David Rubenstein: belief

Transcript context

…But those who finish — state schools, everything — it seems to be below half. What are we doing wrong? The returns to college on paper are pretty high. The socioeconomic returns, health returns may be higher yet, but so many Americans are not finishing. Where are we failing whom, and how? Well, one, we are telling people that the value of a college education is how much money you make, as opposed to what you can learn as a human and actually have a better experience as a human, by getting an education. I think it’s unfortunate that we only worry about whether you can make a certain amount of money by going to college. And therefore, sometimes people say after one or two years, “I’ll drop out and get a job. I can make a fair amount of money now, or just as much as if I had a college degree.” Whereas I think it’d be better if people actually got a degree and appreciate the value of learning and were learners throughout the rest of their life, but that’s a whole separate subject. I think people are dropping out in part because of economic pressures. COVID has probably increased the dropout rate, and obviously, there’re a lot of family pressures and other things to do to support families in the case of lower-income people. It’s unfortunate because I think higher education is really the pathway, in my view, to a happier life and a more successful life. If you look at data on college professors, or even incoming students at Harvard, it seems they’re very left-wing, and they’re much more left-wing than they were before. Now, one might even be a Democrat or have left-leaning sympathies, but it seems the system is somehow out of balance. What went wrong? And how do we fix that?…

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