and on the education side as well.

You mentioned debt and an issue that's become significant. I think what you would find, whether at Dartmouth or at Berkeley, is that if you're coming to one of these institutions from a lower-income family, you're probably paying no tuition, and many of those students are leaving with very little debt. So, to say there are all these higher-education institutions and then to talk about averages, I think you would be surprised at how much support lower-income students are getting.

I would just add to that that I don't think education is one-size-fits-all. At a place like Dartmouth, which I would talk about as a different kind of Ivy, it is cheaper to go to Dartmouth if you're lower- or middle-income now than it was 10 years ago. That's because of the philanthropy that we receive from amazing alumni and families.

That is what we want to do. We want to make institutions a place where anyone can go, regardless of background, bring the best and brightest together, and send them off without a huge debt burden. We package without loans. A third of our students go for free, and they come out, on average, making more than they would otherwise if they hadn't gone to a school like Dartmouth.

But I think it comes down to institutions having some responsibility for pushing out students and making sure that they're not serving them an education that then they can't find jobs in. As we think about loan burdens and others, I do believe the institutions have a responsibility to their students. I think we have to do a lot more in talking about ROI than we do right now.

Does that mean that we have too many universities in the United States and that they charge too much generally? You guys are leading two of the top institutions in the United States. Are all of the second-tier, third-tier, and fourth-tier institutions that are providing perhaps negative ROI on the cost of their education in need of being shut down or reformed? What's the future of that?

I think if you aren't thinking about the ROI, and that is part of what you're delivering, it's a fair question to ask. I also think we've pushed too many people to think that college is the be-all and end-all. There are different ways to be successful in this country.

I certainly think there's a place for an amazing elite education like Dartmouth if we are teaching students how to think and not what to think. But the idea that everyone needs to go to a 4-year college or university, I think that's outdated.

Let me ask you about different degrees and loans and the risk that you take. I mean, $70,000 a year in tuition, but you're not on the hook for it. Students who take these loans are on the hook for it, and their brains are not fully developed. Would you? I can confirm this.

The neuroscience data suggests that your prefrontal cortex isn't developed. Boys a little bit later than girls, by the way.

Yeah, you can't. I did okay. I went to Fordham. I did okay.

The point I'm trying to make here is: shouldn't you, the university, be on the hook for these loans? Shouldn't you be responsible for the outcomes for these students? Would you be in support of having the loans and the amount of the loans match the desirability of the degree and its ability to monetize after graduation?

Or, said differently, would you guys underwrite the loans?

Yeah, look, I think we do at Dartmouth because our students are packaged without loans. They don't take out loans, and in fact, for a student in a lower- or middle-income family, it's about $5,000 a year to go to Dartmouth. So we do underwrite in that way.

Now, you asked the question about other institutions where students are coming out with high debt and low ROI. I think it is fair to ask what share of responsibility the institution should take, and I do think that that's part of the reforms that we need to think about in higher ed writ large.

So you're in favor of it.

I'm in favor of institutions having some responsibility, and at Dartmouth we take that responsibility very seriously.

Do you think they should take responsibility? Should you take responsibility for the outcomes?

Well, the word “responsibility”—I'm an economist. Is responsibility the liability, the financial liability, at the end of the day? Or, as people have been saying, look, if we are not providing an economic pathway for our students, on average, at Berkeley or Dartmouth, people will stop coming and they will stop taking loans.

So that market mechanism is working pretty well as it is, and we are producing really wonderful outcomes. I think the earlier question about the more than 1,000 higher-education institutions in this country is important, and I think there is pressure on the whole system.

We are certainly making sure we have a brand-new program called the Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program. We are launching lots of new things to make sure that we are providing that kind of support.

I would push back and say I don't think the market's working exceptionally well, because I think students are coming out overburdened with loans without the kind of job prospects for which we have a responsibility.

What would happen if we ended the federal student loan program?

I think it's an interesting thing to think about. What I don't want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are student loan programs that are really helpful to some students in terms of being able to go to the school they want and get the education they want.

Is DEI the bathwater?

Let me ask you guys, actually, a question. What is the correlation between DEI and scholarship? Is there one?

I don't think having a diversity of thought and thinking about merit are mutually exclusive. I think that's a false dichotomy.

We were the first Ivy League to bring the SAT back at Dartmouth, and many of our peers followed. The reason is that we looked at the data, and what we found was that it was a great equalizer in finding students from lower-income and higher-income backgrounds who are succeeding in something that's less susceptible to financial input, like letters of recommendation and what you did for the summer.

It's a better way for us to find lower-income students who are excelling where they are but maybe don't have the prep or the background. So I think it's false that they're mutually exclusive.

There was no impact on the quality of the actual scholarship, what the professors taught, or the language that was used? All this concept of microaggressions—all this stuff that got in the way of teaching math and science—you don't think that happened?

No, I think that we have to focus on our core subjects and merit. But I believe in diversity. I think we should have a diversity of people at the table, from lived experience to political ideology.

I think we have better outcomes if we can sit together and push at each other. I have conservative views on my campus and more liberal views on my campus, and I have students who come from veteran families, students who come from the middle of the country, and students who come from the coast.

Bringing people together with different perspectives, allowing them to push at each other, you get the best outcomes. And do you notice that the schools veered away from that?

Did we spend any period of time—I’m just curious—veering away from what you just said, or no?

Yeah.

Is there nothing to see here, or is everything—

Of course not. I think I’d be the first one to tell you that higher education has a responsibility to reform from within.

What is the reform? What happened?

I think we lost sight of what our mission was. We’re educational institutions. We’re not political institutions. We’re not social advocacy organizations.

How did it happen? Thank you—how did it happen?

Just to say, when we lose sight of that mission, people don’t trust what we produce, whether it’s the students or the knowledge.

How did it happen?

There are a lot of theories for what exactly went wrong. I think having strong leadership and being clear about what your values are is a really important part of this. I spent much of my academic career at the University of Chicago, and I think that’s a place that was very clear about the fact that institutional neutrality is the way to get the best outcomes: We don’t shout down speakers, we don’t set up encampments, and we don’t declare a space for one ideology.

Those are all things we’ve been pushing at Dartmouth, and we are excited about where we are going and the outcomes, but we have work to do.

How are we doing at Berkeley, Rich?

Hey, no—beware the caricature problem, because Berkeley undergraduates produce more funded new businesses than the undergraduates at any other university. We lift more people further up the economic ladder than any other university in the country. So the caricature problem is very real here.

At Berkeley, I have been saying very publicly that we need to—I’m agreeing with what she just said—we need to move in the direction of institutional neutrality. I’m talking about viewpoint diversity all the time. Do we have some getting better to do? You better believe we do. We were thinking we were so tolerant. I think we weren’t very tolerant of viewpoint diversity.

We have a new course called Openness to Opposing Views. It got launched this summer. 5,000 people have signed up for it. We have something called the Berkeley Liberty Initiative. It is exploding on campus. Do we have people on all sides of the spectrum? We sure do, but people keep pointing to one side of the spectrum. It’s like, look what’s going on at today’s Berkeley.

How should Chamath or I explain to our Asian daughters or sons if they don’t make it into one of these schools because you have to admit somebody for diversity who got lower grades and a lower SAT score? How do we explain that?

We don’t admit in that way. We’re looking for students with great scores, great grades, and who have grit and ambition, and that allows us to bring a class together where people can push and make better ideas.

It’s been the law since 1996 in the state of California. We can’t use race or gender or affirmative action. It’s literally illegal. We get audited for this all the time. So, if that’s what you meant by your question, we don’t do it. The University of California has effectively been aligned with that decision since 1997.

It’s part of the California Master Plan for Higher Education that a third of our incoming class every year are community college transfers. They’re grittier, they’re older, they’re more first-generation. If that’s the diversity you’re worried about, then I have a different conversation, talking more broadly—not just about your universities, but about what we’ve seen at other universities. Perhaps Harvard would fall into this category, or others. We do think about that. What are we explaining to our kids in terms of—

Or maybe the general question Jason is trying to say is: What message does that give the broader American student and the broader American parent about what is actually happening in higher education when a case like that gets litigated to the Supreme Court?

Yeah. Look, again, in a place of viewpoint diversity, you can have different views on affirmative action, and we have different views of that on our campus. Our goal, as it’s always been at Dartmouth, is to look for the best and brightest students, and that’s not only just a test score or a grade because that doesn’t tell the whole story. We’re certainly bringing students together based on all of the things they do, and we’re not picking students to fit any sort of quota or system.

The University of California has effectively been aligned with that decision since 1997.

Tell us about the growth of administrators versus professors. There’s another common—maybe it’s an accurate statement or a misconception—that many of these elite institutions in America have been overrun by administrators and they get in the way. They gum up the system. They have all these ideas. They turn out to be idiots, and the ideas are idiotic. That’s a theory. Have you seen that play out at your 2 fine institutions, or is there nothing to see there either?

Do you want to go first?

I will start. For years—and we have further to go—but we have been talking about bureaucratic burden. We actually have an initiative, and we just call it bureaucratic burden, because there is too much of it at Berkeley. Berkeley is a very, very large organization with lots and lots of people.

As we think about how to make some of the hard decisions for making things faster, we’ve been working very, very hard at that. The clock speed of the world is going up so fast, and the clock speed of these institutions—the pace for change—that gap is widening, and we need to get better at getting better.

So I promise you, with AI and many other things, academic advising is going to change a lot. We’re always going to need human academic advisers, in my view, but that world is going to change a lot. How do you navigate what’s on campus?

The last point is, when you talk about the mental health of our students, I think if you went back to when you and I were undergraduates at our universities, the idea that the university would help people with scaled mental health services—they weren’t there. They are there now. So you could say you shouldn’t be doing that, but the expectations of what we are providing have risen quite a bit.

Yeah. I’ll say that I think it’s a totally fair question, and we always need to be thinking about moving our resources more toward the academic enterprise. Dartmouth is a place where you’re in a classroom with a faculty member and 6 to 20 students. It’s a very special thing that doesn’t happen at all institutions.

But we also have a lot more compliance that we have to deal with that’s come in from the government over the years, and we have to staff up to deal with it. I like the idea of rethinking that relationship in a way that allows us all to do our work better.

Let’s talk for one second about what President Trump has done with his settlements with Columbia and the proposed ongoing thing with Harvard. There’s going to be some settlement. Just walk us through what the implications of that are, the cascade effect and the waterfall as it trickles through to other institutions, and whether you guys will have to be party to something or what that means.

Look, I believe in the fierce independence of our educational institutions, and I worry that if we are swaying in one direction or another based on who is in office, then we don’t have the trust of the American people. I think we failed in some ways to show that we could self-regulate and do that ourselves.

But the goal in my mind is to get back to a place where it’s clear that universities aren’t political organizations, aren’t taking a position, and are focused on bringing the best and brightest to go out and contribute to our democracy. We can do that ourselves.

Yeah. I think that if you look at trust and confidence, and when it started to diminish across all kinds of institutions, including higher education, that predated by quite a bit the election, which was less than a year ago. So I don’t want to confound things where they really shouldn’t be confounded.

Why have we been losing trust and confidence? To grossly oversimplify, it’s cost, career, and culture, and we could go into each of those and talk about it. The cost thing came up: Are the career opportunities there? And by culture, it’s sort of, have things got too progressive or not tolerant enough of viewpoint diversity? Those are all reasonable things to talk about.

I think part of the questions that are being asked under this administration, and even before that, is that we need to be more reflective. I just said I think there’s too little viewpoint diversity.

Let’s go to culture. David, you had a great career at Stanford, and that was during the politically correct era. Then we saw safe spaces, trigger words, and students feeling they were being harmed by words. I’m curious what your thoughts are on culture on campus from your perspective, having lived through it, because this does seem to reemerge every couple of decades.

Well, political correctness never ended. It just got renamed. I think they renamed it woke. There may have been some other things in between.

Peter Thiel and I wrote an article for the Stanford Review back in, I think, 1995—30 years ago—called “The Case Against Affirmative Action.” It was basically making the case for completely color-blind admissions, having it be strictly based on merit, and not taking race into consideration.

And obviously, that argument did not prevail and win the day because we had the Supreme Court case a couple of years ago that basically said that—I think it was at least Harvard; I don't want to speak for every college—but basically, it was still engaging in racial discrimination. And so I think that article, or that argument, clearly was losing in practice for 30 years until the Supreme Court reached that decision. So I think this is why there's a lot of skepticism on these issues.

And I think you have a wave of presidents, and I think leadership matters, coming to the forefront and talking about what we need to do in this space. At my inauguration two years ago, I had just finished my second year, and I'm the third-longest-serving Ivy president right now.

Just a side note, there's been a bit of turnover, a little bit. So tell us, did you watch the Claudine Gay testimony, and what did you think when you were watching that train wreck happen?

Yeah. What was going on in the group chat?

While it was hurtling? Yeah, the Ivy group chat.

The Ivy group chat was a brick wall. Look, I mean, I think we have a responsibility to be different kinds of campuses. And the testimony, I think, was an outcome of being a campus that wasn't protecting the people, wasn't inclusive, and wasn't calling balls and strikes when we needed to.

And we've been very clear at Dartmouth that we value free expression, but your free expression can't rob others. That means no shouting speakers down and no taking over parts of space and declaring it for one ideology. That's not free expression.

It's just John Stuart Mill's philosophy of spheres of influence: just don't intersect with others. But let me—sorry, let me just ask one.

No, I just want to follow. Rich, isn't the best part of Berkeley shouting over the speakers? [Laughter] I'm trying to get through traffic over there sometimes, and you've got 1,000 students on the freeway. It's kind of the tradition.

There's a difference between protest and speech. Protest is fine. I think that's a really important distinction, and it's really important for leaders to be clear. Protest is fine. I have protests outside my office all the time. I have students chalking messages. That's fine.

But the problem is when one person's free speech takes precedence over another's. And nobody's disagreeing with that. The heckler's veto is something we talk a lot about. We are coming down on people. It's not appropriate, right?

So people are outspoken. That's part of Berkeley's tradition. I will often say to people, at a free-speech university, there are hundreds of ways and places to express your free-speech rights, and no more tents and no more blocking Sather Gate. So it's sort of like, look, we need parameters that help this to be as constructive as possible.

But the John Stuart Mill marketplace for ideas—we're trying to keep it as open as we can. And that is something I'm just going to—I worry about the idea, for our faculty and our community, that we're going into a world where there are acceptable questions and unacceptable questions.

That's a bad problem. That's 1984.

But going upstream, I just want to go upstream with you guys for a second. Where's this coming from? And what's going on in K–12?

Yeah. I think we don't talk about K–12 enough. I think we really have to go back. Our students are landing on our campus without having civics, without having practice engaging in difficult conversations.

I mean, I think we really have to move backwards and not just think about the university setting, because we're getting them much later. And we train all of our students at Dartmouth to go through Dartmouth Dialogues to learn how to have conversations with people you disagree with. I believe it's like a muscle. You have to train it through practice.

Are they showing up basically just unprepared? A lot of them, through COVID, didn't have these skills. And we've seen this in different ways where, at one point, when we were in school, if you had a fight with someone, you'd have it face-to-face. Then it went to text messaging. Now it goes to you leaving a long voicemail, a voice memo, and then not even engaging.

And if anyone who has teenagers out there—when I tell my 14-year-old to pick up the phone and call someone, it's, "What are you talking about?" We have to get those muscles back. A university setting, a college setting, is the place to do it. We're not just about knowledge transfer.

To Friedberg's point, though, I just want to ask the pointed question. I think it came out today, but high schoolers are graduating woefully unprepared. It's not just the skills of debate. This is fundamental math, science, and English. They can't read, they can't add—

They can't write.

What is happening in our primary and secondary high school education system? What is broken there that's delivering these kids to you so academically unprepared? I understand emotionally, but let's just first address the first one.

Why?

I think they're both. And I mean, I'm not an expert in K–12. I don't have all the answers there, but I'll say that one thing is that we're not getting rid of income gaps in achievement in K–12. Students come into kindergarten at very different levels depending on their parents' income, and they leave at those same levels.

If we were doing something important and successful in terms of education in the U.S., we would see differences and changes there. And I think we have a lot of work to do to think through a K–12 system that's not serving the entire—

Is there any low-hanging fruit there? Is it having the ability to have more tutors, extending the school day to 5:00 p.m., having summer sessions? If you could, as an educator and somebody who works in this field, is there any low-hanging fruit that we could say, "Hey, President Trump, we need 25 billion more dollars a year to do this?"

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I would say one thing is making sure that we're putting good teachers in the classroom.

School unions are a problem. What does good mean?

Competent and able to teach at different grade levels, and the ability to—

Measure their outcome.

Hold students accountable and push them forward. Before I became a college president, I studied performance under stress and anxiety, so it's been helpful the last few years. But one of my findings is around teachers, especially in lower grades, being really unprepared in terms of math competency and transferring that onto young students.

The teachers themselves don't know how to add.

No, I mean, I think it—but what's interesting is there's probably a very good teacher emerging, which is AI. How are you guys thinking about whether higher education should even exist, and what the role of higher education, classrooms, teachers, and textbooks is in a world where I have a personal tutor available to me to walk me through the knowledge transfer at my own pace and help me think critically?

AI seems to have the potential to play so much of the role that higher education, and even K–12 education, has played historically. Are you guys calculating for your strategic planning with AI, and what does it do?

Absolutely. Well, I'll start with that. My daughter just graduated 3 months ago. I have 2 kids. She just finished college, and I'm astonished by how much she has developed. I think most parents would have a similar experience.

If you stripped out the knowledge—the part that you could easily access with AI—she would still astonish me in how much she has developed. That's a residential university, with all the interactions and all the things and the challenges and overcoming them.

And so, you know, people were predicting, with massive open online courses, the death of universities 15 years ago. I really think that when you start realizing that's what makes it so darn transformative, and at least any AI I've seen so far is not getting close to what we're able to do, you see that these uniquely human skills are such an important part of a residential community that allows that to come together.

I'm a big proponent of how we think about integrating AI into what we're doing. Dartmouth was actually the birthplace of the term artificial intelligence, in a 1956 summer conference where people got together and talked. We developed BASIC. We were the first institution to put it in all the math classes.

Thinking with technology is so important, but there is a human element of developing young people from 17 to 25 that universities really can excel at. And I think that's one of the reasons that the culture issue, and the idea that we're teaching students what to think instead of how to think, has hit such an important point, because this is exactly what we should be doing.

We should be teaching those critical skills that allow students not to be in a safe space but a brave space, where they learn how to be uncomfortable and interact with others.

Fair enough. But I predict AI will play an important role, and I predict that the teachers' unions are going to fight tooth and nail from seeing AI show up. It's going to challenge our ability to provide this advantage for our students.

Meanwhile, in other countries around the world, particularly looking across the Pacific, things are going to be very different than they are here. What is the conversation with the teachers' unions, who are so politically connected and can be so troublesome?

We saw this recently with the longshoremen's strike, where they didn't want to have automation that would provide faster, lower-cost unloading and loading of the docks and so on.

It made it really hard. What’s going to happen with respect to the teachers’ unions and their ability to move through this accelerating transformation that’s going to be underway?

Well, I’ll start. I think categories of labor across the economy are going to be under threat. It’s easy to start with thinking about organized labor, but non-organized labor is going to be terrifically under stress. And I think that a lot of people are going to be pushing back on what’s about to happen.

So I think that’s the larger frame. In fact, I think a lot more unrepresented jobs are going to disappear as a result of AI than represented jobs over the next 10 years. We don’t know. But I think over-framing in terms of representation, at least for me, is missing really the core issue here.

There’s been a lot of talk about recent graduates having a hard time finding jobs and that, for at least male students, the degree versus non-degree in terms of unemployment has now shown no difference. It used to be, if you had a degree, you had roughly double the chance of getting a job. Are you seeing that on the ground? I know you have elite institutions, but are you starting to see that even at your incredible universities, and are you concerned?

Yeah, I think, again, we have to talk about what the future of work is. We haven’t seen that at Dartmouth. Our students are succeeding in getting jobs, but again, we’re not just teaching students how to code. Everyone who gets an engineering degree also takes classes across the sciences and across the humanities. We’re teaching them how to think across difference and, in many ways, how to develop what I think are uniquely human skills that I hope will be important for being a leader.

What’s on that small list of uniquely human skills or attributes that you most want to get into those students?

I really do believe that the ability to listen, have a conversation, speak face-to-face, have eye contact, and have empathy—to understand that even if I don’t agree with you, you are a human. We have these things together, and we’re working toward some sort of positive democracy. I would say that’s at the top of the list.

We’ve been working on that with the two Davids. In fact, we’ve been working on that.

It’s a muscle. I think you can build it over time.

They’re getting there.

Yeah. Look, there’s no question. I was talking to an alum and somebody who’s close, very senior, and I said, “What should be in our strategic plan?” And he said, “Keeping humanity relevant.” If that’s not a big deal, I don’t know what is.

And as we think about the sorts of skills that we’re going to need in our students, I think a sense of agency is something that pops to mind for me. It’s like a sense of agency: I can act on the world; I’m not purely acted upon. And it’s partly my responsibility, and that goes so far beyond the way we think about education, at least traditionally, as mostly knowledge transmission. And I think we can do that in our classrooms.

They do perceive themselves as victims at times. Let me shift it for the last question and end maybe where we started.

One of the things that has happened is that, with the cost of higher ed, there’s been the emergence and the importance of endowments. And as these endowments have emerged, there’s been a perception—and then those things have been laid bare—that there are side doors and back doors and all kinds of different ways in which to get into schools. The Varsity Blues thing is a perfect example of just the manipulation of the system that, again, to your point, causes people to lose trust.

What role do endowments play? How much influence do they exert when it’s good? When they can’t fund a budget, what happens? Just walk us through that cycle where there’s a perception that they could be doing more. Harvard’s got a $55 billion endowment. But just walk us through that for each of your institutions: how reliant you guys are on this and the impact it makes on you being able to be totally meritocratic.

Yeah, I mean, I will say very clearly that we are looking for the best and brightest students. Our endowment is a way that allows us to fund students regardless of their ability to pay, and through our financial aid, we provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year from our endowment to support students so that they come out without loans and they’re ready to go. And that is because people believe in the institution, so it is an important way that private citizens give back to support what they’re doing. And I think it is extremely important to what we do.

It also funds our research. There’s a lot of talk about indirect costs and what those actually mean. We lose money on every research dollar we bring in. We spend our endowment to create the buildings and to create all of the compliance. You can’t make discoveries in the middle of Main Street. You’ve got to do that in a scientific enterprise where we are putting skin in the game.

And I think it’s great that people are giving back to be able to do that. But it doesn’t drive our decisions. What I think of it is support to do the good work we need to do.

Yeah. And if I may just add a little bit—I know we’re out of time—but I think our endowment per student is far, far lower. And it’s going into scholarships for our students and accessibility. What’s the effective cost of these educations, even with our lower prices?

And also on the research end, we’ve got something called the Innovative Genomics Institute. A lot of that was philanthropic capital that came in and went into an endowment, and CRISPR comes out of it, along with some other things that are changing the world, right? So it’s really important that we have that kind of funding, both on the education and research side.

And I’d just say that there are multiple inputs into the system. I think the endowment is important. I think having a really robust partnership with government that makes sense is really important for the American innovations and discoveries we’re making. And then, for people who can pay the tuition, paying tuition is another aspect of that. But all of those come in to try and create what we’re trying to create.

Before we wrap, we’ve pointed out a lot of problems and challenges and left you guys in a kind of defensive state. I want to just give each of you an opportunity to talk about what you’re excited about at the university that you’re leading. Maybe just take a minute. What gives you optimism? What are you encouraged by? What are you looking forward to accomplishing as we finish up the segment?

Well, thanks. I’ll start. It’s true of Dartmouth as it is for Berkeley. We view these things—we hope you do, too—as some of society’s most valuable assets. To what use shall we put them over the next decade? That’s sort of what we’ve been entrusted with, right?

And so, if you said on the education front, for example, economic mobility—what would it look like to double down on economic mobility when a third of our students are already transfer students from community colleges? It’s sort of like, wow, could we get even better at that? I think we can, and we can do better at that, right?

And as we think about the research, it’s like, what are these fundamental seismic shifts? You’re thinking about the biology revolution or the AI revolution or planetary and human health. I mean, these are things that, I believe, we all need these institutions to be contributing to massively, and that’s part of what’s going into these strategic plans. So I think you should be rooting for us.

We are rooting for you.

Yeah. And I would say a few things. One, Dartmouth has the most rural academic medical center in the country. We serve a huge population of people not connected to the institution. And I’m excited about how we double down and make health systems better. I think that’s such an important part of what we do as universities.

And the second thing I’ll say is that I am very excited about our students. Just one other thing that Dartmouth is doing that is so impressive: we have one of the only bipartisan student-run political unions in the country, co-chaired by the Dartmouth Conservatives and the Dartmouth Democrats. And those students are changing the culture at institutions.

Last year, we had a debate between Kellyanne Conway and Donna Brazile. We had Cornel West and Robert George. They’re dealing with DEI and immigration. They are talking about the issues and putting it out there, and they’re creating a culture where it’s cool to have conversations and be uncomfortable instead of shouting each other down. We should be excited about that because they are the next leaders of our free world.

Awesome. Thank you both. You took on tough roles. We appreciate you being here today. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was awesome. Appreciate it.