So know that we have learned, I mean, what is AI, what is, you know, deep learning neural network, a little bit more in this case, what we can do, I mean, with different kind of machine learning, we'll dig up a little bit more in the artificial neural network, I mean, the deep learning part, and explain the position of the QBI, what ST is proposing in this case, and what you will have to learn, I would say, either by yourself or using partners in this case. I think it's important to have it in mind. So these are the five defined steps in this case, and the first one is a capture of the data. Of course, before, and it was quite interesting from the presentation, you have to think about what you want to do. It's not, you know, for fun in this case, so, and this is, I think, the most important part to understand the target, and then you will have to verify if you reach what you are reaching, and otherwise you will have to change. So this is part. But then once you have the idea, you have to capture the data, and capturing the data is okay. It could be okay.  No, you have to take care about how you are, you know, recording the data in which condition. So I can take, I don't know the example we faced during the AudioSense classification, because for the AudioSense classification, I mean, the small demo you were playing with before. So we had to record hours and hours of indoors, outdoors, and in the car stuff. And, okay, and at the beginning things were working well, because the room was, you know, a medium room, but then we had to try in a bigger room, then we have to try in some specific room. So that means we had to capture a lot of data and to remember in which kind of, which condition we were in order to, in case of bad training, to come back and maybe modify and change all of these. So it was important. So capturing is quite simple, but this is a basic. Because if you are recording bad, I would say capturing bad information or not proper information, because you are subcontracting it and the guy is not really taking care about this, or you are recording a motor and normally the motor is like that, but I don't know because someone cleaned the room and changed the motor and the motor is not exactly in the same position, then you will get maybe trouble. This is the first thing. Then there is a cell you are capturing the data using sensors. Okay. But then in the final application, you will maybe use other sensors. So maybe they will have also discrepancies. You have to think about this. And this is important. I mean, baby, to use the sensor, the same data, the same sensor for the capture and for the final application, or maybe not to have, you know, to stay global in this way. So these are things you have to think about. Because maybe you will record using a normal microphone, you know, and in final application, you will use a mem sensor, which have different resonance. So really, it's something you have to think about. It's not only recording the data. It's how I'm recording the data. And okay, the next step is to clean the data. So to be sure that you are not recording stuff you don't want to record in this case or adding a noise or adding, you know, unusual noise. Then you have to, in the case of, I will say, specifically, you have to label the data and then prepare and think about neural network topology. And the third step is then you have to train the NN model using, you know, as we see, TensorFlow using a big stuff. So for this part, for this area, there is no ST tools in this case. I will show you because there are plenty of tools on the web.  So this is something you can use. The point number four is then to convert it. Once you have a train network, so that means a neural network, then you will convert it in a C code in order to be able to, you know, to use it on the microcontroller. The fifth step is to process and analyze. I mean, see if you have any discrepancy between the theoretical model and the real model because don't forget that you are converting in this case. So that means it could be that the result is not completely 100% the result of the theoretical model. This is first of things. And then here converting, you will maybe also want to compress because they are also optional to compress the model in order to fit in less memory. And then you will have to check. I mean, if you are still in line. This is also important step. And the final one is, of course, to check if you reach what you plan to reach, which was also final zero zero. So these are the five identified step we had, you know, implementing or trying to implement neural network into a microcontroller application. Let's go a little bit more, I would say deeper and what is the state is proposing as a tools. Okay. So we have some tools. And this is one of the tools we have on the table is, okay, the tools we are proposing in order to, how we say to be initiated or to start to walk or to start to develop. It's maybe not the tools you will use at the end. You will maybe develop your own tools. You will maybe use tools from our partners. So again, if you're interested in tools, ask the partners because they have also developed their own tools and they will maybe help you with this tool. So ask them, please, in this case. But, okay, to capture data, we have tools. And this is using the mobile phone in order to clean, label, and, okay, and at this step, you will have to think about the NN topology. So we are not helping you for the NN topology, but you have to think about the NN topology, neural network topology. For the step in the middle, as I say, there is no ST tools because you will have to go in the new patents to learn Python in this case and use tools which are existing on the web. For the first and fifth step. So for the first step, it's a Kube AI. So finally, the Kube AI we are proposing is there. And this Kube AI, which is part of the Kube MX, this option from the Kube MX, is there to convert, again, like it is, to convert the code or the neural structures, the neural network structure with the white and the visual structure into a C code. Or we say meta code, let's say like this. We'll present it. Okay, so that means for you a C code and also helping you to verify if the code which we are transferred, how we say, or converted is, you know, from the reliability at the same level as the example, for instance. On the theoretical form and also on the practical form, so on the target, directly on the target, you will be able, using these tools to check on the target if you have discrepancy between the theory and the practical model. And I think it's quite important for you because at the end you have to have a walking model, yeah, close to the theoretical. Okay, and finally to process and analyze, so this is the board we have. So let's present a different part that we have. We have a very small board which are called sensor tiles, including SD cards. So we will have the possibility to put some SD card to record a lot of things. It's the one we use, for instance, for the audio send classification, because it was small. We put it everywhere and a lot of ST people were wearing it and then, you know, recording a lot of stuff. It's nice. The only missing point, I mean, for us today on the workshop is there is no ST links. So you had normally to add an extra component. It's the reason why we do not select this board. But this board is existing. Then we have the next generation of this board, so including IoT. So this is a sensor tile dot box. And this is also water resistant and including Microsoft Azure access and so on. So much more IoT stuff. But again, with SD cards, you have the possibility to record a lot of data. And finally, this board. This is the one we have, which is quite good for IoT, which is quite good because you have an ST link on board. So that means you can program. The only drawback for artificial intelligence or what we are doing today is we only have a quad SPI with one megabyte. So it's not so much. And for audio recording, for instance, it's roughly one minute of record. So it's not the best board for this kind of stuff. But okay, we just again bought to play with to to understand the principle. This is what we will do today. Then if you really want to record a lot of stuff, either use a partner's board or use a board with embedded SD card on it. Okay, this slide is no, you know, combination of sensor and STM32. So as I mentioned this morning, ST also are also providing smart sensors. What we call smart sensors or mem sensor with some machine learning core embedded on it. So in this case, what you can do. So with some decision three and machine learnings with different stage. So that means you have algorithm you can learn. You have a certain amount of memory. So you can do some of the stuff. And which could be good in this case as a pre processing. So you can, I don't know, you have a accelerometer and you want to detect if something is falling down in order to switch off the system or to protect the system or save everything. So maybe you can use this one because it in this case is good enough in order to, you know, to detect if something is falling down. But if you want to have something more complicated and the good thing is okay, consumption and so on because everything is in implemented. So you will have a less conception. It will be do, you know, on the fly. So this is something we are proposing. But then if you are combining it to a STM32 in this case, then you are adding the deep learning or neural network in this case, staff. Okay, and you can combine both. You can first detect if something is falling down, then switch on the STM32 and then, you know, start the neural network staff and then define if it's really falling down or what is happening. On which condition what exactly, exactly happening. So you can combine both. Collecting the data and architecting an end topology. So that means is where we have in this case, you know, selected partners. Of course, they can help with more because I've experienced about or a little bit before or after. So it's depending on the partners we have. So we have a dedicated website for AI for STM32. And inside the website, you have selected partner in this case, mean that we were in communication with the partners and they're working. They are knowledge about ST in this case and then know, okay, what they're talking about. And to clean the label and the topology, we have the Bluetooth sensor mobile phone application you already have installed and play with. And this, the code are open in this case. So you can find the code on the website and then you can modify, you know, slightly is giving for you as example, you know, a start example, you know, to define or to develop your own application. For the training neural network model. So this is somewhere in the middle. So we mentioned already TensorFlow and Keras. So we are also compatible with TensorFlow Lite microcontroller. So TensorFlow, which is dedicated for microcontroller. So generated structure, neural structure, which are, I would say, which fit more with microcontrollers and microprocessor in the past. So we are compatible. And there are lasagna and cafe TensorFlow and Keras. This is more the Google in this case. And the rest is, you know, the big name in which are unknown in this case. And the conversion tools already mentioned and then analyze for the deep learning. This is a QBI roadmap because what we are proposing in this case, as I say, from the STM 32, maybe I did not mention it to everybody. What we need for the QBI is at least a Cortex M4. So Cortex M4 or Cortex M7, because we have integrated floating point unit inside. And these are the reason, of course, we have partners. We already have algorithm which are running also on M zero and M three because it's also possible. You know, it's just a question of inference time. So that mean accuracy and speed of the SAP. But if you are happy and if you have a simple structure, you can also do it in a small microcontroller. But for the QBI, QBI at the moment is only supporting Cortex M4 and Cortex M7. Supporting floating point support since beginning of 2019. Supporting, of course, the new board and also the quantization. TensorFlow for microcontroller, which is also called TensorFlow Lite. So we are already supporting it. I think it's supported since the version, it's not the version you have, but the next version. Because for this workshop, we've frozen a version just to be sure that everything is running well and so on. But if you have taken the next version, so it's supporting this one, which is already available. The current one, yes. And we are additionally layer. So we are supporting always more and more layer. Okay. And the next step is in 2020 is to support the ONNX structure. What is ONNX? It's everything except Google. So Google is generating a specific format in this case. And all other, I would say, company are also generating in the ONNX. It's a unified format for this kind of stuff. And we will support it in 2020 because it will be defined, finally defined in 2020. Or finalized, I would say in 2020. It's the only reason. Okay. This is the roadmap for the AI, QBI. And again, what I explain is not only it's a toolbox, what we are proposing. So that means you have some tools, software tools, hardware tools in this case. You have a community and for all the function pack, and we are using one function pack today. So this is an audio slang classification or this is a sensor pack, let's say. We are providing the audio and the motion example. So almost everything is inside the package you have. So the goal is if you want to start from scratch, you can reuse the package and then step by step over the five step, redo it by yourself. This is our goal, in order to get a little bit of confidence and then to develop your own ONN network. So we are providing everything in source code in this case. And you have dedicated community. This is the package, the FP package. So AI sensing package we are providing. So inside this package, download the package, you will find documentation and all the material you need in order to develop from scratch the neural network. Okay, this is a pack scope. So it's educational, so it's for you to learn from it. It's a simple based development board and this is something you can do at home in this case. And it's including poor optimization because if you are using microcontroller it may be because of the price, but it's also because of the optimized ultralopore capability. I mean, for a neural network it's quite important. These are the sensing. The only, I would say, library which is in a binary and not open is the AI NN library from SD, in this case. Why? Because, okay, you can imagine that it's a Cortex M4, M7. So you have a lot of on the market who don't want to have other people using it. But this is the only thing which is, I would say, in a binary. But normally we just have to use it in this case and we'll explain how. The rest is open and this is all what the package is offering to you. So firmware on the air and so on. So we are starting with a hardware supporting different board, including the board you are using. And then we have the whole hardware exception layer like we have in all STM32, in this case. In the middleware we are proposing some pre-processing stuff. For the audio, we are proposing the audio pre-processing log mail. And for the accelerometer, the gravity and reduce stuff. So we have some algorithm dedicated to what we are using in order to pre-filter or to pre-process the data. And then you have the standard package. Again, this is an example you have. So this is an example we are using. So there are different paths. The first path is in order to record new. Because in your case, you will have everything open. So you have all the package, you have all the recorded information. And maybe your idea will be to optimize it. If you want to optimize it, you can. I mean, no problem because everything is open. You will just have to use the embedded audio board you have. Record it using the apps. Save it on the SD card or somewhere else. And then you will have to relearn the system. So you have this path. And the second path is what we have done this morning, is the application itself. So this is using the application. So you are inside, outside, or in the car. And it will be detected automatically. This is for the audio send classification. With the same sensor and the same board and the same application, we also have human activity recognition based on accelerometer. So what are we doing? It's a five-class package in this case. So what we are detecting, if you are doing nothing. So standing. If you are walking, running, or bicycling, or in the car. Just using the same. And you can have both running at the same time. With the new package, you can have the board. And you can detect both at the same time. If you are in the car. So we will detect in the car and in the running car in this case. Okay. So just to finish the QBI. Okay. This is the tools. And again, it's doing five percent of the job. The final job, because the big part of the job from, from the five step are before the first, the second, and the third step. These are the big part of the job for this. But nevertheless, so with the program and all the staff. So we are normally proposing something ecosystem in order to develop, you know, properly a neural network on the SM32.


The Prestonsburg police responded to a shooting at the Beaver Valley Golf Course Sunday afternoon. Monday we spoke with Prestonsburg patrolman, Sean Little, about the incident. Two individuals, Larry Mullins and a Christopher Sword, had some kind of issues, altercation or a road rage incident while traveling on the roadway. Mr. Mullins exited the roadway into the parking lot of Beaver Valley Golf Course and according to independent witnesses, Mr. Sword then immediately pulled in behind Mr. Mullins' vehicle, blocking the vehicle. Mr. Sword exited his vehicle, opened the door to Mr. Mullins' vehicle and began assaulting Mr. Mullins. According to witnesses, Mullins continued to tell Sword to stop. After vocal attempts to stop Sword, Mullins shot twice, hitting Sword in the abdomen. Mr. Sword was then transported by a private vehicle to ARH Martin Hospital where he received initial care and then was later airlifted to PMC where he's now listed in stable but serious condition. Upon further investigation, officers located Mullins, who was sitting outside of his vehicle with his weapon inside. No arrests were made, however, the information will be presented to a grand jury. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Kordjall.


I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome you, but we welcome everyone to the Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host today on the forum's creator and the chief cat herder, and I'll be your guide to our hour of conversation. Let me introduce this week's topic. Since the very beginning of the Future Transform, we've been exploring the economics of higher education, how it costs so much in the United States, where the budgets go, what the relative discount rates mean, and a key theme has been the huge and growing burden of student loans. You can see here from the most recent data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank that the total amount of student loans is more than $1.7 trillion, and you can see from this chart that the number has been growing and continues to grow. This week's guest has just published a wonderful and important book on the subject. Here's in the ivory tower, Charlie Eaton is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, and this book dives into how higher education has been increasingly financialized over time. How did this occur? What can we do about it? How might it change? And more questions are all yours to ask as we begin. But first, let me just bring Professor Eaton up on stage. Good afternoon. Good morning. Hey. Good to be with you all. Well, where are you today? Is this your office or is this your home? This is my home office in Merced, California. Okay. Well, I think we can all be strong and we can take what you're about to say. How's the weather there? Oh, it's pretty nice. It's I think probably about 70 degrees out and blue skies. Sorry. All right. Actually, we need some rain. It's been a while since we've had any rain here. All right. Well, I'd be glad to send you some. And I'm delighted you can join us. Charlie, this book is powerful and you hit a major, major topic. And you have a whole bunch of interested people here, including Mark Dufusco, who exclaims he is a former banker with twice been a college president. Yeah. Interesting. Well, to introduce you to folks, I mentioned your job, I mentioned this important book. And by the way, on the bottom left of the screen, you should see that kind of mushroom colored button where you can click and buy a copy of bankers in the Eiffel Tower. But looking ahead, what are you going to be working on for the rest of 2022? What are you researching? What are you teaching? What else are you up to? Well, I'm doing a lot of this, actually takes quite a bit of time to go out and talk to folks about the book. And I'm also working on a couple, a few projects that I'm really excited about. I got a large grant with Laura Hamilton, another terrific faculty member here at UC Merced. And with Fred Wary at Princeton and Adam Goldstein at Princeton. And it's the grant helped us start our higher education race in the economy lab at UC Merced, where we're building a great team of grad students and postdocs. Also with Camila Alvarez, another one of my colleagues here. And our research is mainly about the kind of coming year of research is about racial inequality in student debt and the role of wealth inequality in student debt and how we might change our financial aid system so that we award more financial aid to folks from low income households. And also looking at online degree programs and assessing are there cases where online degree programs are predatory even when offered by public or non-profit universities such as the Arizona State University program? In part because of the endemic use of for-profit subcontractors to deliver online degree programs, subcontractors who in many cases actually ran predatory for-profit colleges prior to the Obama administration's expansion of consumer protections in that sector. So those are kind of two major things that we're working on that expand on the book. And going to be talking to a lot of folks about these pressing issues around student debt and policy options for things like debt cancellation, which is something that's still very much in play in the administration. Well, I'm glad to hear, first of all, I'm glad to hear of all of this work. And I'm glad to help you in getting the word out of this recent book. And I'm especially glad that you think that debt cancellation is still live. We have all kinds of questions to ask you, and I just wanted to get the ball rolling. By asking, how did higher education become so financialized? That is, how did we begin to really rely more and more heavily on debt and loan mechanisms? Yeah, one thing I think that's important to understand is that the increasing power of financiers and financial inequalities in higher education are unextricably linked to increasing inequalities involving finance throughout the economy. And the rise of very wealthy financiers is also inextricably linked to higher education, that these two phenomenon are really tethered together. A key thing that happened is change in tax policy and financial regulations at the beginning, starting at the beginning of the 1980s, something that I've started taking to calling, not deregulation, but regulation for the rich. Because there actually are quite a few financial regulations, but they tend to be highly advantageous for wealthier people, including higher education financial regulations. So some key ones that happened in the early 1980s was cuts to capital gains taxes and changes to financial regulations that allowed the rise of private equity and hedge funds. That's the big bang in Britain, right? Yeah, so that's a big policy change that really you don't really have hedge funds or private equity in their current form until after these changes in financial regulations and these capital gains tax cuts that let those financiers keep more after-tax profits. And so that's one part of it, of where it comes from. In the case of student loans, the big regulation for the rich actually happens in 1992 when and it involves both Democrats and Republicans. And there were changes to the federal student loan program that were in large part written by the banks and written by their industry associations, the consumer bankers association and the National Higher Education Loan Program Association. But the big bore of banking, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Steady Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and then also Sally May are all big, big financial corporations that benefited from this huge expansion of subsidies for student lending in 1992 and then a few legislative tweaks that happened in 1993, 1994. And that's really after that is when student debt explodes and you then have this combination of endowments or private equity investors chasing profits in sectors like the for-profit college sector where they can use these expanded student loans to load students up with debt and provide almost no educational benefit. And then you have endowments that are benefiting from investments with those same private equity funds. And so you get this pulling apart of the top and the bottom and you get a squeeze on the middle of the system because the tax revenue that gets diverted to endowments at the top by the tax cuts I mentioned comes at the expense of public universities. And the diversion of subsidies by the student loan program and other programs to for-profit colleges at the bottom also comes at the expense of public institutions in the middle even though public institutions still enroll about 65% after degree seekers in the US. So this is a powerful history. So on the one hand of this, the regulatory changes drive the joke that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached on the side. It powers the huge boom for profits and then the opposite of a boom, the gutting of public university finances. I have more questions to ask but we've already had a couple of questions come in. I want to give people a job. John Hollenbeck asks, how much is the growth of administration and part of the added cost in higher ed? I worked at a small college in New Mexico where the president made $250,000 and grew her staff by 50%. Let me put that back up on the screen so you can see it again. Sorry about that. Yeah. So my perspective on this is that the driver is actually more on the accumulation of wealth at the top side of it. So you do not have as much of an increase in higher education instructional costs in most of the higher education system as most people think, nor do you have as much administrative bloat as you think. I am always wary and critical of overpaying our top administrators or hiring too many top administrators. But the amount of, and I think it's in part, I'm wary of it because it's counterproductive. It undermines public confidence in higher education and public institutions when you do that. But really, there's just not enough administrators for those things to be a real cost driver. Where you really have absurd administrative bloat and excessive administrative costs is at the very top of the system and that's driven by this huge endowment boom. So an example is Princeton University has not increased its enrollment that much since the 1970s. My recollection is that they enroll maybe around 700 new first year students a year today, but their endowment has grown a thousand percent since the 1970s. And so as a result, they spend about $100,000 per student per year from the endowment on educational related things. And so, and that provides lots of slack resources that administrators can grab because when we think of higher education, our ideal of it is the ivory tower and elite institutions like Princeton. A lot of times people map on the reality of bloat and administrative slack at places like Princeton onto other institutions. But it's really at the top where we've had a very large expansion of these sort of wild expenditures. And what I would like to see is I would like to see Princeton not just enroll more racially and economically diverse students, but enroll more students. They're spending $100,000 a year per student on educational things. They should double their enrollment and spend $50,000 a year. They can do the great things they do just as great with only a $50,000 a year subsidy per student from the endowment. And then doubling their enrollments would do a lot more for equity than just providing more financial aid for the people who they do enroll. Because if you only enroll five students, it's pretty cheap to provide the greatest financial aid package in the world. But if you enroll 50,000 students like University of California Berkeley, for example, then providing generous financial aid really reaches much wider in society. Well, I can see that. Well, first, thank you for that great answer to a great question. If you're new to the forum, friends, this is one of the ways that the Q&A box works. So if you've got a cue that you'd like to flow, please enter in the box and we'll put up on the screen for us to discuss. And Mark Defusco had a follow question in the chat. Let me just quickly summarize. He asks, why are institutions with greater than $10 billion endowments not taxed? Yes, why? Why aren't they taxed? And I think it's about politics. They actually are taxed now. A great irony is that a tax on endowment investment returns for large endowments was part of the Republican and Trump tax reform bill or tax cut bill. It was one of the few taxes that they increased. They then used the revenue from that tax to cut other taxes for very rich people. So it wasn't a great victory for equity. But yeah, we had taxes on endowment investment returns until 1984 when Congress eliminated them. They were recently restored. The tax is smaller than I think it should be, particularly when an endowment is so large and is not being used to serve enough students from diverse enough backgrounds. So I do think taxing endowments that are not used for schools that have too large an endowment per student and that don't enroll enough diverse students is something that we should do. And there's a legal case for doing it because if there's this ironic thing where a number of endowments, even though they are for the most part, even before they had this new small tax, they use what are called off-shore tax blocker corporations to, and I've got a New York Times op-ed about this from back in 2017. They use these tax blocker corporations to evade taxes on or avoid taxes on a large portion of their investments. Why do they have to do that if they were tax exempt? It's because, effectively, these universities are running hedge funds. And if you run a hedge fund that involves going and borrowing from capital markets in order to make bigger investments, not just investing the assets that you have for your endowment, but you go and borrow, you're basically running a financial firm and you can't do that empty tax-free. So what endowments do is they do that still, but they do it with these off-shore tax blocker corporations as a way to get around this tax on running, effectively, running hedge funds. Wow, well, that's a great question. That's a great, I just, I grabbed the editorial, I just shared that in the chat. I'm also going to tweak it out, which has a very pungent title too, which I guess. Yeah, and there's a great deep dive by Stephanie Saul from the New York Times. Susan, a fantastic investigative reporter, and I think she was working with a consortium, one of those public consortiums of investigative reporters. And so she pulled me in on that, that story and I recommend seeing her work too. Excellent, thank you, thank you. We have another question that follows up on this from our good friend in Virginia from Mark Rush, they put this up on the chat so you can see it. Taxing is a nice idea in principle, but who decides how to reallocate the money? Two, will there be a clear way to reallocate to other universities if that is the purpose of the tax? Great question, I mean, who does decide in America on these things? I remember a book written about 12 years ago called Thirteen Bankers by forgetting the Simon. Simon is one of the names of one of the authors, it might be a co-authored thing. Simon Johnson. Yeah, Simon Johnson, right. A prominent banker in a way, I think he was maybe a chief economist at the IMF or something like that. And so the Thirteen Bankers was about the revolving door between Wall Street and government and actually the bankers are deciding how to reallocate resources when we increase taxes because they run the Treasury and they play a major role in policymaking. But so that's part of the problem that I think this question gestures at, it's a good question. What about who should decide? Well, I think people should decide, everyday people and that's what democracy is about. And if you have a functioning democracy via representative elections and citizen engagement, everybody in society is involved in deciding how to allocate resources. It's a matter of strategy, as a matter of policymaking. I think the way you do it is write a bill, write a California state legislative bill or a Massachusetts state legislative bill or a federal congressional bill. Maybe we can get Elizabeth Warren to sponsor it. And the bill should say, all right, we're going to increase taxes on these endowments who don't satisfy what we think should be non-profit requirements for tax exemptions. And then we should use those resources to fund an expansion of Pell Grants, for example, hypothetically. Let's use it to double the Pell Grant. We spend about $20 billion annually in the U.S. on tax subsidies via tax expenditures for endowments between all the exemptions that we give endowments. $20 billion would be about enough to double the Pell Grant, which would get us a lot of the way there to making most public universities debt-free. So I think that's how I would go about it. But it's a great question. Thank you. That is, Mark is a great scholar, a great teacher, a great friend. And so that's, I'll only hit a question about process, but also you've taken this to outcomes, taxing the various wealth, the very wealthiest institutions in order to fund the doubling of Pell. That sounds like a pretty clear, clear approach. We have more questions coming in. So I was going to ask people to ask questions. And as usual, it's too late. I have to, they're all coming up. So here's one from Lynn Sabulski.  The sage of social media influencers. Is there a reason why more businesses don't offer scholarships as a form of marketing? Interesting question, Lynn. I'll put that back up because that's a very detailed one. Yeah, you want me to get into that one? Yeah, it's for you. Got it. Yeah, so I don't even know how you do it. Go fund me. That seems like a good tool for that kind of stuff. I like your grassroots approach. And I do think that there's been these local initiatives to create college promises to make college debt free or free for students in the region. We have a bunch of HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities that have taken steps to use federal funds to cancel student debt. And I think those local level initiatives are helping change the narrative nationally. And so I love that kind of mutual support. A lot of that support for debt cancellation has been built by a group called, it was first called Strike Debt. Now it's called the Debt Collective. And in addition to advocating for policy change, advocating for the US Department of Education and for the president to cancel all student debt by executive order, they did a bunch of work to provide mutual assistance, providing people with technical expertise on how to get relief from their student loans, how to discharge their student loans, and how to get their loans canceled. And that work built towards this program that has canceled student debt for over 100,000 former for-profit college students totaling in the billions of dollars. The program is called Bar Work Defense. And the Department of Education was like making it almost impossible for people to apply for this form of debt cancellation if they had been defrauded by a predatory for-profit college. But this debt collective figured out a way to provide mutual assistance to thousands of these for-profit college students to comply with the bureaucratic morass required to request this form of debt cancellation. And the Department of Education subsequently made it much easier because of pressure from that same group. So I think that's a nice example of how mutual assistance has a great role to play. But I think it's best when coupled with efforts for policy change because it's often just it's hard to reach everyone who needs support when it's just us trying to pool our resources. We got to make the banks pay their fair share and the bankers pay their fair share. And they're not just going to do it voluntarily via a mutual assistance program. That's what the tax policy part is for. Well, thank you, Lynn, for the really thoughtful question. And if you haven't followed in the chat, Amanda Burbage recommends, many areas have community foundations that often help establish and retain bespoke scholarships. Go for it. And thank you, Charlie, for the really, really rich and direct answer which took us a lot, covered a lot of ground. We have more questions coming in. Let's make sure that we have room to get the chance to ask. This is one from our good friend, Tom Hames, and Tom asks, is the ultimate expression of college as a private good instead of a public good? Is there a deeper philosophical issue here? And is this a uniquely American problem? Interesting question. Happy. Can you keep that question up so I can reference it as I as I respond? Yeah, I mean, I think on the one hand, college in the US in particular has origins as a private good. It was really, you go back to the early days of the US when we had primarily elite institutions. Harvard is the first chartered corporation in the US. So the the overall, you know, the broader organizational form of the corporation has shared a shared lineage with Harvard and who Harvard let in. And what they did for students was very much a matter of making an elite and and was more about exclusion than inclusion about defining who is in the elite and who is out. So if you go back and you read Jerome Carabelle's work that chose in on that means that elite schools and others. Admissions actually took into account families, wealth and family social status. There was, you know, public listings of elites. And that was taken into consideration when people were were admitted. And a large part of the education is learning culturally how to be elite. Learning, you know, in some ways, you could say colleges have origins in the US as finishing schools for the elite. And that really doesn't start to change in mass until World War two and the expansion of mass higher education via the G.I. Bill for veterans from all walks of life. When they passed that G.I. Bill, people like the president of University of Chicago protested saying, which is ironic, that's a book published by University of Chicago Press, but the president of the University of Chicago protested the G.I. Bill saying this bill is going to turn places like University of Chicago into hobo jungles. They'll make us let anybody in. So as late as World War two, that's what people were saying about the G.I. Bill. And so the expansion of mass higher education is in some ways created an alternative expression of what college is less about defining an elite and who's in and who's out, more about mass inclusion and public public universities have been at the core of that. And one of the things I talk about in the book is the places like the University of California, California State University system, public university systems and other people's states. They just they're much larger than private colleges. They enroll many, many, many more students. And they tend to enroll students, especially the less selective public universities. They tend to enroll students from much more diverse economic backgrounds. And so they connect larger swaths of society with each other. And and and so there's, you know, that expression of inclusion is, you know, I think gained, you know, has gained and gained in the 20th century. But student debt has been a challenge for that. And it's very hard to escape the ideal, the original ideals and ideal types of higher education as an ivory tower. We still talk about it as an ivory tower. And it's hard to escape that picture that people have in their mind of higher education in colleges being about excluded ivory towers from the rest of society. Even though so much of higher education is beyond that ivory tower, beyond that elite. Thank you for, I mean, this shows how, among other things, how deeply ingrained with history and how buttressed with history your your book and your thinking are, which is so important. And thank you again for the really, really good question. Tom has a habit of asking very, very deep and thoughtful questions. One of the reasons we love him. We have more questions coming in. And friends, if any of you have your camera on, please click the raised hand and join us on stage. You can tell that Charlie is very friendly and we'll take your questions seriously. And speaking of serious questions, we have one from Regina Haribay. We don't often talk about the role of state government in higher ed, particularly public higher ed. And how the changes in state funding have pushed institutions towards increased tuition, et cetera. Your thoughts? Great question. Get the book. You will love chapter three. Part of what the story that chapter three tells is it tells how the chapter is called bankers to the rescue. And it talks about that 1992 expansion of student loans and how that legislation came to be. And one of the things that the chapter kind of starts with is I show that student loan barring was actually flat from the late 1970s to the early 1990s until this 1992 bill is about $20 billion per year. And it's only after this 1992 bill that you get more than a quintupling of student debt to a peak of $120 billion annually around 2011. Now, I mentioned earlier, the banks basically wrote the bill. But the other thing that happened is at the end of the 1970s when people were people had another conversation. They had every five years or so Congress is supposed to renew the Higher Education Act that funds Pell grants and regulates our student loans. And so they had another Higher Education Act conversation about student loans at the end of the 1970s. And if you go back and you read what people were saying and you read what the representatives for the college is, including the president of Georgetown who testified for the Industry Association for Colleges and Universities, they said, we're actually not supportive of expanding student loans. We're wary of that because we're concerned that it'll provide a rationale for colleges and universities to rely on these student loans instead of public funding from our state governments and from Pell grant program. And so we're worried that the option of student loans will provide cover for state governments to reduce state appropriations. You then go through the through the through the 80s and basically state governments started to reduce spending on a per student basis. They didn't reduce overall spending but enrollments were growing and basically funding was not increased to keep up with enrollments and you had the same thing happen at the federal level of Pell grants. And so you come back at the beginning of the 1990s and in 1992 the colleges say, okay, we don't think we can get state funds anymore so we'll support the student loans. And I talked to Jane Wellman who's a really great person, you know, looked back at her own role in this, you know, critically and thoughtfully. She was the executive director for NICU, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which is private non-profit industry association. And she said, when I was hired by NICU, the board told me my job was to get money from the bill. That was my only job. And they didn't care where the money came from. And the only place it was going to come from was student loans. So that kind of gets at this problem of disinvestment by state governments. I think as a matter of long-term strategy, we should obviously concede no ground at the state level in advocating for state funding. But in the U.S., most of the fiscal power of government is at the federal level. There's just more power to tax and raise tax revenue and also to borrow for expenditures at the federal level. And so I think focusing on expanding federal funding is a better long-term strategy to increase higher education funding than just trying to advocate for more state funding. That is essentially how Medicare, for example, has been able to expand so much, is because Medicare was made a federal entitlement. And there's a bit of a technical... I think we all kind of know what an entitlement means, but there's actually a kind of technical meaning to entitlement there, which is that we said as a society with the Medicare legislation in the 1960s as part of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, we said Medicare is something that will be guaranteed to all seniors. That's what makes it an entitlement. And future Congresses will be required to fund Medicare and Medicaid, by the way, will be required to fund it for all eligible folks as an entitlement. And so there are fiscal obligations and fiscal constraints on cutting funding to Medicare. Pell grants, which the forerunners to Pell grants were created also as part of President Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society programs, but they did not include full entitlement status with that requirement that the federal government in funding for them for all eligible students. So that's kind of an example of how a different federal funding structure and using the greater power of the federal government to tax financiers and tax others is, I think, a way to buttress our state funding for our colleges and universities. Great question. And Regina, thank you. And what a great answer. This is taking us through a lot of history and also through a lot of structure. We have more questions coming in. And there's one from a former student of mine, Jordan Davis, who asks about income-based repayment plans. I hear a lot of criticism of the solution. I understand that it's not ideal, but I don't see how it's worse than what we have now. Yeah, great question. Yeah, I mean, I'm for improving income-based repayment plans, which are also called income-driven repayment plans. Well, you know, I'm a sort of let's do all the things that we can do. Certainly a student who is or a borrower who is in repayment, them getting relief by having their payment reduced to a level that they can afford rather than what's called the standard repayment plan. And then the policy currently says that their debt would then be canceled after 20 years or 25 years, depending on the exact plan. That's better. It's better than forcing those students into default, better than forcing those borrowers to pay more than they are able to pay afford. But it's income-driven repayment. People have been trying to make it work for 30 years now with no success in the U.S. It's very difficult to administer it. You know, between public service loan forgiveness, which is linked to income-driven repayment and the income-driven repayment plan, only about 10,000 people have ever had their debts ultimately canceled. And so if you're stuck in income-driven repayment and you're making these lower payments, but your debts don't ever ultimately get canceled, and by the way, it's kind of hard to stay in the program because if you don't certify your income year after year after year, the federal government will say, wait a minute, I don't actually know if you were poor enough last year to get this income-driven repayment and they'll bounce you out of the plan. But if you don't ultimately get the cancellation and it's after 20 years under the current plan, then you're actually still really at a disadvantage and you're still suffering from this new inequality of student debt because if you try to go get a home loan or a car loan, people will still see that you have debts on your books. And in fact, if you are making the income-driven repayment payment, you're paying less in some cases than your interest rate, which means you're then accruing unpaid interest. And so this is a factor in why black borrowers who particularly have debts that are unaffordable because of a lack of household wealth from historic housing and other forms of racial discrimination. Black borrowers after 20 years, the average black borrower still owes as much as they originally borrowed. Even if they've made $100,000 in payments in some cases, they might still have $50,000 in debt because of how it was accrued for 20 years. And this has that knock-on effect, too, of if these people have a harder time of buying capital, of buying, say, a house or buying a car than... Exactly. And then you can't build wealth, so we can't break the cycle of the racial wealth gap because student debt itself is making it impossible to build household wealth. So I'm for making... I support efforts that make income-driven repayment more generous, that reduce payment burdens further, that cancel debts more automatically. But I also support broad automatic debt cancellation for most student debts right now, which I think it would give us a reset for the student loan system and would get relief to millions of borrowers who have waited too long. And we haven't been able to make income-driven repayment or can't ask borrowers to wait another 20 years to get relief via that program that they probably will never receive. Well said. We have a video question I'd like to bring up. This is from Amanda Burbage, who... let's see if we can bring her up on the stage. Ah, cool. Hello, Mr. Burbage. Hey, everybody. How are you doing? All right. Good to see you. Good. Well, I've added your book to my wish list, Charlie, so thank you. Super. Thank you. So I'm really interested in this topic and something that you said earlier strikes me as troubling because if we want to be able to make any change and we need to get Elizabeth Warren to sponsor our bill, it kind of puts us in direct opposition with these really heavy, weighty powers that also maybe we don't all agree on that, right? Like we're all kind of crabs in the bushel. We compete. We all want to be Harvard, even though we're kind of mad at Harvard for not paying taxes on their endowment, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you just said something that made me think maybe there is an alternative, kind of like some banking jiu-jitsu where we use their strength against them. And the fact that these borrowers cannot participate in the extra economy, the economy outside of their loan debt. They can't get up mortgage.  It seems to me like those are lost opportunities for the bank. And I'm curious, does that argument, is there any persuasive aspect to that argument? Or are there other ideas you have about jiu-jitsu, how we can use that power against them, so to speak? Yeah. That's a good question. If I understand you right, is it kind of like can we use how it could benefit the financial sector itself to cancel student debts so that more financial inclusion would result? Yeah. Which means more customers for the banks, more mortgages to make. And I think that's a worthwhile strategy to explore. I like work that the Aspen Institute is doing on financial inclusion that I think is in the vein that you're talking about. My collaborator, Fred Wary, at Princeton, has done a lot of work on financial inclusion. And Fred sort of both and here. Fred has been a vocal supporter of broad debt cancellation. And I think part of the case that he's made is that there's a moral case for this, but that we need that cancellation for these other forms of financial inclusion. I'll give you a good story about student debt and financial exclusion. So one of the people I interviewed for the book is Don Quijada, who was a student from Connecticut at the New England Institute of Art. And he took on a large amount of debt, maybe $50,000. I can't remember the exact amount. It's in the book. And he didn't end up getting a degree because this predatory for-profit college was bought by Goldman Sachs and a firm called Providence Equity Capital, which ironically is run by a member of Brown University's board of trustees, Jonathan Nelson, Rhode Island's only billionaire. And so he, because of his debts that are unpayable for him, he runs a business that's like a sound production company. And he couldn't even get a revolving line of credit at a music equipment store for like $250 a month in order to buy the equipment that he needed to run this thing because of these defaulted loans and delinquent loans on his books. So that's an example where Don was trying to build a business and trying to get credit, but he couldn't possibly pay it because of these financial burdens from the student loan system. And basically because he was defrauded by a private equity run company using a federal student loan program. Yeah, you would think the local tax base would want to be able to support someone like Don because that's money in the local tax base that's now missing because that business is not operating or employing others. I just, I'm just thinking, the government may have been partially responsible for creating the problem in 1992, but I don't know if I can trust it to fix it without some creativity considering the HEA is not reauthorized and may never be. But thank you. That's a great answer. Thank you so much. Yeah, great talking with you. You too. Thank you so much, Amanda. And friends, that's how the video questions work. Really easy to do. We have a, in the chat, not a question, but a theme that's come up from our friend Keele. Dung has been asking about one problem, which is how do you expand massive amounts of enrollment without going into the heavy financialization? And he points to just, I think he's pointing out to the long boom from the 80s through 2012, massively increasing the amount of students taking classes in higher ed. Was it possible to do that without going, inflating this huge debt balloon? In a word, yes. You know, the amount of money that we're talking about, I think here, let's suppose it's $100 billion annually to have expanded enrollments to the level that we did without asking people to take on student debt. Right? If borrowing increased to $100 billion annually, perhaps that's the amount that people are borrowing to pay for school. Well, if we hadn't done it via student loans, I bet we could have gotten it down a little bit cheaper than that. Think single payer, right? If the government is negotiating with with schools to provide adequate funding, but to also ask schools to enroll enough students at affordable enough cost, you can do some better price setting than essentially what the government did was said, okay, we're going to remove, and this was part of the 1992 regulation for the rich. A big part of it was they doubled the cap on what each student could borrow and they eliminated the cap on what parents could borrow from the program. And then they gave a big subsidy to private banks to do about half of all the lending. When we got rid of that subsidy, did get rid of that subsidy to banks, actually half the lending in 2010, that saved $6 billion a year. And the Obama administration did that in 2010 as via congressional legislation. And they used the $6 billion in savings from eliminating this guarantee subsidy to private lenders to budget the largest increase in Pell grants that we've had in the last 40 years. So that's an example of where you can directly reallocate money from these wasteful subsidies to finance to more equitable direct appropriations to students in schools. And you talk, if you look at the amount of, you know, tax avoidance that finance has engaged in, if you look just at the amount of tax revenue that is lost to the carried interest loophole and to the low capital gains tax rates that we have, those taxes alone would provide ample funding to make higher education debt free. And at the same time, at the same time, do many other important things for social programs. So I think we can do it. And, you know, we haven't had a problem, you know, while the debt is large, the federal debt is large, it has not been unmanageable. So I'm confident that we've got the fiscal ability as a society to do this. Well, as other societies have done. Others have done. And that's something people have been asking. Since we're coming close to the end of the hour, I wanted to step back to something you said early on, which was that there's a cycle going back and forth with the financialization of society and the financialization of higher education, at least to continue to reinforce each other. I'm thinking of Giovanni Origi's work, where he points out that financialized societies historically have a hard time stopping being financialized. And he points out Genoa, he points out Venice, he points out Britain and Holland. And I'm wondering, looking ahead, you know, say a decade or 20 years, what can we do about this? I mean, is there a way of keeping the, of reducing the total amount of student debt? Is there, and if we wiped it all out just tomorrow, would we be able to stop it from re-inflating again? Yeah, no, I think that's an important question. Tressy McMillan-Cottom had a great quote at a meeting I was at with her in 2019, where she said, debt cancellation can't work without free college, and free college can't work without debt cancellation. And I think that's basically right. You know, my kind of political economy analysis of this is that cancelling student debt is politically a reset for the, for our student loan system, that then makes it even more politically untenable to continue asking future students to rely on student loans to pay for college, because what are we going to do? Just recurrently cancel debts that people assume to go to college and can't repay. And so it changes the political discourse and it changes people's expectations in a way that I think favors the politics of making college free or debt free. And actually you see signs that that analysis is right and what has happened with the student loan pause. Folks might know that interest and repayment on federal student loans has been paused for almost two years now since the start of COVID. And the Biden administration has wanted to restart student loan repayments, but is finding that it is administratively and politically very difficult to do. If they try to do it because people have become accustomed to not repaying their student loans, there's likely to be a wave of defaults on student loans which no administration wants to preside over. And so they keep extending the pause on student loans and actually this pause on student loans is actually a very large form of debt cancellation. Essentially it's effectively about a hundred billion dollars in debt cancellation annually because these loans that students do not borrow and do not have to repay are also interest accrual as paused on them. So nobody is accruing interest on the loans that they would then have to repay either. And maybe this is some financial jiu-jitsu to go back to the comments of your earlier terrific questioner. Financial, the federal government in doing its financial valuation of federal student loans has essentially devalued our student loan portfolio by several hundred billion dollars because even though their face value is 1.7 trillion, the federal government does not believe it will actually be able to collect on hundreds of billions of dollars of that debt. So if we can't collect on it, why don't we then release students from and borrowers from the life and financial turmoil imposed on them of having a debt on their books that prevents them from getting a home loan or a car loan or being able to change apartments to go get the job that they want. So I think in that way student debt cancellation is part of the path to establishing a debt-free higher education system. That sounds revolutionary and that's a fantastic note to, I'm afraid, end our session on. We've reached the top of the hour again. And Charlie, you've taken us through this whole enormous problem with a great deal of clarity, a great deal of history, and a great deal of thought. Thank you so much for... I don't know if I did it right, but I think I just put my Twitter handle in the chat. So it's Charlie Eaton, PhD. I hope I did it right. I don't even know. That's a couple of fans of yours have already put that in. Charlie Eaton, PhD. So if you have questions that we didn't get to today, tweet them at me and I will get back to you. Well, that was actually my next question, my last question to ask you, which is what's the best way to keep up with you and the answer is on Twitter? Yeah, that's where I have the most steady and regular stream of my work. So that's a good place to follow. Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for all of this. Good luck with all the projects you're working on. And we're also follow up with you and hear more from you. Yeah, thank you. Great conversation. This is really fun. I appreciate it. Appreciate your work. Thank you, Charlie. But don't go, friends. Don't go, friends. I need to point out where we're headed over the next few weeks. And also to second Professor Eaton's praise for all of you. These are really, really good questions. Looking ahead, we have a whole series of topics coming up from libraries and careers to minority students on campus, public higher education, web three, the climate crisis. If you would like to keep talking about these issues about income-based repayment, about debt forgiveness, about this Trustee McMillan-Cottom's link between cancelling student debt and free college. We're happy to talk about this on my blog or also, of course, on Twitter. Just use the hashtag FTTE. If you'd like to dive back into our previous sessions about these topics, just head to tinywell.com slash FTF archive. And thank you all again for thinking through this very complex and very charged question together. I hope all of you are doing well. Above all, I hope you're safe and sound. And we'll see you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.


It's almost Christmas, well one of the Christmases, the Catholic one. So let's set a festive tone because in the everyday rush we may well need just that little bit of help to get in the mood for celebrating the birthday of some guy who famously told his followers to love one another and insisted that, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Because by the look of it, we Europeans seem to have a mixed record in loving our neighbors, especially when they are fleeing war and disaster. So today, we talk about refugees. The reception of Ukrainian refugees was very political and actually when it comes to the reception this was a blessing. But my fear and the fear of many migration scholars is that it can turn into a curse. We pretend that we can respond with migration management, how it is often called, that we manage migration, but this is already far too late. When people need to leave their countries, then it's already too late. The EU didn't just run out of the gates and say, welcome all Ukrainian refugees, there was immense pressure, international pressure and internal pressure to declare these rights. The bar was so low compared to other asylum seekers. We always have this like a mantra, we distinguish between flight and legal migration as if these are two completely different things, but who wants just to flee? Everybody wants to also have a sustainable life afterwards, so you need to also sync it together. Our labour markets scream actually for people, so I think we have to be much more creative. Hello and welcome to Standard Time. I'm Mirei Kokinga Pop, editor-in-chief of Eurazine and your host on Standard Time. Eurazine is an online publication that combines articles from more than 100 culture journals, reaching people all around the world. We are also proud to be a founding partner of Display Europe, a new platform presenting European content in 15 different languages. From the streets of Istanbul to the waves of the English Channel, refugees play a definitive role in European life and politics, as they have been for thousands of years. The surface of today's political discourse is divided between extremes. On the one hand, we have the Europeans who love to brag about their heroism in receiving refugees and our devotion to human rights, and on the other hand, we see the steady rise of xenophobia in mainstream politics. These tones play a dreadful duet, while a great number of people meet horrible deaths, trying to sail through the Mediterranean, walk their way north from sub-Saharan Africa, or struggle to find a path where you foot across the deep forests of the Belarusian borders. And for those who do make it to a more desirable destination, Europe does not offer a land flowing with milk and honey. Housing is a crucial challenge on a continent reluctant to address its deepening housing crisis. From the Lampedusa Camp in Italy to the jungle in Calais and the Grand Sins Camp in Dunkirk, many faced terrible conditions and dangerous environments. Many refugees, skilled or unskilled, find themselves either unemployed or underemployed. For instance, in Germany, one of the major host countries in Europe, only about 40% of adult refugees had found employment after five years of residence, compared to 70% of the rest of the population.  For some, this is a struggle across generations, living perpetually displaced, never safely settled or integrated. From the blatant xenophobia of Giorgia Malone's administration in Italy or the Tory party's vile dreams of deportation in Britain, a lot of political players have turned anti-immigration into their entire identity. Some others bravely display their human rights sentiment, all the while arranging for non-European countries to absorb immigration for them, outsourcing their own violent refusal to practice the values they preach. Of course, not all refugees in Europe have crossed continental boundaries. As of September 2023, around 6 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered across Europe. This is the most significant displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War. The role of the diaspora, particularly in Poland, has been crucial in managing the crisis and supporting new refugees. But we may well admit that it is a marathon and not a sprint, and research reveals growing resentment as the war drags on. Our guests today are here to help us grasp the breadth and depth of this issue. Martin Wagner is a senior policy adviser for asylum at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development. He specializes in European and international refugee law and authored several studies on European asylum seekers. Olena Jermakova is an interdisciplinary researcher with a focus on central and eastern European migration. Currently, she continues her research into Ukrainian labor migrants in Poland at the Research Centre for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. Welcome and thank you for taking the time and coming on the show. Today we're going to talk about refugees because, of course, this is a perfect Christmas topic when we celebrate the birthday of a refugee child, anyway, and supposedly also mercy and understanding towards each other, which I don't think we have a spotless track record in in Europe. Let's talk about your research first, Olena. You have recently published an article in Eurazine. You studied the relationship of Ukrainian, whom you term labor migrants, and their integration in Poland and their role in receiving the bigger waves of refugees in 2022 and 23. The role of kind of old Ukrainian diaspora is largely underestimated in this kind of, you know, warm welcome of Ukrainian refugees in 2022. Many researchers point out that we can see if we kind of look at the maps of where labor migrants settled before and where the refugee settles, they kind of mirror the refugees being hosted by their families, extended families, and by their friends took like an enormous burden in housing and helping out the newly arrived refugees. However, as time passes and as the war lasts and people get more and more exhausted, Ukrainian population abroad, it also becomes less unified in many ways. We can see many more new frictions arising in the society. So, because of course, before 2022, the migration regime applied to Ukrainians was very different. It was a kind of strict labor migration regime, whereas afterwards it was this humanitarian migration regime, so to say. So the treatment was very different and in my research, for instance, I see that there's a lot of resentment from the old migrants towards the new ones. Also kind of, they see this as preferential treatment, which they did not get. So even within Ukrainians themselves, we see resentment, unfortunately. Martin, you work on migration policy, but you have worked for the longest time in supporting and representing asylum seekers. Do you see this kind of tendency playing out with other refugee and asylum seeker groups? Is this also the case that many of them go where they already have contacts? It's a marvelous question, I must say, because this is the big difference that we have with Ukraine. Basically, in order to come to a safe country, people need to leave the country, go into another country irregularly. There are no these regulated pathways that people can go from one country to the other. There was a recent article, I brought it very much to the point, I said that the temporary protection that is applying for Ukrainians is the biggest task force against smuggling. And in fact, it is like this. People can go where they have language skills, where they have relatives, friends, or where they think they fit best because of their job skills and what they have. And this is a huge difference. Regular asylum seekers, so non-Ukrainians, are stuck mostly in the first country. They are. But I must also say, it is not really foreseen like this in new regulations. There's this Dublin regulation that many people know. If somebody comes to a country, asks for asylum, there would be a hierarchy of reasons where they could go, meaning probably there's a minor somewhere, and a relative somewhere, or whether they were ready before they end one way or the other. This was maybe the most unique thing about Ukrainian migration, this unprecedented mobility opportunity that we enjoyed. And because I've done also some research on return refugees in late 2022, this was maybe counter-intuitively, but also a factor for people to return, allowing people to leave and then come back again, actually made them leave, because the stakes were lower for them. They thought that if something happens, if the situation gets worse, I can still get out. I don't have to kind of make this all or nothing choice right here, right now, which would of course make people stay, because you don't know what's coming. Yeah, you also point out in your article that the primary goal of a refugee is to get to a point where they can stop being a refugee. Can you explain what this means to those who have never experienced forced migration or having to leave somewhere that they called home? Being a refugee has been in a state of limbo. You put your life on hold and you wait either for it to return or you're seeking for new opportunities. So either to come back home and to return to your life as it was more or less as much as possible, or to fully integrate in a new country, get the passport, get the job, become like a proper resident with full rights and so on. Ukrainians are under temporary protection and the word temporary is very key here. The protection lasts only for three years and as of now no one still knows what's going to happen afterwards. It's a state of limbo and I think people want to exit it as soon as possible. And now a word from our partner. Today we come to you from the Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, a vibrant cultural hub located in the heart of Vienna, Austria. Thanks to them for hosting us. Their program ranges from literary talks and events to concerts and all of them are free to attend. For a complete list of events and further details, please visit Alte Schmiede's website at AlteSchmiede.at. Can we put it in a wider context like our current understanding on refugees and our moral understanding of obligations towards refugees are rooted, let's say most closely, in the aftermath of the Second World War, right? It's just the aftermath of this incredible massacre and genocide across the world and it often seems that whatever guarantees, protocols, progress was made during, let's say, like a 50-20 years following the Second World War. We keep dialing back from those. You are completely right. I mean, the foundation of what we have dates back to 1951 in the language from the Geneva Refugee Convention in the aftermath of the Second World War. You find many of the definitions of how a refugee is defined already. It has the wording race in their religion, all these kind of things that were of utmost importance in the Second World War or during the Nazi regime. And you're also right. It is actually quite long ago already. It's 1951 and this instrument is still the main reference point that what we do on European and EU policies. This is the reference document and you find it also in all other EU law, for example. And this is also why many want to question the Geneva Refugee Convention in one way or the other. They say, is it still timely or not? But just imagine, 74 years, how many refugee situations it already helped us to come through the Geneva Refugee Convention so further developed through case law, through a new law that was applied. I'm not really questioning the Geneva Convention only in part because I'm not competent to. What I'm saying is that in mainstream political discourse, xenophobia and anti-refugee and anti-migration tones get louder and louder. It feels like these parties and political players are trying to negotiate down from this anchor point, forced deportations, mass deportations, the idea to just withdraw already granted citizenships. These are things that would have seemed unthinkable only just a few years back. So it seems to me that on the level of political discourse, we're actually seeing a deep infringement on these conventions and sort of a gradual degradation of this baseline with some notable exceptions. The EU didn't just run out of the gates and say, welcome all Ukrainian refugees. There was immense pressure, international pressure and internal pressure for the EU to declare these rights, right? Yes, so the reception of Ukrainian refugees was very political. And actually, when it comes to the reception, this was a blessing. But my fear and the fear of many migration scholars is that it can turn into a curse because when you apply this moral notions of hospitality and solidarity and such, this means that you're not applying the law and you're not applying rights and obligations, which means that the decision to send people back can also follow political moods. So it's viewed like some kind of an individual grace and that's something you're entitled to. And grace, it's arbitrary, right? And it can be taken back. The reception of Ukrainian refugees followed legal documents which already existed, so the temporary protection directive. But it was enforced because of the political moods. Of course, this mobilization can not last forever. If you look at the reception, so the usual reception is housing that is provided by states. And in Ukraine context, we have an incredible huge amount of private housing that has been offered. There was over ambition by people without knowing what it means. Because you say, okay, of course, everybody wanted to open their houses, their hearts and everything. But it means also, you don't know when it stops. And can you tell then somebody, please leave the house? I cannot anymore. I need my space again. Yes, it was very bottom up. But because it was very bottom up, there was not enough kind of state support, institutional support. So, like, sustainable structures were not created. It was all individuals or NGOs, some researchers call it NGOization, different social tensions that arise. They are such a breeding ground for populist politics. Like we've seen after 2015, you know, the rise of far right-wing populist parties across Europe, which can largely be traced back to the mass migration back then. This now can also reinforce the already existent far right populist forces in Europe. It is impossible to avoid talking about what we have already mentioned briefly, this incredible difference between Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers, because not everybody gets the refugee status, of course. You will never have so easily an unanimous vote anymore. It doesn't matter in what context we could think of that something like this could happen again. I work already quite long on this field. And I sometimes have a bit the impression, isn't migration a bit too precious for political small gains for elections in order to have your electorate and you have your easy gains? Whenever do we hear that our migration policies work, something is working good? If you remember the biggest difference between 2015 and the Ukrainian situation was for me, there was a patchwork. Each country did it somehow in the Ukrainian one. This was an unanimous approach. I think also the population understood this is exceptional. There will come many people, but we know and we work together on that. And I think this was important. And I think this is how communication about migration has to be. It is a challenge. It is nothing easy. We don't paint things pink in a way, but we face them. And we are in control and we know what we do. I think what's important speaking about the preferential treatment or so-called preferential treatment that Ukrainians received is that the bar was so low compared to other asylum seekers. And I think what we kind of collectively should aim for is sort of like raising everyone up to kind of the level of humane and decent support that Ukrainian refugees received rather than dragging Ukrainians down so that they're equal with everyone else. We like to say this about human rights, that equality is not something that somebody usurps from you. The more there is, the more you get out of that. But of course, for that you do have to have a mindset. And in European politics, xenophobia is a very hot commodity. And as Martin said, it's cheap. But Martin, you also mentioned that the fact that Ukrainians fleeing the war was legal basically did away with human trafficking, right? Because there was no reason to traffic these people. Do you see a potential for this experience to also be kind of a push towards something better? Because we now experience that all of these Ukrainian refugees somehow didn't swallow the rest of Europe, or at least not so far. Not that I've seen. And then maybe use this as a point of persuasion to push things for the better, or I'm being too optimistic. I'm afraid so. I would love to say this is the future that comes to us. No, I'm afraid it's too optimistic. If we, even if this is a Christmas version here, I think it's a Christmas miracle. I really must say that the options are very limited. But it's not only that we are very solidarity or whatever, but we also need labor power. We need people here. We are a demographically aging society. So why not bringing things together? This is something completely unthinkable, because we always have this like a mantra. We distinguish between flight and legal migration, as if these are two completely different things. But who wants just to flee? Everybody wants to also have a sustainable life afterwards. So you need to also think it together. And why not also looking at the needs of our societies and what kind of labor opportunities are there? And our labor markets scream actually for people. I really feel a bit like we try to respond to contemporary migration phenomena with concepts from at least 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And this was what I mentioned, this divide between flight on the one side and legal migration on the other. Because everybody needs both to think about climate change and all these kind of things. This is not anymore either or it's nearly open. And now some words from our sponsors or shall I say, funders and founders, the European Commission and the European Cultural Foundation. The European Cultural Foundation is based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and they have long been keen on connecting Europeans across borders, languages and cultural backgrounds. They've been supporting arts, research and much more since 1954. They also created the Erasmus Student Exchange Programme which has allowed over 10 million Europeans to travel and study abroad. Now they're bringing together partners from across Europe to build a content sharing platform that syndicates articles, audio and video programs in 15 languages and somehow miraculously also doesn't abuse your user data. This pay Europe offers content on politics, culture, community and so much more. It also brings you this very talk show, Standard Time, produced by one of the co-founders, Eurazine. This all wouldn't be possible without the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Thanks folks, now let's get back to where we were before. So we tend to kind of draw this line, you know, before February 2022, it was all labor migration and after February 2022 it was all, you know, refugees forced displacement. Now the reality of course is very complex and things are a bit more interconnected in practice. I can share a personal anecdote. So me and my younger sister, we were, you know, one of these people at the line to the Polish border on 28th, I think of February that was, which was before the temporary protection was invoked. And back then, like, Ukrainians on social media were sharing, you know, stories and like kind of circulating advice.  So even though we were, you know, literally fleeing missiles, like there cannot be like more obvious and direct, I guess, you know, reason to be a refugee, we were there and been like, okay, so what are we gonna say at the border? We're gonna say that we're just going to Krakow for tourism, you know, like to see the castle or something. So like in that moment, I kind of realized that, you know, all this discourse about, you know, refugees choose to come to Europe to milk the cow of social benefits and have this privileged life is just completely untrue. Yeah. Just to clarify, I think what you meant is not the refugee status that this is a worst status, but asylum seekers, just to have this because refugee status is a strong status. It's a stronger status than temporary protection. Yes, thank you for clarifying. But this is also one of the things that, you know, where preferential treatment of Ukrainians is not completely preferential because indeed, we're not given this like long-term pass towards citizenship and usually the social benefits that come with the full refugee status are much stronger than Ukrainians receive under temporary protection. Yeah, but let's be clear. Like this is not a disadvantage, Olympics, so you're not saying that you are worse off than the people camping out in the border forests of Belarus. What you were saying is that what many people frame as like heaven on earth has very severe limitations. We also see EU policy, foreign policy, basically securing that certain asylum-seeker populations don't even reach the continent, that certain, for instance, Northern African or Middle Eastern countries absorb the incoming asylum seekers from Sub-Saharan Africa, from Syria and Afghanistan, and sort of keep them there. You advise migration policy. How do you feel about the EU's policy right now? I think it's very difficult to explain to a population why somebody from Syria goes through Turkey, through Greece, through Western Balkans and so on and then to Austria. But the thing is, the Geneva Refugee Convention doesn't give us this. It doesn't tell us how people can access. There is no really clear and good policy option that you could put on the table because there is none. But what I see very often is, we pretend that we do, that we can respond with migration management, how it is often called, that we manage migration. But this is already far too late. When people need to leave their countries, then it's already too late. We have to do something that comes before. We have to be much more smarter with our foreign policies that we not only think about irregular migration, but we think much more about development, much more about how you can create opportunities for people. And we still have to acknowledge that climate change will be a huge topic in the future. But my point is here really that we try to, I don't know how it is called in English, but we try to put the horse from the wrong side. We need to break the silos of thinking in boxes. We think about migration. We think about the economy. We think about foreign aid or something, but we need to bridge these things and bring them together. We come back to the fact that we already mentioned that there is no long-term sustainable strategy for migration. Everything is just reactive. Many politicians think about electorate, and electorate is for years or five years at maximum. But migration is not something that you can think about in four or five-year terms. You need to go, we spoke about demography. We spoke about climate change. It is not something that will be in the next five years coming to us, but it will be the next 10, 20, 30 years. But in order to be prepared, then we need to start right now. The expression you mentioned that we approached the horse from the wrong side in Hungary, and I would use the expression that says that we have to tailor the trousers to the backside and then the other way around. When political forces are trying to appeal to an electorate, first of all, they behave like the opinions of that electorate were immobile. Like they had to serve a certain interest, but we see, especially with populists, that popular opinion moves all the time. So you can't persuade people, even if they are not initially very happy to have a lot of refugees or labor migrants, whoever to come around to be more hospitable. But another example that comes to my mind is the recent Polish elections, where the Conservative Party started to turn away from their support of Ukraine, and it didn't pay out for them. Does this leave a mark on the Ukrainian diaspora there? So with the recent elections, I guess it's too early to say what's the effect of that will be, but a lot of the migrants, mostly kind of low-skilled labor migrants, they are quite apolitical in that sense. They don't speak the language, so they don't follow the news. So this populist discourse does not affect them so much. But then the ones who do follow Polish politics who are in the country for a long time speak the language, are kind of involved, and of course, this is a very big concern for them. Many people I talked to, they felt very uncertain about their future because of the politics, because of this populist anti-migrant discourse. So we are towards the end of the discussion, so I'd like to close with this round a completely imaginary sort of megalomaniacal rant. If we have like one wish, one immediate wish, to come true as of tomorrow in this field, what would that be? Depoliticized migration. Yeah, I mean, no wars would help quite a lot. And you know, we have other than wars that are forced people to leave their countries. I think we don't need additional ones, yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming along. And Mary, whatever each of us will celebrate. This show is presented by Eurazine, a platform offering insightful articles from over a hundred partner journals in multiple languages. You can be a part of this intellectual journey by visiting patreon.com slash Eurazine to become a patron, starting at just three euros per month. For this, you'll get access to bonus materials, early releases and further perks. Our show is a production of Display Europe, an innovative platform dedicated to presenting content with a strong focus on data privacy. We're also grateful to the Altishmide for hosting us. Funding for this program comes from both the Creative Europe Program of the EU and the European Cultural Foundation. The opinions and views expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers, and do not necessarily reflect those of the EU or their European Education and Culture Executive Agency.


If you have no idea what type of doctor or medical path you should be pursuing, I'm going to show you exactly how to decide in two minutes. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman. I'm a board certified internal medicine physician and currently a cardiology fellow. And here at the MD journey, we make content to help your medical journey a little bit easier, more successful, both a lot less stressful. One of the most stressful parts of the medical journey, at least for me, was just freaking deciding what kind of doctor do I want to be. But today I'm going to show you how in just two minutes, you can make a more confident decision on the path you should take. So let's go ahead and put that time on the clock. So the first thing that you need to do is take all the career paths you're considering. Maybe you're considering being a doctor, a nurse, a PA, etc. That is completely fine. If you're already on the path of being a physician, for example, then take all the specialties you're considering.  The second step is to now ask yourself what are the bread and butter situations that this personnel will find themselves in. So for example, if you're a nurse, you're going to be working a lot with patients bedside and dealing with those comments, complaints that they may have your physician, they start to ask yourself, well, as a pediatrician, what are the provider and butter things as an internal medicine doctor, things that I commonly saw included things like infections, lung disease, asthma, COPD, renal failure, chest pain, people that were just in chronic pain, people had GI bleeding, cirrhosis, drug intoxications. That was a common list of things that I would see on a daily basis on the flip side. As a cardiologist, my bread and butter would be things like chest pain, arrhythmias, heart failures and valvular disease. Kind of those four pillars are things that I'm used to seeing on a daily basis. And once you go through all those pathways, all the specialties and you've identified your bread and butter, now start identifying those zebras. As a cardiologist, you may be thinking about dealing with more exotic things like cardiac tamponade or people that are needing transplants or cardiogenic shock.  But once you have a list of your bread and butter and your zebras, really ask yourself, which of these bread and butters could I see myself doing every single day for the rest of my life?  Those zebras are likely going to be making your months and the years in your career more exciting. But that's that bread and butter that you're going to be exposed to on a daily basis. You have to ask yourself, can't live with a career where this is what I'm seeing on a day to day basis. And on a personal note, when I was an internal medicine doctor, the answer for me was no, I can't deal with that bread and butter. Because cardiologists, all of those four pillars I set, I absolutely see myself doing it, thus I know it's the path for me. So try this bread and butter and zebra exercise for yourself. Next time, we'll try to hit that two minute mark a little bit better, but hopefully this help helps you becoming the physician or medical professional that you want with less stress. And again, if you're on your medical journey and you want all the tips and tricks that I wish somebody had given to me on my first day of medical school, make sure you check out our free Med School Success Handbook. And if you're on your medical journey and you want the entire blueprint of what to do to get into medical school, to crush it in med school, on your rotations, your board exams, your studying, getting into residency, and ultimately into fellowship, if that's your choice, then go ahead and check down below our Med School Blueprint, which is all of our programs in one place that have been checked out by hundreds of students over the past few years. I'll let the results speak for themselves. If you're interested, they'll be linked down below in the description. And if you enjoyed this episode, then you'll probably enjoy this episode of all the study strategies that I use to get a 3.9 tp at medical school, as well as this technique right here that has been checked out by millions of people on YouTube on exactly how I use flashcards to reduce my setting time in half. Hopefully you guys enjoyed those. And as always, thank you so much for being a part of my journey. Hopefully we were a little help to you guys on yours. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.