well uh good afternoon thank you for uh being here thanks for tuning in online if that's how you're watching this uh my name is Matt scogan and I serve as the president of a place called Hope College Hope College is a liberal arts institution in Holland Michigan we're more or less on the shore of Lake Michigan were a school of about 3,000 students we were founded in 1866 and I've been the president of Hope for almost three years but if you remember the Hair Club for Men commercials from the 1980s I'm not just the president of hope I'm also a client or in my case I'm a graduate at least uh this is me I graduated in 2002 from Hope College and this is my wife Sarah we met while we were students at hope we have three kids our kids are Sophie Lucy and Oliver and I want to talk to you today about a vision that I and a growing number of people have which is a vision for a future without College tuition in other words a vision for a different way of funding higher education but before I get there let me say a bit more about who I am and where I come from as maybe you can tell I'm I'm a bit young to be a college President so I'm 42 years old the average age it turns out the average age of a college president in the United States today is 62 so that means I could do my job for another 20 years and still only be at the average age most college presidents have a PhD usually in education and 85% of college presidents Rose to their position through Academia none of none of those things describe me I'm a bit of an outof thebox College president my story is a little bit different I grew up in a small town in the south of Michigan called Portage my mom was a middle school science teacher and my dad was a chemist he worked at a local pharmaceutical company both of my parents went not just to college but also to graduate school and so the importance of high education was instilled in me from a very early age I grew up I think basically there was the in my house that I was going to go to college but for me that was okay because I was excited to go to college so that wasn't a problem the problem was affording it and my parents had not just me to worry about but also my three younger siblings I found out later in my life that my dad had to take out a second mortgage on our house so that he could send me to Hope College and even with that I still had to take on a significant amount of student loan debt and of course my story is not uncommon many students today face debilitating Financial barriers when it comes to attending college um when I was uh the problem of course is is was way worse than it was when I was in college when when I went to hope the full price sticker the full sticker price tuition room and board was around $20,000 today it's more than double that $46,000 and I want to try to put that price increase in context for you because of course we all expect prices to increase over time that's inflation a lot of people are talking about that right now uh consider just my lifetime so I was born in 1979 from 19 1979 to today the price of a gallon of milk for example has increased by 266 per. consider wages over the course of my lifetime from 1979 to today the average income of an American has grown by 223% but look at what's happened to the price of a college education over the course of my lifetime the price of a college education has gone up 97% that is even after you adjust for the increase in wages the cost of college today is still four times greater than it was the year I was born that is it's four times more difficult for families to afford now there there's always naysayers there's always critics when you bring up statistics like this um here's one example uh this is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis uh don't worry I'm not going to make you read that paper I've already read it for you and basically what this says is yes the sticker price of tuition has gone up but so to have financial aid packages and so students in the end aren't paying that much more and we should all just calm down but my response is it's kind of hard for me to calm down when I look at what's happening to the student loan Market in the United States today collectively Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt if that were the GDP of a country that would be the ninth largest economy in the world it seems a little excessive to me the average amount of debt that a college graduate has today is is nearly $40,000 and that amount grows every single year it seems out of control and the question is how did we get here well I want to talk mostly about a solution but to set up that solution let me talk for a couple minutes about how I think we got here and here's the headline my take is that we've seen this skyrocketing price of tuition and this skyrocketing amount of student loan debt not because we needed to see it but because we could see it in other words the price of college in my view today is expensive because there's no natural incentive to keep the cost down let me show you two things that help illustrate this one is the student loan the structure of the student loan Market itself so student loans back to 1944 student loans were initiated in the name of making College more accessible and ultimately making the American dream more available to more people it sounds great like let's do that but the problem is as access to student loans increased so too did the price of tuition by a lot let's call it the law of unintended consequences and it makes sense because without a cap on the amount of money that students could borrow colleges could just raise the price year after year and they could direct students to student loan programs to make up the difference regardless of how much that difference became another thing that explains the rising cost of the sticker price of tuition has to do with how scholarships are funded at most colleges and universities in the United States so let me try to show you this imagine that this graph is the demand curve for Hope College so we're going to have like economics 101 for a minute this is the demand curve for Hope College uh the the market price the break even market price of tuition at at Hope College is around $20,000 that's the average price that a student pays to go to Hope but there's two problems with that price point one is that there are some families who are willing to pay a whole lot more than that the other problem is that there's a lot of students who we'd like to have come to Hope but they can't afford the $220,000 price point so what we do and what nearly every other college and university does in the United States is we set the price at the very top of our demand curve and what it means then is that anyone who's paying more than $20,000 for tuition is paying for their owned and they're subsidizing scholarships for someone else it's Robin Hood we're running our own redistribution scheme and you can have your own opinion on that you can ask ethical questions about charging different people different prices for the same outcome the point today is that this is just unsustainable and it's unsustainable because it enables colleges to increase the sticker price year after year after year in the end for me paying a lot of money for college was worth it because after I went to Hope College all kinds of opportunities opened up for me I went to Harvard for graduate school and then got jobs in Washington DC at the highest levels of government the White House and the treasury Department and then I pivoted to the private sector and worked in New York City for 11 years at the New York Stock Exchange in a Global Financial Services firm My Story shows I think because I came from a family with very modest financial means and no family connections I I think my story shows that the American dream is still possible obviously lots of people face even higher barriers than I did but I think my story shows that you can still climb your way to the top you don't need a back door or a side door what you do need is a great education and the research shows that this is true across the board so there's an economist at Harvard named Raj chedy and Raj ched's work shows that students who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds but attend the same College have remarkably similar earnings opportunities after they graduate it means that higher education is the great equalizer it means that higher education is the solution to solving income inequality but the problem is with a high tuition high debt funding model that solution just isn't working and the main reason isn't it isn't working is because the price alone deters too many students from considering great colleges so uh surveys show that 73% of high school students say that they will eliminate a college from consideration just based on the sticker price alone and these are students who probably would have been eligible for financial aid another 20% of students say they're not just eliminating colleges they're thinking about eliminating the whole thing they're thinking about skipping College Al together because of the sticker price so that's the obvious negative effect that a high tuition price high debt funding model has but there's some other negative effects that I think are less obvious but are still worth pointing out um consider for example grade inflation this is less obvious but I think it's interesting to talk about as the price of tuition has gone up students have become customers what's a customer a customer is someone with dollars in their hand looking to buy something and you know the saying the customer is always right well the problem is when your student is a customer and you're supposed to be the teacher that sentiment the customer is always right is kind of a problem interg grade inflation so as this chart shows the the the trajectory of grade inflation over the last couple of decades has more or less tracked the trajectory of tuition increases and I guess the question is is that a coincidence Maybe not maybe it's the fact today that students aren't just paying for their education maybe they're paying for grades because the incentive structure is such that colleges and universities are kind of incentivized to give their customers the grades they want in order to protect the revenue to protect the business model another negative effect that's somewhat less obvious of this High tuition price high debt funding model has to do with impact and what we see is that far too many students who graduate with a lot of student loan debt end up pursuing careers to chase income to pay off their debt rather than pursuing careers that have impact so too many students are turning down potentially lower paid jobs but higher impact jobs in order to pay off their student loan bills it it means in essence that this tuition crisis in the United States is producing college graduates who are just working to make ends meet rather than working to make the world a better place and the last thing I want to talk about here in terms of the negative effect of a high sticker price high debt funding model is hard to talk about but I think we need to talk about it and it's mental health so the the CDC which studies mental health and by the way these statistics are from prior to the pandemic the CDC says that in an average year 3.9% of Americans think about suicide now thankfully most of them don't make a plan or an attempt but 3.9% of Americans think about it it gets really troubling however when you start to break down some subcategories so consider single women who make more than $100,000 a year that's a substantial amount of money but they have significant student loan debt in that category the number jumps from 3.9% to 5.9% people who consider suicide every year and if you look at single women who make less than $50,000 a year but they have significant student loan debt the number jumps all the way to 177% is this literally a matter of life and death let me read you some quotes from a a group uh a survey done last year by a group called student loan planner uh this first quote Says student loans make me feel like my life is not my own second quote saysi have constant anxiety about affording things and hesitation for major life experiences such as having a child buying a house buying a car buying my my own practice or having a wedding half of my sixf figure income goes to student loan debt and it will for the next 23 years it is solving challenges like that is what motivated me to apply for this position president of Hope College and ultimately as I was thinking about all these things that we just talked talked about and stepping back even further and looking at the state of our country right now the question I started to ask myself is are we really going to be a land of opportunity for all or are we going to be a land of privilege for a few and my take is that the answer to that question is going to be decided in higher education it's going to be decided in Academia it's going to be decided by the schools themselves and so on July 1st 2019 I became the 14th President of Hope College and our ambition is to eliminate tuition as the way we fund higher education and here's how here's how we think it could work so there are two prevailing funding models in higher education today the first is a pay as you go model which means you pay your college or university every semester before the start of the semester the second model is a pay it back model where you you pay a bank or a lender after you graduate and of course most people end up paying through some combination of those two what we're imagining at Hope is not a pay as you go model and it's not a pay it back model what we're imagining is a Pay It Forward model and we call it hope forward here's how it would work students would come to Hope College and their tuition would be fully funded upfront funded by the generosity of others and they then make a commitment to give something to Hope every year after they graduate we wouldn't specify an amount or suggest a percentage of income nothing like that because we want it to actually be a gift we want it to be a gift that's given out of generosity in essence what we're trying to do is move away from bill paying to a business model that's based on gift giving a gift economy that's what we're trying to move to and students what they're doing when they're giving to Hope after they graduate they're not paying for their own education because there's what's paid for rather what they're doing is they're paying it forward they're investing in the generations of students who come after them we're excited about what it might mean but it's going to take some time and it's going to take some money to switch our whole College from of 3,000 people 3,000 students from the tuition based model to this gift based model it's going to take some time so last summer we embarked on a pretty daunting fundraising task I have to say we're trying to Kickstart this gift based model with others giving to our endowment so we're trying to get grow our endowment by about a billion dollars so that we can fund tuition for a 3,000 students upfront and then move to this gift based model but because that's going to take some time and because that's going to take um a lot of people helping us we're going to go ahead and get started and so here's what we're doing last year we launched a small cohort a cohort of 22 hope forward students they're on our campus right now they're freshman next year we'll have another cohort roughly double that size these students are not paying tuition rather they've committed to a lifetime of giving so we're pretty early into this experiment but we've already learned a lot and I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've learned the main thing we've learned is that this is going to be way bigger than just solving the business model of higher education it's going to do that it's going to do that in a radical way in a in a dramatic way it will solve the problem of access and affordability but it's going to do a number of other really interesting things let me walk you through a few of these uh the first one is it is it aligns incentives in a really compelling way I think so for example uh under a hope forward model we as an institution we as the college are highly incentivized to help our students be successful after they graduate why because the more successful they are the more opportunities they'll have to give today it's students and parents who are continually asking questions about what's the ROI on my high tuition bill under a hope forward model that burden shifts to us as an institution we're the that have to make the education really good so that students are grateful for it after they graduate speaking of gratitude we're excited about what it's going to mean to have an alumni base thousands of alumni who have committed to being givers of course they've committed to giving to Hope but we're going to spend their time while they're at hope the four years they have at hope we're going to spend time talking with them about what it means to be a generous citizen of the world in all the ways we would Define that so these 22 hope forward students they've only completed one semester but there are is starting to ask me questions like how do I budget for a life of generosity these are students who are going to run out into the world asking questions like how can I give to make this world a better place and that's in pretty sharp contrast to the way most of the world thinks today most of the world looks around and says what can this world do for me what can I take from the world not what can I give so these students are going to be givers and that's going to make the world a better place but interestingly it's also going to make them better so there's a whole body of scientific research now that shows a strong correlation between giving and health and happiness there's a professor at Yale named Lori Santos and during the pandemic she put she's got this popular course called the science of well-being during that pandemic she put it online for free you may have heard of it because three million people have taken the course according to Santos the three things that contribute to a life of Happiness are number one practiced generosity and gratitude number two helping other people the third one is getting sufficient sleep so for college students maybe that sleep thing is is a Lost Cause but the other two with hope forward we can build the other two into the structure into the business model of Hope forward and we're excited about what that might mean let me keep going another thing hope forward does that we're excited about is it immediately overnight ends the relationship with students that just today feels too transactional as a college President I can't tell you how many times students or families will make an appeal to their tuition bill in order to try to try to get what they want so students might say something like I'm paying you x, a year so therefore the whatever the The covid Mask policy ought to align to my preferences or parents might say something like I'm paying you the full sticker price and so therefore my student deserves the best living Arrangement that you have here's what's happened what's happened is that the tuition-based funding model has led to a sense of entitlement and it's that sense of entitlement that is leading to this crazy arms race we're seeing in higher education right now where way too many colleges and universities are trying to attract students to their campus based on amenities lazy rivers and pools and Gourmet dining halls and luxury dorms this stuff sounds like a great vacation but it's not the point of college the point of college is an education and with hope forward we're moving away from this consumer mindset which I just think is toxic to healthy learning environment we're moving away from that and stepping into something so we intentionally begin our relationship with students with hope forward we intentionally begin it with an unbalanced relationship it it starts with imbalance we just give them something up front we give them something that's incredibly valuable it's Priceless and fact and by doing so we're modeling for them in a radical way what it looks like to be a giving person to have a giving mindset because a giving person is someone who's just constantly looking at what they have and saying should I hold on to this or should I give it to make the world a better place and there's no sense of entitlement in that kind of mindset another thing hope forward does is it creates all kinds of interesting opportunities around lifelong learning so like everyone is talking about lifelong learning right now with hope forward one way you can think about Hope forward is that it's moving from a a pay for service model mod to a subscription based model so by definition students who come to Hope College are signing up to be subscribed to hope for the rest of their lives and we're excited about the opportunities that will give us around lifelong learning having an alumni base that's engaged with us for their entire life we're also excited about what it's going to mean for the four years that they're at Hope because we actually think a hope forward model and we're starting to see this with our 22 students we think a hope forward model means that they might actually take their college Years more seriously than when they're on a tuition based model here here's why see the number one critique I get for Hope forward is people say this won't work because students don't have skin in the game people say this won't work students won't take it seriously if they're not paying for it but like here's the thing they have made a commitment they've made a very real commitment a very personal commitment because they've committed to give their own money this is not free tuition what we're talking about this is something entirely different they've made a very personal commitment their own money it's not their parents money it's their own money and we think in the end that means students will feel more skinn in the game than under the current model we think it means that students will take their education more seriously than under the current model the last thing I want to say about Hope forward relates back to impact and we talked about this a little bit already uh I mentioned that student debt skews the kind of things we see students doing after they graduate it pushes students into careers just so they can pay off their bills and if you talk to these 22 hope forward students and ask them what they want to do after they graduate these students because they know they're not going to be burdened by debt these students are entirely motivated by impact so they're talking about things like ending racial inequality in the Healthcare System they're talking about things like ending the school to prison pipeline in inner cities they're talking about things like reducing homelessness through affordable housing they're talking about things like suicide prevention in high schools like these students are ones who are going to bring hope to hopelessness and at the end of the day that's why we're calling this hope forward because yes this is going to solve the business model of higher education but this is going to do something way more dramatic if we can motivate a generation of students to run out into the world looking at the problems of this world and say I'm going to bring hope to that problem we've done something far more dramatic and far more impactful than just solving a higher ed problem the last thing I want to say as I close is that this is not a competitive thing for us at Hope College like this is not some secret strategy to try to increase our yield or attract more students this is not branding we're trying to start a movement we're trying to start a movement and I would love it if other places would follow us to use this as a model for other colleges and universities to pick up on at hope we have a Christian Mission and so for us having a business model that's inextricably linked to accessibility and communal generosity that's tied to our Christian Mission but we actually think this could work at a lot of other places and my hope is that hope forward could serve as a model for other colleges and universities I just want to end by going back to this question that ultimately brought me back to my alma Mo this question are we really going to be a land of opportunity for all or are we going to be a land of privilege for a few and what keeps me up at night when I think about that question is who we might be missing because the question is are we missing the next great inventor maybe the kid who's going to invent the cure to cancer or the next great musician the next great artist the next great world leader are we missing somebody just because they happen to grow up in a different zip code and here's the thing the whole landscape of higher education knows this is a problem and very few institutions are doing anything creative about it we come from a place called hope we believe in hope we believe that problems are solvable and therefore we want to run toward problems and try to go after them with hope we're trying to bring hope back into higher education ultimately we're trying to bring hope back to the American dream and we'd love to have others join us we'd love to have others join us in this endeavor to try to move hope forward in the world thanks so much for listening I'll Stick Around for conversations and questions [Music]