My name is Felipe Borges, I work for Red Hat here in the desktop team. Can you guys hear me in the back? Cool. So yeah, I've been working on the desktop team for three years already, and for the last couple of years I've been working on GNOME boxes specifically, and that's what the talk is about. It's about my experiences running GNOME boxes in a flatback sandbox. And I guess you're assuming that it's the whole virtualization stack inside of the flatback sandbox, not just running the GTK application and connecting to things broadly. There is no requirement for the host. So these are the basic topics I'm going to approach today. Usually I would go for the motivation and get to the concepts afterwards, but now you're going to understand, after explaining the concepts, that the motivation is pretty much the other way around, right? There was a technology trend forming around the desktop technologies, flatback, RPMOS3, silver-blue, and containers technologies getting closer to the desktop, and this was something we were trying to catch up to still be available in the Utopia future, where there is no packages anymore and everything runs on containers.  I usually don't have this feedback from the user, so it's really exciting to see people using it. So for those who don't know it, it's like an alternative to virtual box or VMware for desktop users focused on the desktop use case. So for somebody who is experimenting with a new distro, just trying something out on a Windows VM, it's not something focused on scale deployment, neither for somebody who has a very deep understanding of virtualization. So if you are looking to that, Vid Manager is your friend. Both of them are actually based on the same stack, so there is no competition here. They usually have two different use cases, and one is focused on users and the other is focused on advanced users and developers. So that's why we call it virtualization made simple. Boxes, parts like from the point where it assumes that the user doesn't need to understand what's necessary to be set up to get a virtual machine running. So for them, it needs to be like a couple clicks and a lot of things need to be abstract from the users. And other than virtual machines, Boxes supports remote machines. So you can connect to remote machines, either running locally or remotely, over VNC, RDP, and SPICE. So it also replaces your client. You also can use it as a SSH client, so you can have a terminal embedded there and use it for SSH. So the main focus is this test drive experiment. So it's based on LibVirt, so it's just a front-end for LibVirt, and it has this LibOS Info at the core. LibOS Info is a library that has data on operating systems in terms of which devices each operating system supports, which requirements it supports in terms of memory allocation and things as such. But it can vary to all kinds of features that certain operating system supports. And Boxes uses the US Info tools, which are able to detect that an image, an ISO, or a disk match a certain criteria that qualifies it as a specific operating system and already configures this operating system to use these certain devices. So you don't actually need to know whether CentOS 7 supports SCSI adapters for disk buzzer, things like that, because we have a database with this, and this database is designed as such that there's some hierarchy, so we know which operating systems derive from other operating systems, so somehow we can cover a lot of ground to support things out of the box. We also have this great feature that is like a great sales feature for us, which is the Express installs. When Boxes detects that you want to install a specific operating system, which is like a known operating system, for some of them we have these install scripts, which are able to start up the machine based on data from your host and replicate them on the guest. So if I'm installing a Fedora virtual machine in my Fedora host, you'd be able to create a user for me with my same user, my password, my profile picture, and you would do the all install by yourself, so we don't need to do the Anaconda process in your VM, you can just let it install and just go for a coffee and when you're back hopefully things are going to work just fine. So Boxes is like the application I've been working on and Flatpak. A couple years ago applications in the desktop started to be text as a Flatpak and Boxes was kind of left behind because you can imagine that the complexity of a virtualization tool is not comparable to other common desktop applications. As Owen has described, the complexity is also based on the amount of dependencies it has, so it's very easy when you depend on things that are usually part of SDK or a normal installation. And it is hard when you have a lot of dependencies and Boxes uses libvirt, which uses camel, and then you have the spice display, we also support RDP, which means you have free RDP. So a lot of big projects are dependencies of Boxes. And Flatpak has brought us, like you have heard a lot of Flatpak today, so I'm not getting to the details of Flatpak and I'm going to save you both time and patience on this. But the build orchestration actually is a great feature for us in Boxes because I would say that half of the bug reports we receive from users are not our fault. And you know that this is something that I maintain, I usually say, but it's kind of true that in the traditional packaging management the people packaging libvirt and the people packaging spice or camel, they are not the same, sometimes they're not even talking to each other, sometimes they are volunteers, they are just copying some things from other districts. So when you have dependencies which are very well connected to each other and camel has been built with a certain flag and then spice needs to have this certain flag, it can become a nightmare. And the truth is that most of the bug reports were pretty much saying something like Boxes doesn't support a certain feature and then I would dig a little bit and find out that Arch Linux has built camel with some smart car support but it hasn't built a spice with this flag, so it's looking for the flag but it's not built with this support so this type of things that it's like a consequence of the Linux fragmentation that Jan has spoken before and I don't need to get into it. Another great feature that FlightPad has brought for Boxes is the distribution that some distributions just thought that it was too hard to ship Boxes because of the whole dependency tree so they're just not shipping it. And now with the distribution we have it on FlatHub and it's as easy as it gets to install, it's like a couple clicks. And the FlightPad Sandbox enables us to perform non-destructive actions so since FlightPad also enables us to run multiple instances at the same time the user can hack on it and don't cause any damage on their existing virtual machines neither on their host installation or things. So another concept that was around on the desktop before I decided to start working on getting Boxes to work just fine on a FlatPad was Fedora Superblue. Fedora Superblue was designed to be the next Fedora desktop and it's an image-based operating system which means that the basic core OS of it is going to be a static read-only image and everything on top of it is going to be containers. Of course there's this technology which is RPMOS3 that allows you to layer packages on top of it but you are defeating the purpose of having a read-only image-based system if you are just layering stuff on top because you lose the robustness of upgrades and you are just messing up with your install and not decoupling things. And by having an operating system which is focused on containers first we are actually enabling our users to have a very core solid operating system that does these robust updates and have their apps independent of dependencies that usually would expect them to come in the core image of the OS. So Fedora Superblue enables us to have a very reliable operating system and at the same time run on stable applications on top multiple versions of applications on top and that's great for Boxes because one of the biggest challenges is to get people to hack big applications because they just need to build the newest stuff of everything and build the whole world, it's a pain. So you should definitely try Fedora Superblue there is a stand outside, they have demos there and they might help you out with everything you need for Fedora Superblue and so now we are finally at the motivation. So with the reproducible builds I solved the problem with the cross distro support distribution is not having Boxes set with the right things I can just literally go to the GitLab issues and say have you tried the Flatpak and they just try the Flatpak and we find out that most of the issues are on the distro side so then I can tell them to file these reports downstream or just get the users to use Flatpak and most of them are just turning they are just like I'm gonna use Flatpak for now on and not interested on using the packaged one from my distribution The development process has also improved a lot because before we were using GH build so you are just building a different prefix but you still need to build everything locally and the dependencies, the runtime dependencies were things that you just need to catch up and discover when the build is failing and compensate for that So now we have CI bundles so whenever you push something on GitLab we use Flatpak builder to build a bundle which contains the whole build with SysLivirt and Kemu and all and you can just download it, double click it and test it and this enables us to get designers to test the new stuff translators to actually try their translations because how many translators are actually building Kemu just to see whether their Boxes translation is fine is just painful and the simultaneous installs you can have a Boxes development version installed and you still have your stable version which you have your VMs that you don't want to screw up with So right, so the build orchestration this is one of the hardest challenges for packaging Boxes getting all the dependencies to build with the right flags and stuff so this is the moment where I felt a little empathetic with the packages because it's really hard to build so much stuff I don't know if I can actually get my my code to show in that display yeah, there we go so now I don't see it here right, so this is the manifest of the Boxes Flatpak this is the nightly version so you see that the application ID here in the top has the develop prefix applications oh, I don't know how GNOME builder does it so maybe I could just open up in a terminal because I know how to make terminals big yeah, but I don't know this keyboard yeah, but somehow it's eating my shortcuts oh, sorry alright, so I'll describe it, I'm really sorry oh, here I can see it better so the application ID is unique so if this build would have the same org.gnome.boxes then you'll be seeing the same VMs you have on your stable version but by appending this develop thing you can have simultaneous install that doesn't see those VMs so when I run this develop version I don't see the VMs that I installed on the stable Flatpak so they have an isolated container where the VMs are running the libvirt demon is running inside the VM and it spawns it when Boxes is launched and then it just leaps down because there's deburse activation for that so we also save a lot of memory about not running libvirt demon all the time in your Fedora civil bloat because you just need it on demand what else? so here we have the finish arguments which are pretty much the permissions and so far Boxes has device all which means it has access to all the dash dev devices and that's not ideal and that's something that I have in the section of further work of my project which is to use portals to be able to access devices but we still don't have a working devices portal for Flatpak but it's gonna get there at some point we need to just get in motion also file system access here this is mostly because we have this folder sharing feature that allows you to share some folders from the host and see them on the guest and there's a file chooser portal but it's for files not for folders so this is also something that Flatpak needs to change to accumulate these changes we need to have maybe a sharing folder portal or something up to discussion so let's get to dependencies and so here we describe how to build the dependencies you see here that we are doing some patching on this one here to correct some multi-tools build things yeah so a lot of them different build systems so I imagine that for a packageer and understanding that these are the flags that are necessary for you to run Boxes but at the same time we want to build these things and get them working elsewhere for other apps which depend on other builds so delegating to the application developer all these responsibilities actually enables us to do just what we need to do and nothing else more so here we have tracker, disabling a lot of things so another topic of this see Verge Rendering we recently have enabled Verge Rendering for operating systems that support it so you have OpenGL acceleration in your VM so you can run high-performance apps such as Photoshop and things like this and here finally Boxes another aspect here you can see some these apps are sub-projects which I have created for Boxes to introduce new features on it this one is a RDP widget and this one is to support the OpenVirtualization format so the Fatpack also enables me to create sub-projects which can be used elsewhere and ship them together here and I don't need to convince packages or to update a library and things like this these things are quite unstable yet so I don't need to go back and forth with them because we just are in charge of everything from now on okay so let me check where I was there we go so there are certain things that still don't work you used to be able to detect that you connected a physical device and because you are using your dev to detect plug-in stuff so if you connect a USB stick or something the Fatpack Boxes wouldn't be able to see it yet that's also something we need to handle with a portal we now have a FlatHub build which means that you can go to FlatHub.org and download the last stable Boxes and we also have the Nightly Builds which are automatically built every night from GNOME so you can have the latest master comments so if something doesn't work you can try the Nightly Builds and see if it's still broken so for the work this is what is remaining to acknowledge those if-deaf conditions the network bridge so far we don't have the network bridge between the VMs which means that they don't see each other they can connect to the outside world but they don't talk to each other neither to the host which means that you cannot SSH into your virtual machine inside your FlatPacks sandbox with the network bridge you're required to set up a bridge and also forward this file descriptor into LiveVirt so LiveVirt can do its shenanigans and that requires escalating privileges and in FlatPack that is something we don't want which is to escalate privileges inside the sandbox so ideally with the devices portal we would be able to let's say get network manager to create the bridge and then create a little helper which the devices portal is going to use PolishKit so you'll be able to type your password there and forward the file descriptor from the DevNetToon or TAP device into the FlatPacks sandbox and from there on we know what to do with it so we will be able to recreate the network bridge with that but so far we are not able to perform network settings on the host system from inside the sandbox I have some hackish ways to do it but it requires you to set the SUI-ED bit on your binary and run it and you don't want to tell users to install FlatPack and also run a privileged binary at the same time just to set it up we don't expect boxes users to know what they're doing with the bridge network so we want to use also portals for file system access as I mentioned before we can already drag and drop files into it because files are supported through the portal but directors are more complicated because you imagine that you might have some scene links you might have recursive directories and things like this but we expect that we've virtio file system which is a recent work we are going to be able to tackle this very easily by creating a specific FlatPack portal and device access imagine that you want GPU pass through or USB redirection you would be very interested to have a portal that you would be able to decide which devices you want to expose to your specific virtio machines and in the other way around if you want to create some virtio machines which are air-gapped for testing some malicious code whether you're working on security and you want to hack that would be ideal as well so this is future work so yeah here I described so we will pretty much just forward the file descriptor and create a socket pair with it and I kind of ran through this already so pretty much we just need portals and these portals need to be like having boxes in mind that we will be able to forward something not just into the sandbox but from the sandbox expose these two virtio machines so yeah that's a good timing I was planning to go oh you got it I was planning to go deeper on flatback but I guess you already saw a lot of flatback stuff so just a little bit before I was planning to maybe run boxes so I can just press play here you can see the build here in the footer and it's going to run this unstable version of boxes yeah and that's how it looks like it has this nice develop style this nice black team that we like it but it can also change if you don't like black but that's how it looks like we have this nice setup here where you can download the grating systems you can install free rel so you just need to create an account for redhead to know how many people are using it but it's a free rel server you just click here you're going to go to some desktop portal and you're going to create an account for yourself and it's going to download and install rel for you and it's going to use the express install so no one account and here you can connect to your remote machines so I guess that's I guess some time for questions I guess yes it is OCI container oh he is asking whether Flapex is a container yeah well it's an OCI container I would say right so it's compatible with a Docker container in this sense and it just has the niceties for desktop apps so it handles desktop icons and putting the desktop files in the right places and making it easy to show in software stores and things passing into the yeah right the way it is now it does not because we're just poking this hole in the sandbox so the way it is now is just having direct access but we always have this portal in the feature that would allow you to authorize or not to forward the access into the so this is ongoing work you already do for files so if you want to move a file on and off and the GNOME settings panel is going to have in the feature like this application panel where you can decide which application is going to have access to each devices each element you want to introduce in there so it's an ongoing work yeah any more questions? thank you


Go ahead and introduce yourself, your name, and how I won't give in at UC. My name is Richard Kretschmer, Jr., and I was hired in 1969, and I retired in 2010 and taught about four more years and then officially retired in 2014. What subject did you teach? I was in the Department of Special Education. My area was hearing impairment, but I taught a course in language development for the entire 41 years, 45 years that I was here. And it was a required course in special education and in speech and hearing. And I had students from reading, from linguistics, from English, the foreign languages in the course, too. What made you get into special education? Well, I'm a coda, a child of deaf parents. And my parents were deaf, and I was raised in a deaf household.  How was it, you know, being raised by two parents at hearing disabilities?  My first language was ASL. My family was the only deaf family in the community. And so I learned to talk, I learned to sign, and then I learned to talk. And I spent all my time in a small farming community in Illinois, and was in the, to the chagrin of everyone, I was in the academic track. And the reason I say that is that I came from a very socially stratified community. There were the very wealthy and the wealthy, and then there was the poor. And the two groups didn't mix very much. And I was one of the poor kids that was in the academic track. What do you hope students take away from your class when you taught at UC? Well, what I wanted was two things. I wanted them to have a very, well, three things. It was a year-long course. And in the first quarter, my expectation was that they would have a very strong understanding of how language and communication operated among adults. So it was very geared toward adult communication. The second quarter was language development. And my expectation is that they would come out with a very strong understanding of how children go about the process of learning language. And then the third quarter was on special needs children. And my expectation was that they would take the first two quarters and apply it to working with children with disabilities. Why did you want to teach at UC? Well, I was working at Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., and I proposed to my wife, who was here in Cincinnati. So we had to make a decision would she come to Washington or would I come to Cincinnati. I made the decision that she needed to be here more than I needed to be there. So I came to Cincinnati and applied at UC. They didn't like, didn't want me, so they turned me down. So I wrote a grant, a five-year research grant, got it funded and worked at the Cincinnati Speech and Hearing Center. Then all of a sudden they became interested in me and then they hired me the next year. What do you think would happen if you took the job in D.C.? I probably would have stayed within the deaf communities and it was actually probably a very good thing that I came here to UC because UC provided me with the platform to broaden myself and to broaden my professional goals. What was the hiring process when you came? I know what you said was a little difficult. Well, when I came here there was a rule that, anepotism rule. My wife was in speech and hearing and they wanted to hire me but the university said no. My wife was already employed and you couldn't have a husband and wife in the same department. So I came over here to education over to education and I was interviewed by the faculty, every member of the faculty and I was interviewed by the department head and then I was interviewed by the dean and the dean is the one that nixed me because he was in deaf ed and he and I philosophically didn't have the same viewpoint about deafness so he decided that I wasn't a good fit but then he left the next year and they hired me. Now you mentioned you had problems with the dean when you got to be hired. Did you feel any problems with other faculty members? No, no, no. UC was the best thing that ever happened to me. Can you go further? Did they meet any of your needs? I was hired when we were making the transition between a city institution to a state institution and part of that transition is that they wanted to increase their research visibility so they hired me specifically to beef up the research capabilities of special ed and so that's so I was hired to do that and I became the director of the doctoral program in special ed and and I accomplished what they wanted me to accomplish. I managed to make it a well-known doctoral program in the nation and even internationally. Did you write any books? Yeah, I wrote two. One is considered a classic in deaf education and the other one I was co-authored by a woman Alice String who at the time was probably the most well-known person in language development for the deaf in the country and she asked me to help write a book with her so I wrote half of the book and she wrote the other half and the classic is written by me and my wife and I'm very proud of that book. It was quite a breakthrough and people still remember it. I guess it would be really special since you wrote it half a year with your wife. Did students change every time at Nega time at UC or how did it change? Well, first of all I got older. When I was first started I was about the same age as the students and as I got older the students seemed to get younger and younger and younger. However, I think I connected with all of the students pretty much. I think the major change is technology. That's when I saw the biggest change. Students were connected to their phones and connected to their computers even in class which didn't bother me. I mean that's okay. In terms of the quality of students I don't think I saw any difference. I think the quality has always been consistently high. Has technology changed by the way you taught hearing impaired students? Yes. The big thing right now and toward the end of my career and I became very interested in it was cochlear implants and that has made a big change in the field and it's also set up harden the divisions within the field because there's the pro cochlear implants and then there's the anti cochlear implant people. In other areas of special ed there's technology has really made major changes in terms of like voice recognition, voice generation, devices for the blind, the auditory encoding systems. So there's been a lot of changes but the basic principles of special education are essentially the same. I mean it's just the trappings have changed but not the substance that has changed. As you see that they leave the cochlear implant ready for or against it? The people that are against it are the diehard signers who feel that cochlear implant is going to destroy the deaf community because it's it allows deaf people to go into the hearing society and much more freely. The people that are for it are the people who are very anti signers and the irony of it is is that a lot of the cochlear implant kids when they become adults learn sign so that becomes both talkers and signers but so that's hardened the division that's been the main division in deaf ed and that's hardened the divisions. How has the faculty changed over time? I think when I first came here the faculty was very much into service and that's consistent with the fact that it was a city institution rather than a state institution. When we made the switch to state I think the the service component has become less and less important and research has become more important and I have mixed feelings about that. I believe in service and I believe that every faculty member has an obligation to connect to the community but I also believe very much into research so I think there needs to be a balance between the two but I see the weight going more toward research and less and less towards service. Who would you prefer? Would you prefer research or service? Oh I'm both and the reason I say that is I ran a preschool program for 12 years at a non-profit institution while I was simultaneously a faculty member and so what I was able to do is to take my research and apply it directly to children and I think that's the best of both worlds is when you can find the service but also where you have the opportunity to actually apply the science into into that service. What are you most proud of at your time at UC? I think the thing that I'm most proud of is that I two things one is I had 68 doctoral students that I completed dissertations with and I'm very proud of those 68 students and what they've done in the field. They've helped make major changes in in the field and I'm very proud of that. The second thing I'm proud of is that I taught a course for 44 years and students still remember the course. I actually saw a student who was in my very first class and she was talking about how she remembered the class very fondly and how and she actually remembered some of the content which is also appealing to me. So those are the two things I think I'm most proud of. Is there any students that graduated or got their doctorate? Are they still working that field now? Oh yes I have probably of the 68 that are there I would probably say about maybe 55 are still in the field and the others have either died or retired. Have they made any more significant improvements? Have they made any more like significant improvements? Yes one of my doctoral students became the head of special education in the province of Ontario. I had two or three students who had done some major funded research at Gallaudet and at RIT, Rochester Institute for the Deaf. A lot of my students have written books. I've got copies of the books that they've written. So yeah I think they've made major contributions and they're even today they're making contributions. Like how so? Well I just got a call from a lady who's head of the program, one of her programs down in Florida and she's done some major kinds of work in the public schools in Florida and she's doing research connected to that and what she was telling me was I was very impressed with and so they're still there. What changes does your witness at UC? What changes? Well I think the major change is going from the State Institute, I mean the city institution to the state institution. I think that was the right thing to do but it changed the mission of the of the university and it was both a easy transition and a difficult transition. The second thing I think that is is different is that we've gone pretty heavily into research and I know there's a lot of attempt to bring service and teaching focus back into the into the mix but having talked as I talk to the younger faculty they seem to be less interested in teaching and less interested in service and more interested in doing research and I think that's okay I mean if that's what people want to do that's okay it just happens it happens not to be what I am all about because I I believe that the three were equal. Who were some of the easy transitions from from city to state? Well I think the city never got over the fact that we made the transition even to today I'm not sure they reconciled the fact that we've made the transition. The second thing was the faculty because the faculty most when I came on most of them were hired when it was a city institution and they were very very geared toward service in the community and all of a sudden the rules began to change and I think that they found it difficult and as the rules changed the new faculty that were hired were slightly different than them and so there became sort of a division between the service people and the non-service people and I think the students changed too that you know you talked about changes I think that's when it began I saw the biggest change because the the the population became more widespread before it was almost 90 90 percent Cincinnati and then all of a sudden we started having students from international students and we started having students from all over the country coming and that changed the complexion of the student body. Did you like the bigger student size for state of population? Yes, I actually helped contribute to it. That was the period that I was out doing a lot of outreach nationally and as I was doing that outreach I would have students contact me that they had heard me and wanted to know more about the program and so I would say that during that period of time I don't think I had any students from Cincinnati. Did you like it? Yeah, yeah I like the diversity. It was fun having someone from California and someone from Brooklyn in the same class and because they had very different viewpoints on life and how they saw life and it was fun to see them congeal into a group and and that was very exciting to see because they would come as individuals and by the time they left they became this sort of cadre of people who who still were in contact with one another when they left and that was very very gratifying to see. Did you see like the people from California and Brooklyn like the city of Cincinnati and like the University in general? Yes, a lot of people felt that they were being exiled to Cincinnati particularly in the New Yorkers. They all thought that because they never been west of Manhattan but once they got here they found it they really liked it. They were a little surprised at how southern the city was because they expected more something like Chicago as opposed to Cincinnati but they all came to like it. Most of them had families. They brought families and they were very pleased with the cost of living. Most of them had lived in places that were twice you know they could get the same. They could get twice the living accommodations that they had where they were living and they were also very pleased with in general with the school systems so they came to like Cincinnati and they remember their their experience here quite fondly. And you mentioned the difficult times that you see over some of those. I remember a faculty member of a faculty meeting where the people who had been hired prior to the transition were accusing the ones that had been hired after the transition of not caring about the students and I really objected to that because I thought that I I personally felt that I cared about the students and really wanted the students to do well. And I remember one faculty member saying that there was too much emphasis on research and I felt that there was not enough of emphasis on research at that time. So it got pretty testy at times but eventually I mean we all work together. I mean I don't want to give the impression that it was chaos but sometimes it got a little tense. Was it just like the older generation and newer generation? Well I don't think it's old and new new is so much the service oriented people versus the research oriented people. Okay and what were some of the incidents that were handled in a way that disappointed you at UC? I think the hardest time for me was when the union was formed and the response of the administration to the union. And did you, how'd you feel about the union? I was very pro-union. Okay. And I went out on strike both times. And I was a little disappointed that the administration wasn't as sincere in their negotiations and that was a very tense time for the university. Fortunately we got past it but it was a very tense time. And what did you do? How did you partake in that strike? Well the first time I did, I have to admit I crossed the line only to teach my class because I felt a duty to the class but other than that we didn't come on campus. And on the second strike I actually joined the pickets and was picketing. I'm not comfortable with that but I decided that I decided I had to do that. And how long did the strike last? Not very long. It was maybe four or five days. And then the negotiations stepped up a step and it finally got resolved. And how did the administration feel about you teaching the class during strike? They didn't know. I don't think the administration has a very good notion of what goes on at their university at that time. I think they were more concerned about administration than they were about the faculty per se. And where you had the time where Warren Benes was the president, how did you feel about him? I know there was some faculty that had mixed feelings about him. I think he had a very difficult job. I'm not a touchy-feely kind of person and he was into touchy-feely big time. I have mixed feelings. There were parts of what he did that I liked and there were parts of what he did that I didn't like. So I can't give you a definitive answer as to how I felt about him because you'd have to give me the very specific situation and I could then react and say I didn't like that or I did like that. What were some of the things that you did like about him? I think he was a very personable guy and I think he was a good spokesman for the university. I don't think he was always honest but in his mind he thought he was honest but I don't think he was always honest. I think also the I know that many of the community leaders were very upset with him because he wanted to make the transition to state. I think that was the right decision. I mean I think I'm going to stop there. How does the campus change since you started? When we started it was like a little village. Now it's become a city. The building program that was started and completed I think has transformed the campus for the good because when I talk to incoming students particularly undergraduates often the campus is what decides them to come because of how it looks and how it feels. But in the process of becoming a city it has also has the problems of cities of congestion and things of that nature. I think overall I think it's been positive changes. As far as the another changes I think and I know this sounds contradictory but I'm pleased to see more emphasis on undergraduate work and trying to really upgrade the undergraduate experience. I always felt that the undergraduate experience that you see was lacking particularly when compared to my own experience at Northwestern I felt that it didn't it didn't measure up but I feel right now it's beginning to measure up. And who were some of the things that were laggreens? I think it was much too focused on the traditional curriculums and I always had the feeling that the undergraduate program at least in my department was sort of an afterthought and now it's become front and center along with the graduate programs and I think that's that's that's good. I don't think they're all equal I don't think because we're a state institution and we're dependent on grant monies and that stuff but I think it's it's uh I don't think the undergraduate program is necessarily the stepchild anymore. I think it's a full you know it was true sibling now it may be the younger sibling but it's a true sibling. And how was the Northwestern? Do you experience that Northwestern different from? Northwestern was uh very uh we did a lot of hands-on even back in 1950 let's see 1962 it was very hands-on uh I mean there was a lot of lecturing and that kind of stuff but uh and and I always felt I knew why I was taking the courses and all of my classmates felt the same way that they knew why they were taking courses I didn't always feel that you see that students knew why they were taking a lot of the courses they were taking and I hope that's changed a little bit now that students sort of see the purpose of the course and uh at least in special ed I know they they feel that way even the liberal arts courses that they're taking they can see why they're taking those particular courses uh whereas at Northwestern we always we always had a sense of why about UC's priority shift that since you started here. What? How have UC's priorities shifted since you started here? Well the main shift was that we went from a state institution I mean a city institution state uh the uh and and as a consequence research has assumed a high priority at the university. Rightly so because if we didn't do that then we couldn't begin to compete with other major universities. I think that the undergraduate programs have gone up and down as a result of that but I think we're on an upswing at least I hope I you know you're both undergraduates you should you could tell me if it's going getting better but I I think it's getting better. The and and the people who set the tone are the presidents and each president has a different tone and uh but there's there's a consistency from president to president and there has been a shift since Benus uh toward more of this academic uh research and also an emphasis on recently on undergraduate work. Okay and what were some or maybe some of the presidents that were you know there were more research based presidents at a time? Uh let me rephrase that okay um I think uh our current president is uh uh very research oriented and justifiably so because of his background so but he also has a very strong interest in undergraduate education uh our uh previous president and I'm blocking on his name that's old age. I think uh was all cut from the same piece of cloth that he was very research oriented but he was also very undergraduate oriented. Um I think the president before that Nancy uh I'm blocking again. Zemper. Zemper. I think she was uh more interested in and undergraduates than she was graduate. Um and I'm going to stop there so I mean I I think it's just sort of I mean the basic parameters are the same but it's sort of the emphasis changes within within the presidency. And where do you see you see going in the future? Up. Up. The plan where? I think they um I think our ratings across the universe across the university national ratings across the university is increasing and I see us getting more and more national visibility. Um I'm not a big sports guy but I have to admit that the sports program helps us uh because I know it's a Northwestern once they started winning all of a sudden uh visibility rank and file person uh suddenly appeared. And and the reality is that you have to be visible to the academic community but you also have to be visible to the community at large if you want to draw nationally. And and I think University of Cincinnati is doing that by virtue of the diversity of the population that's here. How do you feel about the changes you know changes for like the athletic department you know they're starting to build new stadiums? I'm okay with that. Um I know a lot of my colleagues may not be okay with that but I'm okay with that. Uh what I'm not okay with is that it becomes a major major drag on the financial drag on the on the institution.  Uh now they do get privilege in the sense that they get tutoring that a lot of students don't get and so forth but they uh they they do okay and so I'm as as long as they're winning and they're doing what they're supposed to do I'm okay with that. How have you seen UC connect to Cincinnati and like that? Well I think we're getting back to get being reconnected. I think when we made the transition we sort of distanced ourselves a little too far but I think we had to because the city thought they owned us and we went through a period where you'd you'd hear politicians and you'd hear news peoples still talking about us as that we were owned by them so I think that needed to change I mean because we're not owned by the city of Cincinnati but I think what's now happening is that we're beginning to reconnect and we're beginning to come back to the community as witnessed by all of the campus not just on campus but around campus and the fact that schools were more connected with the community at large uh and I hope that continues because we're urban has a risk I just hope that the wound by situation become too dependent but on the other hand that that's where the money is and the federal government is becoming less and less generous so the reality is is that we do have to have some connection with the with the larger community like Macy's and B&G and so and I'm okay with that you know I can live with that there was a time in my life when I couldn't but I can I can now what are you most proud of at your time at UC? Winning the Dolly Cohen award and what is that? I won that way back when I first started my career about in the 70s and I was the reason I'm proud of that is that it's an award that usually is generated by the students the students do the nominations and get the departments to nominate people and so forth and in my particular case they when they showed me the portfolio that was developed it it brought tears to my eyes I was overwhelmed by the comments made by the students so here she had a real connection with the students yes I I loved I loved the students my largest class was 110 graduate class and while I the thing that I was proud of was that by the second week of class I knew the name of every student in class and the was that I wrote individual exams for every student and so what I would interview the students what their interests were and then when I tried to cater it uh to each individual student and I did that for every year that I taught uh so my computer is was low it's currently loaded with old exams that I've written for students uh and I tried very hard not to duplicate exams uh because uh students are different the smallest class I had was the first year I taught I went which was about 30 and then it went up to 100 and then it started tapered off to about 80 I'm very good at lecturing because I'm very good at tying it to practical practice practicalities and the students seem to respond to that so I class size didn't bother prefer small seminar classes but I was okay with and I'm inherently an actor uh so I I was very good at I was a very good lecturer and uh and and my assigned my midterms in my finals always uh had a practical application so they had to go back out into the community collect data bring it back and then answer the question so that I could maintain that connection to the community so I guess it depends on how you want to look at it uh it was more like acting what else would you like me or would you like to tell me about UC you know I'm very grateful to you see um I was hired at a time when they were making a transition and I was hired to do a certain task and that task is when I let me back up when I was in high school I was in a uh in a in the academic track but no one expected me to go to college and so when I went to college and I met all these professors I said to myself I want to be like them and UC allowed me to be like them uh it gave me the opportunity to become connected to the larger academic community both nationally and internationally and UC allowed me to build a reputation that I don't think I would have a cotton if I had stayed in dc uh so I'm very grateful to you uh to UC and I think it's it's a good place to work I don't I don't know if it is now because I don't work here anymore but it was a very good place to work and and I'm very grateful to UC and I guess the administrators everybody everybody helped you out yeah everybody uh again I I went through a lot of deans a lot department heads but in in general they were very supportive and very uh did the right thing uh and uh I was okay I I've been okay I mean it hasn't been a better roses but I'm okay with UC I'm okay with UC like could you say all the departments had one goal now is the service of students in special ed we were very student oriented so I can't really talk about the rest of the university student oriented and and I can honestly say for the department heads in special ed uh the student always came first and as a consequence the student experience both at the graduate level and undergrad for this first I think I've said everything I can say unless you want me to pad more I think we're good okay


Just to watch a news brief on PLOS TV Africa. Still in the news, Senator Rocha Socorrocha has left the office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and is now in his own home. This is according to the Special Advisor on Media to the former IMO State Governor, Sam Omwemwedu. According to Omwemwedu's communique, the senator representing IMO West Senatorial District left the EFCC's office on the afternoon of Thursday, April 15, 2021. In a reaction to a courageous trip to the EFCC's office, the lawmaker's team had assured that the former IMO State Governor would fully cooperate with the agents of the agency since it was operating within the ambit of the law establishing it. And don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Yeah, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a really good guest on a really important topic. I'm looking forward to our conversation. We've been talking for the past seven years about the economics of higher education, about the increase of prices, about changes in the student aid, about how university budgets are altered, about federal financial aid, all aspects of it. Today, I wanted to dive into how students and their families can pay for college tuition and expenses. And we're doing that with the help of Mark Salisbury. Mark is a fascinating fellow, a former dean, a former athletic school, a college athletics coach, and now the co-founder and CEO of a company called Turnit, excuse me, Tuition Fit, that tries to help students pay for college. This is not a promotional event. This is a serious discussion to figure out what's going on with the difficulties that students face trying to pay for college and what we can do to make it work. So without any further ado, let me welcome our guest and bring him up on stage. You have to imagine if you like the Star Trek transporter noise and maybe you'll kind of shimmering light on the screen. And there's Mark. Hello. Hello. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Where are you today? I'm in my home office in Glum, Davenport, Iowa. Clouds as always in the winter, apparently. So like many folks, experiencing something less than sunny and warm. Well, that seems to be the track. Lisa Durf mentions freezing rain, which is the worst.  And Molly Cheax says that she's a transporter or transplanted Iowan there. So you've got a colleague. All right. I hadn't realized this would trigger the Iowa mafia, but there we go. There we go. Well, we do have a slogan here. The last one to leave Iowa, please turn off the lights. I've seen that in Ohio and in Michigan too. Well, I'm glad that you're there keeping the lights on in all kinds of ways. So Mark, we have a tradition on the forum. We don't ask people to introduce themselves by talking about their career or their past. We ask them to talk about what they're doing in the upcoming year, what projects, what services, what items are you working on, and also what ideas are top of mind for you? Wow. I like that question. The thing that's top of mind for me is, and starting with the dramatic given my improv background might be boring, but if we don't have a successful, thriving, tremendously diverse higher education ecosystem in this country, I don't think our democracy is going to make it. I just think that is so critical, and I don't necessarily think everyone grasps that to the degree that it is. Where I live, obviously it's corn and soybean country, and there are hundreds of small towns that have a small college in them, some of them are over private, and at this point they are the most stable employer. They pay quite well, and in those small towns, those small colleges are the reason why there's some entrepreneurial thought in that town. Those small colleges are the reason why cultural values have progressed and moved to a place that's the kind of ways that we want to be as an accepting and welcoming country. If those small colleges start going down one by one, especially in some sort of mass closure, I'm very concerned for where those small towns end up, and I'm not just talking about businesses closed and people moving, but I'm talking about things like tribalism, and I think I'm talking about this sort of sense of we have nothing and we got to protect our own, come hell or high water. For me, one of the things that is so important and drives me to do the work that I do is we have to save American higher education. As much as we can be annoyed with what we see and what's going on and get down right angry sometimes, we have to save it somehow. So is that the animating thought behind your work? Very much so, and by no means do I want to suggest anybody that I'm some sort of I've got a magic bullet or a wand, but one of the really core elements behind all of the work that I've been doing with the tuition fit project was in order to get this whole space to a better place, to make it possible for the public to not be so uncertain about pursuing higher education options and worrying about if I get this wrong, I'm going to end up in debt for decades. And in order to help the colleges make it easier for them to attract the students that oftentimes want to find them, but just can't. Right now, there's no solution. There's just a giant log jam, and that log jam is the utter lack of transparency and pricing. So if we can fix that, then at least we've got a fighting chance, because I've sat through more faculty meetings than I care to recall, but I know that when you walk into one of those gatherings, and it's not just faculty, I think it's organizations general, it's human beings in general, and you tell them, hey, there's a huge problem and we got to fix it. Unless you give people a way to see, find their way to a solution, what do people do? They all sort of gather in their small group and, well, we better protect ours, because that's what happens all the time when college presidents or somebody else says, hey, you guys all have to get cheaper. And obscenities. And there's no way to answer that question without having some sense of, well, if we got cheaper, how much cheaper do we need to get that would allow us to then thrive more than we are now or turn around our budget somehow to go from being in the black to being in the, or sorry, go from being in the red to being in the black or green or whatever color people like to use now. There has to be a way to get there. And if you can't show people what that is, you're dead in the water. Can I can I ask you just to take a step back for a second so that everybody's on the same page? What, say more about the lack of transparency and higher ed pricing, what makes that happen, just just how opaque is higher education pricing? Well, it's, to say it's opaque is, let's just say that it's it's entirely murky on two dimensions. The one dimension is something that some might have noticed in the news recently that the actual letters that students get when they get what they call a financial aid award offer that tells them what their actual price is. Those are notorious for their somewhere between difficult to make sense of to downright misleading. Those documents are the document that a student will go to to see what's what's the price that I'm going to pay. It's not uncommon at all for there to be a bottom line number that says here's what your price is. And that bottom line number includes an assumption about the student borrowing the full slate of federal loans. It might even include a whole bunch of plus loans in there that the parent would have to borrow that the parent might not even qualify for but it's somehow woven in, right? So the award letter is a problem on its own. One of the attempts to solve this was the net price calculators that was implemented a decade ago. The net price calculator problem started with folks creating the net price calculators that produced essentially the same thing that the award letter did. Make it look as rosy as possible what your price would be and then people would find out later that it's not all that accurate. The second thing of course is that the net price calculators are not required to be accurate. So nice to have them but the whole notion of them sort of implies that they would be, right? So the public can miss all of the fine prints underneath and be really stuck. So there's two points at which you might be told the price but it's really difficult to know whether that's accurate and whether it's even correct and whether you interpret it correctly, right? So that's one of the dimensions of the lack of transparency. The other dimension though is I think maybe even more important because that is a dimension across time because when college was a lot less expensive than absolute dollars decades ago and a lot more of the aid that was given first of all there's a far smaller amount of money given out in aid anyway but it was primarily in need. The sticker price functioned as a pretty simple way to decide is that a school that fits my price range or not. Fast forward several decades the embrace of the high price high discount model the reality that nobody really realized that once you embrace that model you really can't go backwards, right? You can't come back the next year and say just kidding everybody it doesn't cost us that much to do this and we're going to give you a different price the PR nightmare there is not good. So that then that horse gets out of the barn and there's no way to chase it down and the fact though remains that people are still trying to decide which schools fit their price range a year before they apply to college, right? So the lack of transparency there sets up an environment in which you're that much more vulnerable to all of the emotional selling points that would happen in a marketplace, right? If you've got a regular marketplace which this is right you've got schools selling education and degrees and consumers wanting to buy access to that if you're the seller you want them to make an emotional decision because the likelihood's higher than they'll pay more, right? Bayer wants to make the rational decision to get the best value. So the sellers have sort of constructed over decades this entity in which students and families are obliged compelled coerced into making all kinds of decisions that are based on emotion narrowing their options down eliminating a whole bunch of choices and then at the very end of the process when they've eliminated from thousands down to five they're all of a sudden you have a set of prices that now you have to pick one of them and because emotions driven what you've done that set of five is very likely to be something that you're going to have to at least borrow for it to pay for and sometimes sometimes it's five that you couldn't possibly afford in the first place and you are stuck. So you've got transparency problems in two dimensions I should probably add a wrinkle to that that's this price transparency is not just knowing your own price and it's not just knowing your own price at some point in that process What do you mean? Real price transparency is also being able to see that you're not the one Rube who's being asked to pay 10,000 more than everybody else but you actually can see prices across the marketplace and decide oh yeah by comparison that's a pretty reasonable price I'm not being asked to pay more than anybody else and by comparison oh wow I'm getting a really good deal I'm really excited about that now price transparency is knowing prices across the marketplace and all of that is why I started the tuition pit project to crowdsource that solution because that dataset just simply did not exist Well thank you for that excellent answer to to my question the high tuition high discounting model is you know one of in some ways I think one of the great secrets of higher ed that people aren't uh aren't fully aware of and of course and I think you've done a great job and you've done this repeatedly and in public of exposing how award letters can really just be misleading uh friends I have some more questions for Mark Salisbury but this is a forum for all of you uh so I'm going to ask one quick question but I would love to hear your questions and thoughts so please just go to the bottom of the screen click the uh raised hand button if you want me to beam you up so that you can talk and appearances aside you do not have to have a beer to be on the screen today or you can click the the question mark button and give us a give us a Q&A and the the question I was going to ask is um I mean you're describing a very challenging situation uh but the research of scholars like Sarah Goldrick-Rabb and others have shown that it's getting more and more difficult for students to be able to pay for higher education especially students who are marginalized for various reasons uh do you want to say a bit more about that well they're absolutely right and and some of the some of the issues that come up are simply you know when colleges have to report their prices they report their direct costs with they call tuition fees room and board but then there's this other idea called cost of attendance and that's supposed to be essentially what they call indirect costs and that's everything else right and that can be books and lab fees that can be uh just the ability to afford food when the residence hall isn't serving food on Sunday morning or Sunday night or Saturday morning um it can be all of the other costs that come like insurance it can be the cost of travel to the campus and back um all of those other costs and that's kind of a wild west area of where institutions just sort of pick a number throw it out there well that cost of living number that they report may not have changed in a decade because it's a lot to dig into and figure that out and if you live in an area or a school is located in an area where the cost of living is dramatically high that cost of attendance number isn't going to account for that so even when financial aid is is set to work from the cost of attendance number even in the best cases for the students where cost is everything and barely affording to be able to pay for college as it is yeah that creates tremendous problems and tremendous pressures and those are the students that feel it first and feel it right away and the way that the reporting numbers are set up colleges report and people see in every place that you would go to search out college prices um that stuff sort of sits under way under the radar and doesn't really get recognized and you don't report it doesn't exist right sure if you don't see it tree falls in the forest no one hears it um well thank you that's a that's a very good answer and a very sobering answer um in uh in the in the chat um we have keel doom mentioning that the credential inflation goes on and on um but we have a question that comes from uh ed fin and i want to bring that up i'll flash that on the screen for us all um so if um what do you think the role is of amenities and the sheer amount of federal loan funded what do they play in driving students going to schools they cannot afford is this forcing campuses to build irresponsibly there's a whole layer of very funky and just bizarre things that go on and how buildings are funded how amenities are funded and paid for and um it probably would take a much longer than an hour to sort of dive into all that but this is what i'll say to that it's really important for people to understand the sticker prices that colleges charge so across the country maybe one out of ten students actually pays that sticker price and there's the majority of colleges on camp colleges around the country um nobody's paid that sticker price for years so it's not true to think that well these sticker prices are going up and they're being driven up by all of this building that's going because what's happening is if you look at the actual price that students pay that actually revenue that institutions bring in that number is barely going up at all so it's not like tuition increases are funding all of this growth um it's certainly true that colleges have thought that we need to add buildings and facilities and that there can appear to be some sort of arms race there and there was a stretch probably a decade ago where there was an awful lot of growth in building but it's kind of i think it's important to just separate it's a totally valid question to ask was that the right use of those funds and the corollary question to that is would that school have been able to get those funds if they didn't build the building that the donor wanted them to build the name on and celebrate infinitely right but that is oftentimes something quite separate from the money coming in from tuition because the reality is is for most colleges universities their costs are going up faster than their incomes their revenues are sometimes dramatically so and that's even if they're just very good at sort of maintaining uh their expenditures which many are not of course well um thank you for that for that great answer and ed um ed of alparez university thank you for that really good question friends if you're new to the forum that's an example of one of those q and a questions so if you'd like to ask one of those just head to the bottom of the screen hit the q and a box and start typing we'll be glad to share um and we have as well a question from charles finley but charles also wants to join us on stage so let me just beam him up see if his camera is on and charles charles we cannot see you nor can we hear you so let me just i'll just grab your text question and use that charles asks a very very solid and experienced question what is the overall price what did vary based on cost of living in different locations and it's a good question now every college when they report prices to the federal government they'll report their direct costs their tuition fees room and board and that of course assumes that the students living on campus and there are certainly schools where the cost of living on campus the room and board are higher than others and some of that's driven by cost of living and some of it's just not it's just a way that the college decides to organize their funds and costs but then there's the whole other sort of estimating what it would cost to live off and a lot of times institutions don't have a great sense of what that is and it doesn't hurt them to sort of not know what that cost is either because they like to pretend that it's the same as living on campus and oftentimes it can be far more expensive in fact I wish I could remember if it was USC or UCLA but one of them bought a whole bunch of real estate next to campus and is building a whole bunch of apartment buildings cost of students living off campus run by the you know private real estate market was far beyond what they could afford and it was hurting the school and hurting the students so they finally sort of had the acquiesce not every institution is in a position to be able to do that of course well thank you that's Charles as usual that's a great question and thank you thank you mark for the solid answer just by the way friends if you're having any technical difficulties with audio with visuals or anything else our wonderful westerner domsky is here and they can help you just ping them and they will give you a hand if you have any any questions or challenges now let me bring up another video question and this comes from our good friend michelle miller hello professor miller I hope you're staying dry and warm oh it just makes them worry I don't mean that the snow in a bad way just makes a beautiful place more beautiful and fills a reservoir so see if my attitude holds up for another week this is this is so wonderful I I'm coming to this conversation as sort of an old veteran of the course redesign movement that you know kind of trying to see how can we break down the cost of delivering one course to one student and it's and it is amazing you know how the conversation has taken root but the solutions are still if they'll want to go out there so I guess what I'm going to work up to is a question of like have you seen like really radical deep change models that even if they're not fully fleshed out that did you like and you know like in the chat people were bringing up like health care and how you know cost has had its own runaway issues over there I mean I I think about this this one little weird example of community acupuncture like it's this model where they treat people in groups and and so instead of you know $100 for an hour it costs $20 and it costs less because it costs less they radically changed at a fundamental level how they delivered this one service and I know that's a bit of a bit of a stretch but you know have you seen anything out there that caught your eye even something nascent that was not just like well let's accept more traps for credits or this or that but really changed it at a fundamental level so thanks so much yeah well that's that that is a great like let's cut to the cut to the core of the problem question and to be frank no I have not seen let me back that up to be frank in the traditional higher education model right of the on campus lots of students live on campus for at least part of the time many of the students are full time the sort of traditional model of how we used to do higher ed I've not seen a great deal of change and I've seen a lot of institutions try to do things where they're like what's the cost per major or a cost per course I've seen those analyses from their business offices and many times their analyses aren't great in large part because they just don't have a sense of how to figure that out right you've got five you know take one course and you've got 20 students in it and five of those students are there for that major five of them are there because they're checking off something that works for a general education requirement five of them are there because they got it fit their time block of when they were on campus and could get back in time for childcare and then five of them are there because they don't know why they're there to be honest but that and that may be a different issue for that student but the point still is um those analyses often treat all of those students as exactly the same and those analyses oftentimes come at this whole thing like the assembly line mindset right and um so they don't really work very well now to the degree that this is starting to filter in you know some of the online offerings whether they're institutions like western governors or whether they're some of the hybrid places that you can both do in person or online and the degree to which some institutions now coming out of the pandemic have recognized their students need some combination of both and are starting to do that stuff I think some of them are starting to see that there's a way to apply that and then have it affect on the the whole financial model because the reality isn't that institutions for a long time we're trying to just get more money get more money get more money the reality is is no you're you really have to cut costs and so where do you do that right um that requires not only some really really difficult interactions on campus right um and navigating all the constituencies you have to navigate navigate but um it also requires some sort of fundamentally rethinking you know uh or sort of freeing yourself from that old monastic model of higher education right as we're an institution that within this institution we have to offer everything that is related to cultural knowledge right so we have to have everything from a swimming pool to an art gallery right like we do um even if there's 10 of them within a block of your campus right so those are really difficult things to sort out and um I don't think it's in some ways if you've been in higher ed for a long time it's probably not a big surprise to realize how hard it is to make that happen what kind of campus leadership you would need to be able to get people to think that way and sort of shift without chasing you off campus with pitchfork so Michelle great question thanks thank you thank you and uh and mark another good answer uh friends if you're new to the forum that's an example of a video question and and you can tell that uh uh we're welcoming everybody on stage so just click the raised hand button if you'd like to join us and uh and we'll beam you up meanwhile we have more questions coming in mark and uh by the way if anyone's having any technical issues please uh talk to Wessum who will help you um and if anyone's having any audio issues just let me know in the chat too if there's a if there's a widespread problem I need to know about it uh we have a great question from our great friend um long time friend uh Roxanne who asks doesn't lower ed k through 12 have some responsibility for helping students and parents navigate the wild west of educational expenses has lower ed been responsive or should they have been more responsive well it's in in high schools right now the traditional expectation was that the school counseling office would be able to help students with the college search the school counseling profession is a is a rough situation in that oftentimes school counseling is the sort of we'll assign everything at this high school that doesn't happen in a classroom to the school counseling office we're not going to add a whole lot of people corresponding to whatever we add to them but we're still going to do that um so the amount of time that counselors have to work with each student is limited the second problem then is that the way that college planning as a as a field as a knowledge that one gets that one distributes that whole frame has been sort of turned into something that is very time intensive at its you know at its sort of like um stereotypically best and i'm not sure that is best but stereotypically most um full developed it's this deeply introspective experience that is find yourself find who you are find what you want to be find what content fits you and all these things and that's multiple hours with every student counseling staff simply doesn't have that add on to that the pandemic and now the counseling staff is essentially frontline workers five alarm fires going off every five minutes so it's very difficult for them to have to do this the other larger issue or other very important issue is this the college planning or the the sort of knowledge that is to be delivered has always ignored price price has not been a thing that you talk about go find a college that fits you apply get in then we'll figure out how to pay for it well when the sticker price was what most people paid fine and when the sticker price was a lot lower fine but over several decades that's blown up and so now that lack of talking about price is drives people bananas and the one thing that counselors could do is wait they can't because none of them know what the prices of the colleges are so they can't help students in the one area that the student in the family needs in addition counselors are trained to be sort of ask reflective questions and help you to come to decisions they're not financial planners and there's certainly not somebody who's supposed to know the line by line answers to the FAFSA nor do they get any of that in their graduate programs or in their professional development it's sorely lacking so should hire should hire high high schools have a better more important role to play yeah do they know is it their fault I don't know well that's a very sobering and sad answer to a brilliant question again that transfer that lack of transparency seems to just really go everywhere and we have some some comments and questions Mark I wanted to throw in Saras Agregorio our good friend says as a millennial a lot of us can't afford to take on mortgages because we're still almost 20 years later trying to pay down student debt we were told that we had to go to college in the early zeroes so I wanted to share that yes absolutely true everybody was told they had to go to college and it wasn't entirely wrong that you should go to college right it wasn't like nobody should go to college but the question was at college generally it was which college right nobody ever said that part right and you know people have written about this and in my days as a researcher on college student outcomes and and college success 60 years of data tells us the same thing that where you go doesn't make nearly as much of effect as what you do while you're there because it's a four year stretch before you get that degree but that's not what the colleges would want you to hear oh no no right and and again I spent 25 years working in colleges and universities I'm married to a professor I love my people like I'm not yeah higher education is bad people but if you're the seller and you got to pay the bills you approach this thing in a certain way like for a long time you had a lot of people saying colleges should be more run like a business okay that's what you got now not very well wow so do you like it I don't think it's that good well we have a another question from and this is from someone who couldn't make it this hour but this is another great friend Don Chalice he asked a very specific question about the application process I think we have a couple more like this too so let's start off he's asking about FAFSA and says do 18 to 22 year olds have to get parents financial info to complete FAFSA and if they don't does that lead to debt the presumption underneath the FAFSA is that a student under the age of 24 is a dependent that's the 24 under the age of 24 so given that you're a dependent then yes you're going to be bringing in data from your parents tax returns this is another issue that Don raises that that is a whole nother show but the assumptions that underline so much of the financial aid system and so much of higher education generally about the kind of people that are coming to college and the kind of families they come from and the kind of socioeconomic status and stability that they have just doesn't match up with the majority of people that are in higher ed that are in that are taking courses that are trying to get a degree so it's it's very interesting and and to that point if you're a student who is 20 years old and you are consider yourself independent proving that takes a bunch of work and the school is the one that gets to decide if you actually have proven it to them but the school's motivation isn't to necessarily believe you because if they do that means that you're independent that you cost a lot more it costs you a lot more money to live that they probably won't be able to charge you as much but if they can charge you as a dependent then they can use your parents tax returns to dictate this what is now sort of in sunsetting this EFC expected family contribution changing that term to student aid index but the same concept the it's a bad but it is the proxy everybody gets stuck with that proxy for that family's sort of broad socioeconomic status well that's a that's a great answer and Don again as always you ask terrific questions Don does great research work too big fan we have another video question and we'll see if we get this to work Lynn Sibolski is coming in and we'll see if video and audio work otherwise we'll take it to text let's see Lynn hello hello can you hear me we can hear you perfectly okay okay well you'll just have to imagine what I look like I am I am now thanks for the presentation today Mark um I have kind of an on question that ties into the responsibilities of lower education and for the viewers today I just wanted to mention um having had 15 years experience in the financial aid office this is not really an issue that the financial aid office can fix they are so overburdened with administrative tasks and required reporting that it's not really an office that has a say or has any sort of leeway to fix this and so if we're counting out the financial aid office and we're counting out school counselors my next you know eyesight is really really small children and I saw something on Instagram that I'm going to post into the chat and it's it's really bizarre and I'm sorry for that um Snoop Dogg has children's affirmations and it was this big thing um you know he he sings these affirmations for children I am responsible I get better every day I'm surrounded by love and Instagram for a minute was like blowing up with all these adults being like hey this is something that was made for children but I'm listening to it and I'm feeling good about myself and psychologically I'm feeling more balanced and so what are your thoughts on approaching financial literacy from a very early age from the perspective of creating boundaries and if you want my money and you want access to my you know finances that's a boundary psychologically and you need to respect you know kind of like my core basic things you know I'm interested to see what your perspective is on taking that approach and and targeting the audience way way younger than we have been great question thank you well the the movement to educate uh to bring financial literacy education to school um has if you some people may have paid attention that it it has really gained a lot of steam in recent years a number of states have now required it in high school or middle school um and that train has got a ton of momentum right now which is probably really good um I shouldn't say probably meaning I'm not sure about financial literacy it's probably really good except for I mean probably because it depends how they implement right as with lots of things but one of the things that folks find when trying to teach financial literacy is that young people come to a certain point at which they finally are able to grasp abstract ideas right and at some point they're just not able to grasp that stuff the other thing about learning with anything is that unless the student sees how it's valuable to them in some sort of some of the short term um some students just say well I don't want to learn it and one of the challenges with uh financial literacy has been if you take ninth graders and start teaching them about mortgages they some ninth graders say I'm not going to have a mortgage for way long time this doesn't matter for me um but if you teach financial literacy in the context of paying for college and college planning that's actually a lot more present so we're not seeing as much of that yet but that's starting to come around um to the point that you're I think going at just the need for better financial literacy training and teach education that's huge um our sort of capitalist system doesn't necessarily make room for requiring sellers to abide by a set of financial literacy standards unfortunately but um part of the effect that is produced the tremendous debt problem and student debt is just a lack of understanding that when you borrow this much that's what's going to happen a decade from now thank you oh Lynn thank you and thank thanks for fighting through fighting with an old laptop um it's a great question uh and uh Mark again uh you you are a sage on this point um this is terrific we had we're coming up in the last 13 minutes of the program and we have a couple more questions I want to make sure that they get they get asked uh so let me bring up a couple of these uh from the q&a box uh and this is from mark belota he says what do you consider to be a reasonable amount for a student to borrow for a bachelor's degree um well one reasonable is going to be something that it's partially the student's decision right like the family comes from different socio-economic backgrounds so a different socio-economic grant fairly affluent versus uh zero e fc those are two different animals but I will say that a reasonable amount absolutely depends on what kind of profession the student plans to pursue after college if and even if they if they don't know that fits into the calculus as well if a student is going to pursue a field in which you that pays a lot right out of the gate and they're sure that that's what they're doing well then I think the amount of money that a student can borrow is a little bit higher but if if I wanted to be a musician coming out of college I can speak from some experience here that I have to be entirely unencumbered coming out of college because the opportunities for me to be a musician starting out are going to be I auditioned and I got into summer stock as in the pit orchestra so it's three months and just gonna get paid a little bit and then that's it I'm done but those are the only opportunities I'm gonna get that help me build up the ladder and build up the network so maybe someday eventually I get into an orchestra somewhere same way if you're a rock drummer right like same thing right you have to be unencumbered and there's other professions that are maybe less nomadic early on but if you want to be a teacher you're not you can't go to a college that's going to charge you so much that you're borrowing thirty forty thousand dollars a year to then go be a teacher that's just not going to work but there's plenty of places where a student can go and get a teaching degree and the cost of going to that school isn't that high and the problem isn't that all teachers have a bad ROI it's just that if you choose the wrong institutions so I think the question about reasonable amount of debt is more nuanced than just the conventional wisdom of don't have your total amount of debt over your four years of college or six years of college be more than the salary that you're going to have because most students change their major change their sense of direction while they're in college anyway so they couldn't make a choice picking a school with that net or that sort of metric in mind in the first place well that was an elegant subtle question in just a few words and marker love how that brought out so much of an answer we have a question from keel again who always always asks a question keel just is on fire and keel asks what do you think of alternative credentials potential to break the degree monopoly and thus make college more affordable I think there's tremendous potential there but there's a that space between potential and realized is this right there's a lot of surveys of companies and CEOs that ask about you require a college degree and everything else but as keel knows it's not the CEO that's doing the hiring of the sort of entry level employees it's some middle manager in the HR office right so to the degree that the idea that those alternative credentials are valued all the way down to that HR office that's a bit more of a stretch and we're not I don't think we're really there yet but there's tremendous potential there I think that you know if we can get some really great examples of folks succeeding not just right out of school with a job but 10 years later having been promoted and grown and taken on new responsibilities and shows that yet not only did that person just learn to code in this thing but it turns out they learned how to lead how to manage how to do other things that traditional liberal arts colleges have always said well that's what we all do you learn this that there's this person just had this other credential but they learned all this other stuff in our environment and now look at what they can do you get to that point now I think you really have something with the potential for those credentials and even micro credentials that have an impact great question and I love mark the range there especially the the importance of the HR weighing of businesses actually taking this seriously we have another question that comes up and that brings up another sense of lower ed in a different way this is Ryan who asks about what role does for-profit higher education play in the change and lack of transparency of costs well for-profit didn't play much of a role at all in the embracing of the high price high discount model that came from private colleges started with the more prestigious ones then trickled down to the less prestigious ones and then was embraced by the public institutions particularly for their out-of-state fees and the folks have seen how many for public institutions are recruiting out of state far more than they ever used to because they can then get it take advantage of that high price high discount model in their out-of-state fees the for-profit industry didn't play a lot of role in driving up those costs it certainly played a huge role in the debt problem but that was a sort of different you know call center problem right that the motivation to just get students to sign up no matter what we don't care if they graduate we just care if they come so I don't think the for-profit has played a played a particular role in the pricing lack of price transparency in fact today they're probably the most transparent is that because they've been sued so often it may be because we just have an entirely different landscape of for-profit institutions than we did two days ago right two decades ago it was phoenix phoenix phoenix right now we don't talk about them that much we talk about other institutions and some of them especially in specific fields like nursing are actually quite good at what they do but the lack of transparency issue that part of it a non-profit folks get to own that one hook line and sinker well Ryan would a great question and mark would a surprising and powerful answer we have one more question which is a really specific one and I love this and I think I think you'd be ready to grapple with this one and this is from luz my east throat luz who says what about a student who's now 26 who also returned the same university for the masters how could be the financial aid because of his age the student already has a debt for undergrad you know I'll flash that on the screen again say okay thank you um yeah this is where there's a couple of things going on there we graduate level financial aid is different than undergraduate financial aid and and operates sort of in a different planet sometimes and the master's program as a space I know you've talked about this before and you've had people talk about it here in the and the forum um that's been a cash cow for an awful lot of schools with tremendous collateral damage on students because of the way that you can you know the the the plus loan the graduate school version of the plus loan the grad loan and the amount of people just borrow borrow borrow but I'm wondering if the Louise could sort of expand on is this because the student trying to come back for the at the same institution and they've already exact exhausted the need-based aid because they're at the same institution or is there another issue going on luz if you if you want to follow up with another question just just just type it in and I'm sure also you could follow with mark after after the session and while luz is doing that let me just ask a question of my own as a moderator you you've did a great job of sketching out how things have changed recently over the past generation basically of higher ed looking ahead to say 2030 where do you think that the problem is headed of students paying for higher education do you think we're going to see the debt the pile of debt get even higher or do you think the stresses of this are going to force some structural changes well the debt the big big number the 1.7 trillion that number can go in a different direction it can go up and up and up as a function of the interest yeah without it necessarily meaning that students are borrowing more the amount of students borrow coming down do borrow coming down but that thing is just going to keep ballooning just based on the interest alone right and we're going to you know people have been following the student debt forgiveness issues and all the other thing that that that spaghetti is going to be there for a long time I think that's not going to get solved anytime soon uh colleges and universities they're starting to be this trend toward uh tuition resets says and it's only schools for which nobody's paying the sticker price can do this where they say well nobody's been paying it the sticker price scaring people away so we're going to just drop our sticker price a bunch we'll shrink the aid that we provide in merit accordingly so that the amount of money that students actually pays about the same but now the sticker price is closer to the actual price um without a change to the basic funding model of higher ed the basic business model okay you've just reset and then you're probably going to end up back on the same train eventually right because you still have costs that you haven't been able to pull down and you are still going to be in a position where you're going to have to give people more and more money every year because family incomes aren't going anywhere no so um that doesn't really ultimately solve stuff it would be really nice to see a group of schools just say you know what we might as well just put our prices out there and make it much more simple but now we would have to talk about the degree to which the enrollment management consulting and financial aid modeling industry has much of higher ed by a sort of very vulnerable parts of their body and um that industry isn't so much interested in the success of each individual institution as they are in selling their own products right and making money their own way so they don't really want to teach a man to fish they just want to give the man a fish for one day the next day right their nation isn't necessarily as altruistic as we'd like so i i think we're still in for an awful long stretch and i don't think the higher ed the federal government's going to solve anything with some wonderfully redone higher education act because well because we haven't renewed it and or really substantially fixed it in forever yeah um so i think we're we as a public we're the ones that can solve this and i don't think anybody else has a shot at it unless we do it and that was the motivation behind what i started uh intuition five years ago well i'm so glad that you did that and i'm so glad you could join us uh i am the opposite of glad that we were out of time um we have we have just hit the top of the hour and and this is the point of the program where i ask people mark how can people keep up with you how can they keep learning from you and learning about your work well they can find tuition fit at tuitionfit.org people are welcome to email me mark at tuitionfit.org we are trying to make it possible for colleges and universities to participate in the same project so people can just because you work in enrollment management don't think i think you're the bad guy you can talk to me too um they can follow me on linkedin i tend to post there from time to time that's the sort of only remaining social media space that i find anything useful in but otherwise um they'll probably see me pop up in a few news articles from time to time well you have a habit of doing that um and you also have a habit of enlightening thank you so much mark for your passion for your deep knowledge and i really appreciate how you answer all these questions so so thoroughly and um powerfully thank you very much thanks for having me um friends don't leave yet i just want to let you know where things are headed over the next uh a few weeks if you want to keep talking about this we already have some action on twitter please uh follow use the hashtag ftte or tweet at me or uh shindig events if you'd like to continue this conversation on mastodon there's my mastodon link at brian alexander at mastodon.social or hit up my blog brian alexander.org if you'd like to look into our previous sessions having to do with families having to do with students paying tuition and the economics of higher ed just go to tinyurl.com slash ftf archive and you can see them there if you'd like to look at our upcoming sessions on everything from ai the department shares to enrollment and climate change just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more and if you've done any work on these topics or any other topics that you want me to share just send me a note and i'd be glad to share it with everybody and in the meantime thank you all for the great questions and great thinking today i really really appreciate that as the new semester begins i hope you're all safe and well and wish you best for the year 2023 and until then we'll see you next time online take care bye bye