What Americans Really Think of Higher Ed: Insights from New America’s Varying Degrees 2024:

Changing Higher Ed Podcast 234 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guests Sophie Nguyen and Kevin Carey

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 234

[00:00:30] Introduction and Guest Introduction

[00:00:30] McNaughton: Thank you, David.

[00:00:32] McNaughton: My guests today are Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen from New America, a Washington based think tank whose mission is renewing the promise of America by continuing the quest to realize our nation’s highest ideals, honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.

[00:00:55] McNaughton: Kevin is a Vice President for Education and Work in New America. Writes widely about higher education and other topics for publication for the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, and many other publications. Sophie Nguyen is a Senior Policy Manager with the Higher Education team at New America. Her work focuses on college completion and public opinion in higher ed.

[00:01:21] McNaughton: Kevin and Sophie join me today to talk about Varying Degrees 2024, New America’s annual survey that looks into how Americans perceive important higher education issues, such as value, funding, and accountability.

[00:01:36] McNaughton: Kevin, Sophie, welcome to the program.

[00:01:38] Carey: Great to be here.

[00:01:39] Nguyen: Great to be here as well.

[00:01:41] McNaughton: Looking forward to our conversation today. Y’all have done some pretty good work when it comes to New America and the work you’ve done on policies and stuff.

[00:01:52] Background of New America and Guests

[00:01:52] McNaughton: Before we get into that type of stuff, please give us a little bit of your background, if you would.

[00:01:57] Carey: Sure. New America is a Washington DC based think tank. We are, nonpartisan, although generally seen as Left leaning in our politics. We work on a variety of issues, including foreign policy, family policy, domestic policy. I’m the vice president of our education and work programs that span everything from early education to K 12 to higher education to work based education. And Sophie runs New America’s very big and successful program focused on, among other things, higher education polling. We do an annual poll of Americans about their attitudes in higher education.

[00:02:36] Overview of Varying Degrees Survey

[00:02:36] McNaughton: That’s great. Give us a little bit about your background, Kevin, on, on how you got to where you are now.

[00:02:42] Carey: Sure, I, started my career in state government in Indiana. I have a master’s degree in public administration from Ohio State. I’ve, been in DC as part of the think tank industrial complex since 2001. I’ve worked for a variety of organizations, all of which in different ways, focus on the intersection of research, public policy, and advocacy. I write, as much as I’m able, for general interest publications about higher education, both trade publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and also places like the New York Times, the Atlantic, online places Like Vox and Slate, and I wrote a book in 2015 called the end of college, which is about, higher education and the future of technology,

[00:03:27] McNaughton: Ah, very good. Thank you. Interesting trivia. My next door neighbors, when I grew up down in Panama, my next door neighbor’s last name was Carey, spelled the same way that yours is.

[00:03:37] Carey: A lot of carries left Ireland in the late 19th century and went around the world.

[00:03:41] McNaughton: Yeah. I think they were originally from Pennsylvania, it’s been a long time.

[00:03:44] Carey: It’s where my family’s from,

[00:03:46] McNaughton: Oh, okay. You may have been related. Who knows?

[00:03:50] McNaughton: Sophie, a little of your background, please.

[00:03:53] Nguyen: Of course. So hi, everyone. My name is Sophie Nguyen. I’m the senior policy manager with the Higher Ed team at New America. So I started New America seven years ago, right after college. I went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. So if you from Massachusetts, or if you also graduate of, or working at a women’s college right now, Hey there, very nice to have to listen to the podcast.

[00:04:19] Nguyen: During my years at New America I have been conducting a lot of analysis into, a variety of higher ed. domestic policy issues, including, student financial aid, student success, and institutional funding. And a big portfolio of my work at New America is on public opinion. And Kevin said, since 2017, we have been conducting an annual survey called Varying Degree, which is a nationally representative survey of American perspective for higher education, and I’m happy to talk about it in a little bit. But yeah, I’ve been building my expertise in public opinions and in my understanding of american’s perspective in general, but also for higher ed. Particularly, and that build the foundations for the report that Kevin and I put out recently about some of the misconceptions the media have on higher education public opinion. Yeah. And happy to discuss that later as well.

[00:05:21] McNaughton: Great. Thank you. Here’s another interesting piece of trivia. We’re coming up with all sorts of trivia today. My grandmother on my mom’s side graduated from Mount Holyoke back in the early 1900s.

[00:05:34] Nguyen: Yeah. I’m happy to know that there’s a lot of Mount Holyoke out there.

[00:05:38] McNaughton: She was a math teacher and you can well imagine back in the early 1900s, women, math teachers were very few and far between.

[00:05:47] Discussion on Higher Education Trends

[00:05:47] McNaughton: Your report, you’ve done this annual survey since 2017. How did you come about starting this?

[00:05:56] Nguyen: So the New America before this, before 2017, we have been conducted quite a few public opinion surveys into higher education. We do both the general public surveys, but also survey of students learning a lot about Issues related to college access and also college affordability, like how students pay for college. But since 2017 we got this funding from, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to start this surveys conferring degree, as I mentioned. And since then, the idea was to make this survey an annual survey so that we can build a longitudinal data source on how American public feel about higher education.

[00:06:41] Nguyen: And after this 2024, this is the eighth year that we have been conducted the survey. Which means we have now eight years of data on how Americans feel about higher ed and be able to conclude on, to do some analysis on some of the trend on how people feel generally.

[00:06:59] McNaughton: It’s interesting. You’ve got eight years of data without getting into specifics, just, yes or no, I would assume that you’ve seen some significant changes since 2017 to now about what people feel about higher ed.

[00:07:17] Nguyen: Interestingly enough, you would think that there has been a lot of changes in the past year. And this makes sense because there has been a lot of things happen in America with the war and obviously with higher education. Overall, though, with the data that we see a lot of the opinion, a lot of the numbers to mostly stay stable across the year.

[00:07:41] Nguyen: There’s some significant change, like from one year to another for example, like 2020 to 2021 with the pandemic. Overall, like we see that, like some questions that we ask, years over years, especially questions about value, and like confidence for higher education. For example, we have these questions on whether Americans think higher ed is fine how it is. This year, only 36 percent of people think higher ed is fine how it is. It fluctuates over the years that we conduct these surveys, but that number has never gotten more than 40%, which means that a majority of Americans has not been happy with the way higher ed is going. And then we also see, at the same time, we see some decline in some of the number, but overall a majority of Americans over a year still believe that, high ed is worth the return on investment for the students. I would say we see some significant changes in a particular year because of a significant event like the pandemic, but overall, a lot of the numbers, most of the numbers do stay pretty stable.

[00:08:56] McNaughton: Okay, that’s interesting. Kevin, anything to add?

[00:09:00] Carey: No, other than to say, in addition to the report that what we’re talking about in this podcast, I do hope your listeners see our Varying Degrees survey series as a valuable resource. It’s very high quality survey. It’s not one of these like janky internet surveys. So it’s a real sample and the fact that we’ve been doing it since 2017 means we can really start to hone in on some trends over time, some of which provide nuance to a lot of the narrative that’s out there about higher education and some of which really push back on some, commonplaces that are out there now. So it’s on our website. Check it out.

[00:09:34] McNaughton: Thank you. So let’s get into some of the details of the report and the findings. Having looked at the report, it’s really broken up into four areas. How people feel about college and the services they provide. Partisan Attitudes, demographic changes, demographics and economics, and then the polling results.

[00:09:55] McNaughton: So let’s just jump into those. Tell us a little bit, what were the findings and what surprised you on the findings?

[00:10:02] Carey: The impetus for writing, this report, which is called, “Americans Have Not Actually Turned Against Higher Education Like the Media Says”, which there’s a free version of it on our website at newamerica. org. And it’s also been republished at the Chronicle of Higher Education. We wrote it because we had observed, a growing narrative in the mainstream media about higher education that we thought was not supported by the facts as we understood them. Both polling facts, but also other economic and demographic trends. And in some ways, I think we were prompted by a couple of articles that were published in the New York times and the Wall Street Journal. Big kind of long thing pieces in these like influential publications with some different audiences and some different ideological centers, but they both had almost exactly the same title. And in both cases, they stated as a fact that Americans have lost faith in the value of college. They didn’t ask it as a question. They just said as we all know, Americans have lost faith or are losing faith in the value of higher education and why is that?” and they went on posit, actually, some fairly different arguments for that. Again being two different publications with some different points of view and we really wanted to, interrogate the premise that these essays and a lot of other similar media narratives have put out there.

[00:11:25] Carey: And what we found was that a lot of these assertions really come from a small group of public opinion polls. In fact, one public opinion poll, that is conducted on a regular basis by the Gallup Corporation. And I should say, we have no critiques of this poll itself.

[00:11:41] Carey: Gallup, does a poll of public confidence in a variety of important institutions. It’s been doing this poll since, I think, at least the 1960s. So it asks about people’s confidence with the military and the healthcare system and police and, Congress and the Presidency and the Supreme Court and so on and so forth, it’s like a long list. And it added higher education fairly late. So I believe it’s only asked this question three times. ” What is your confidence in higher education?” And over the course of those three data points, only three, the numbers have gone down quite a bit. It’s like a four answer question. It’s like very high, high, low, very low, that kind of thing.

[00:12:20] McNaughton: Typical Likert scale.

[00:12:22] Carey: Yeah. And so the percent who said, one of the first two barriers somewhat, was the majority, the first time it is declined now to be like less than half of people. And again, I want to emphasize, we were not critiquing their methods or anything like that. But those three numbers, you can make a trend line out of three numbers that has been the foundation for what has become, I think, a very powerful and widely held media narrative that Americans are turning against higher education. And for a variety of reasons that we can explain, we don’t think that’s true.

[00:12:51] McNaughton: Okay. So with that, how do you explain the drop offs in enrollments that have happened over the past four or five years since the pandemic.

[00:13:03] Carey: There has been a decline in enrollment. So a lot of this is not about disputing the numbers, but really, understanding what the numbers mean. And many commentators have paired the decline in enrollment with the decline in public confidence, and say that these are two pieces of evidence of the same thing.

[00:13:18] Carey: If you ask people they say they don’t like higher education as much and they’re voting with their feet and their dollars by not going to higher education as much. And so surely those must be two pieces of evidence of the same underlying trend. But in fact the enrollment decline is almost entirely driven by demographic decline. The number of college age people in America peaked in the late 2010s, with the millennial demographic wave.

[00:13:43] Carey: It is since then receded somewhat and is about to recede quite a bit more because we know that fertility rates began to steeply decline after the Great Recession in 2008. And of course 2008 plus 18 is 2026, which is just a couple years from now, and so there are not as many babies being born to native born Americans as there were by a significant factor. And there aren’t as many people to go to college is, one fact. Second, the millennial demographic wave coincided in a complete coincidence, we have to emphasize with the great recession itself. And the great recession drove college enrollment rates up to artificially high level. There’s a well known, counter cyclical pattern where, when the economy goes down and employment gets worse, college enrollment goes up because people are either avoiding the labor market or they’re staying in college longer, maybe going to graduate school or they’re, unemployed and they’re going back to college to get new credentials and new skills so they can get a different job. And this artificial surge in college going rates happened exactly at the same time as the number of college students was at its highest, and so we reached a peak that we are probably never going to reach again.

[00:14:54] McNaughton: I would certainly agree with that. You figured recession would equal college enrollment increasing, but that hasn’t happened this time with the pandemic.

[00:15:05] Carey: Yeah. The pandemic recession was very unusual. It was very brief. And it basically snapped back, right? It wasn’t the kind of financial crisis, the worldwide financial crisis that we had in 2008, which just had a devastating effect on the ability of businesses to invest and hire, very similar to previous panics, the Great Depression, the panic of 1907, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:15:24] Carey: The pandemic, everything was closed and then it opened back up again. And so the American economy in terms of GDP and employment is actually going now above the projected trends from before the pandemic. And that’s another important fact. The labor market has been very hot for the last five or six years, particularly if you take the pandemic pause out of it, for non college degrees at the middle and lower parts of the wage scale. Restaurants, warehouses, all kinds of service jobs, or mid and lower skill jobs.

[00:15:55] McNaughton: Hence the changeover of foci for colleges to more workforce development type rather than the liberal arts.

[00:16:04] Partisan Attitudes Towards Higher Education

[00:16:04] McNaughton: But there is a point here that I think is important to bring up, and you guys did it with your report as well, is there’s partisan attitudes that come into play. There’s not only demographic changes, but partisan divisions around higher education and those who tend to lean left value higher ed more than those who lean right. Did your survey bear this out? And if so, how do you explain that?

[00:16:34] Carey: Sophie, do you want to take that

[00:16:36] Nguyen: Yeah, of course. So we see, quite a bit of partisan divide in the survey that in varying degree as well. So for example, in that Gallup surveys, that is the survey that a lot of the media refer to when they talk about the client confidence or the client value of college. Like in that particular surveys, it shows, See significant decline, way more significant decline among Republican compared to Democrat in terms of the number of people who say they have confidence for higher education. In our survey, we always see a gap between Republican and Democrat in questions about whether you think higher ed is how it is or whether you think higher ed is worth the return on investment.

[00:17:25] Nguyen: But I would say though, even though when there’s a gap between Republican and Democrat, especially questions around like funding higher ed and even the questions about whether higher ed is worth it, a majority of both like if with Democrat, maybe 80 percent and with Republican, we see 50, 60%, a plurality of Republicans still think that higher edis worth the return on investment. So even though there’s a gap between the two sides, like a significant large number of Republicans still see the value or the benefit that higher ed can bring to Individual or to the society. And I would say that a lot of the partisan divide that we have seen, I think it coincides with the fact that we have seen, like with the fact that they have been a change in the makeup of people with college degree among Democrat and Republican voters.

[00:18:31] Nguyen: There has been more people with a college degree,across the board, but we see that among Democrats the increase is more dramatic, more significant, than compared to Republicans. And even among white Republican voters, we actually see that the number, the share of people , of white voters with bachelor degree or more, slowed down or declined recently among Republicans. So that’s, different in the share of people with education, that difference in educational attainment among Democrat and Republicans, I think can account for why there’s such a partisan gap when it comes to how they feel about higher education.

[00:19:18] McNaughton: I think you’re right with that. The perceptions between the left and the right, the, Democrats, the left, it’s looking more and more like a party of education. You’re seeing more and more people registering Democrat and voting Democrat who have more college education versus the Republican without. But I don’t think that really goes into the value of higher ed, and that was something that I think your survey brought out it’s more nuanced than what the polls are saying, and that just the way you ask a question, whether it be, quantitative or qualitative methodology. And however you ask the question makes a huge difference on that. There was one other piece with this I wanted to get into.

[00:20:13] Impact of Enrollment Decline and Demographics

[00:20:13] McNaughton: The enrollment cliffs, and that’s something, Kevin, that you brought up a bit with the enrollment cliff coming up, the birth rate. , We’re going to continue to see this enrollment drop, and we’ve seen it quite a bit. Although this year we saw the enrollment for college increase for the fall 2024. That’s what the student clearinghouse data said, except that the students for freshmen dropped and that is going to affect things significantly over the next four years and continue to do that.

[00:20:53] McNaughton: What do colleges need to do to help them prepare, overcome when it comes to these kind of drops?

[00:21:02] Carey: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think it’s important if you’re in a tricky environment,

[00:21:06] McNaughton: Which we are.

[00:21:07] Carey: You don’t have as many people just lining up to, it’s really important to understand “why”. So as Sophie said, there absolutely has been a partisan realignment around higher education. Everyone can see it. We’re recording this podcast, two days after the presidential election. It’s much too early to really validly interpret exit poll results, but there’s nothing to suggest that isn’t still the case and maybe was more of the case in this election that just happened, here in early November.

[00:21:35] McNaughton: As I read, somebody wrote, “just like the Bill Clinton comment, “it’s the economy stupid”.

[00:21:41] Carey: Yeah, so one there’s a big difference between people’s, sort of, general feelings about higher education as an institution and whether they value it in terms of wanting to go there themselves or wanting their children to go there. And one piece of context I would put back on that Gallop poll that we talked about a little earlier, which is an important one, is that this pattern of declining confidence in colleges as institutions is happening at the same time that American confidence in all institutions is declining rapidly.

[00:22:14] McNaughton: That’s very true.

[00:22:15] Carey: When you ask this question, people have a really different set of feels about a thing and actually like higher education, in a long list of institutions, is I think the third or fourth most trusted or most confident, the third most confident, out of all of them. You know, I think only the armed forces and maybe small businesses are ahead of it. And so all of these other institutions are also at record lows with, a few historical exceptions. The military was at its lowest after the Vietnam War. The banking system was at its lowest after the 2008 financial crisis. The healthcare system was at its lowest back before we fixed the problem of, preexisting conditions. And so that really matters, right? Just people are answering these questions differently.

[00:22:54] Carey: The second thing is the partisan difference, I think, is mostly about how people think of colleges as institutions, right? We’re aware of, there’s a lot of controversy around free speech, for example, and concerns that colleges are, surprised to hear.

[00:23:10] Carey: Yeah,

[00:23:10] McNaughton: I’m, so surprised.

[00:23:15] Carey: They have very strong ideas and opinions about the alleged ideological bias in the academy. . And so on and so forth. And without weighing into the pros and cons of any of those issues, you just have to observe that that is going to shape people’s opinions. When you’ve got national leaders denouncing, colleges as like Marxist cesspools, which I think, president elect Trump, that is going to shape how people feel when they answer these questions. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t send their kids to school.

[00:23:42] Carey: And if you look at some of the other polls, which we get into in actually pretty granular detail in our report, we don’t see any kind of commensurate decline in demand for higher education. So confidence is one thing, demand is something else. Right? So if your numbers are down it doesn’t mean that everybody hates you all of a sudden. It just means there might not be as many customers out there to enroll And those are two different problems that frankly have two different solutions.

[00:24:09] McNaughton: Okay, I’m going to go off the reservation here just a little bit.

[00:24:13] Cost of Higher Education and Its Implications

[00:24:13] McNaughton: How much is the cost of higher education factoring into the decision people are making to not go to college?

[00:24:23] Nguyen: A majority of Americans, so 80 percent of Americans think that the cost of attending college is the biggest factors that stop anyone from enrolling. So in our survey, in varying degree, we see that years over years, affordability and the cost of college is a pain point for Americans when they think of enrolling in college, they can see that the cost is just high and unaffordable.

[00:24:53] Nguyen: That is what some of the questions that we see alignment across Democrats and Republicans, like there can be divide on other questions, but in those questions about whether colleges is affordable or not, or like wheather cost is a factor that is a barrier we, we see a lot of alignment among the two parties. So it’s very clear that causes is a real sticky point. And when we talk about survey, when we like have questions about what the solution could be, we see that, large number, majority of Americans, like they want more investment from the state and federal government to make college more affordable.

[00:25:35] Nguyen: So making college more affordable is definitely, I think, an action, a change that, American wants to see in higher education.

[00:25:44] McNaughton: And I want to thank you because you gave me a great segue into the last question that we’re going to talk about.

[00:25:49] Advice for Higher Education Leaders

[00:25:49] McNaughton: The implication for higher education leaders. You’ve got your poll results. You’ve got different data that you look at. What do higher ed leaders do about all this?

[00:26:01] Carey: One of the polls we dig into, that was cited in some of these “anti higher education” think pieces, was one that said that barely half of, parents want their kids to go on and get a four year degree”. Now, as we all know, most people don’t have four year degrees, and I think that we’re only at about 40 percent of the adult population has a four year degree, and probably something like 60 percent enter college wanting to get one, but quite a few don’t graduate.

[00:26:26] Carey: But when you dig into the rest of those poll results, the parents who allegedly don’t want their kids to get a four year degree, a lot of them, when you ask them, what they say is I don’t want my kid to go to college. What I want them to do is get some hands on training for how to have a career or a job, and then get some kind of certificate and then go to work”.

[00:26:47] Carey: They actually do want their kids to go to college. They just don’t know it when they’re answering the poll results. Right? Because most, the vast majority of all the job related training that happens in the United States, particularly that’s subsidized in some way by the government, happens at a college. Some of it very much does happen, at four year colleges, a lot of it happens at community colleges. Almost half of freshmen start their college careers at community college. Some of them to transfer, but many of them to get, two year job focused degrees. It’s a dilemma because clearly the demand in the market is for degrees that offer a straight pathway to a career. Overwhelmingly, when you ask parents and students, that’s what they want. That can feel, I think, at odds sometimes with the scholarly and liberal arts mission of a lot of institutions. And I think, institutions are very correct when they make the argument that they are much more than job training sites. That they do more for their students are not just about skills, they’re about mindsets, they’re about not just having a prosperous life, but a good life, and that means being exposed to lots of different points of view, learning things you’re not going to learn anywhere else. It’s not just about getting a certificate for that first job. But they’ve got to make that case very clearly to students and parents And they have to both say that those things go together and then they have to meet it. Right? It’s not just about rhetoric and advertising.

[00:28:11] McNaughton: It’s walking the talk.

[00:28:13] Carey: Yeah, it’s not just about spinning up some new master’s programs that you think can make money or cutting a deal to do some online thing that you think can make money or, making some cuts in some under enrolled departments. Everyone is trying that playbook including a lot of institutions that are not succeeding financially. I think there needs to be an authentic, in many ways, renewed focus on a strong, multidisciplinary, undergraduate education that combines skills that are valuable in the labor market with the kinds of classes and attitudes and knowledge that colleges themselves know students need, and, it can be done, but it’s going to be a lot of work.

[00:28:50] McNaughton: It is. Some of the things I’m seeing out there is three year college, things along these lines, more focus on workforce development. To me, and I’m sitting on, 40 years of work experience, actually, I’m sorry, almost 50 years. I shouldn’t short myself, should I? I can see the benefits of the liberal arts education, but it also needs to be cost effective.

[00:29:17] McNaughton: This time has just flown by. I want to thank you both for being on the show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. And as we always do, we wrap up with our two standard questions: three takeaways for university presidents, enrollment people, and boards.

[00:29:34] Nguyen: I don’t have three. I have two and I,

[00:29:39] McNaughton: I think Kevin will probably be able to give

[00:29:40] Nguyen: yeah.

[00:29:41] McNaughton: Kevin.

[00:29:42] Nguyen: So the two thing I have is just piggyback on the thing that Kevin just mentioned. I really agree with Kevin on this point is that college needs to communicate with students and family, like the values that the education brings. Like I’m a product of a liberal education, college education, and I’m very proud of it, and I can see how it can benefit me for the rest of my life. But a lot of students, they may not be able to see that. We got to be able to show it to student in a meaningful way, like what Kevin said, but like at the same time, don’t disregard , the need for a direct career path because this is what student is really looking for and we need to, not stay away from it, but like directly communicate and make the connections between the value of a liberal education and a career pathway for students to be able to see it concretely.

[00:30:47] Nguyen: And secondly, back to the point when I said, like, cost is a significant concern, that in talking to students, this is something that I think needs to be discussing seriously. Because a lot of the audience listening out there, not all of your school will have sticker price of six figures but that is the news that a lot of students are seeing on the news, and that is seemingly the narrative that college is expensive.

[00:31:16] Nguyen: College is expensive, but there’s options that help students to pay that cost to share that burden with students and families. And college needs to be able to show that, and to provide solutions for students.

[00:31:33] McNaughton: Great. So that’s two. Thank you, Sophie. Kevin?

[00:31:36] Carey: Yeah. People don’t hate you. Don’t be back on your heels. Americans love higher education, particularly their alum, the places that they went, they believe in it. They may expect more of it than they used to but, they need it, they need you, and they want to invest in you.

[00:31:52] Carey: One of the, I think most striking findings in our Varying Degrees poll is that, even the majority of Republicans, even in a more ideologically polarized environment, even the majority of Republicans think the government should invest more money in making higher education affordable. So there remains a bipartisan consensus for investing in higher education. Even if people are feeling salty about some of these culture war issues, even if their voting patterns have changed. They still want their students to go to college. So if you can, as Sophie said, if you can make that value proposition, the sky is not falling. But for the reasons we talked about in terms of the underlying demographic reasons, it’s going to be a tougher sell for the foreseeable future. We just have to adjust to that.

[00:32:38] McNaughton: And I’m going to add one in, I generally don’t. You alluded to this, Kevin, is people support higher education, but they strongly say they want things to change. So very good.

[00:32:50] Conclusion and Future Outlook

[00:32:50] McNaughton: So what’s next for you guys? What’s next for New America?

[00:32:53] Carey: We’re a Washington D. C. based organization, there will be a new administration coming in. A new Secretary of Education and we think probably a new set of priorities. It’s our job to analyze those policies, to continue to advocate on behalf of students, first and foremost, to make sure that their college is high quality, that it’s affordable, that they are protected from the bad actors in the marketplace, that they are given the kind of financial aid that they need.

[00:33:16] Carey: That’s always been our focus and we’re going to continue to do that.

[00:33:19] McNaughton: Very good. I want to thank you both for being on the program. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to the next time we get a chance to have this.

[00:33:28] Carey: Thanks for having us.

[00:33:29] Nguyen: Thanks for having us as well.

[00:33:31] McNaughton: Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guests, Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen from New America. Folks, thanks so much for being on the program, I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk.

[00:33:47] McNaughton: Join me next week when I welcome back Dr. Courtney Brown from Lumina to the program. Courtney will be talking to us about higher education, the state of higher ed, and what we can expect out of the incoming Trump administration. You won’t want to miss this one, folks.

[00:34:03] McNaughton: Thanks again for listening. See you next week.