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- [00:10]
A
Hello, and welcome to the price you pay for college episode of Slate Money, the podcast that gives you the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Anna Szymansky of Breaking Views. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of HuffPost.
- [00:30]
B
Hello.
- [00:31]
A
And we have from the New York Times, Mr. Ron Lieber. Welcome.
- [00:38]
C
Ron, it's great to be back.
- [00:40]
A
I think the last time you were on the show, we were talking about airline miles or something like that, but this time you have a whole book out. What is your book about?
- [00:49]
C
The book is about who pays what and why for college, how the system became so complicated and opaque, and when, if ever anybody ought to pay up to $200,000 more for a college education than whatever it is that their flagship state university is charging, we are going.
- [01:11]
A
To dive into that very subject here on Slate Money. We're going to talk about what it means for parental finances. We're going to talk about student loan relief, which is a big thing on Capitol Hill right now. We are also going to talk about another one of your investigations, which we have going on right now, into how to get vaccinated against Covid, which is of relevance to everyone. So all of that coming up on Slate Money. So, Ron, you have obviously been working on this book about paying for college for a while, since long before the pandemic hit. And now suddenly the pandemic seems to have turned the entire question about paying for college and whether you should even go to college on its head. Has anything changed permanently, do you think?
- [02:03]
C
I don't think that anything has changed permanently. I mean, here's how I see it, right? There's three reasons to go to college. You go to college for the education, you go to college for the kinship, you go to college for the credential, right? So when everybody went home last March, the education got really bad, really fast, which is not the fault of the institutions. Nobody was ready for this or saw it coming. But the education. Education was nowhere like what it once was. The opportunities for making friends and finding mentors that obviously went by the wayside to a fair bit as well. And so the only thing that was left was the sheepskin, which came electronically or in a plain brown envelope and not with pomp and circumstance on the quad in May. And so much of what people used to pay for was essentially stripped away. And so is it any great surprise that teenagers came flocking back in September to vote very compromised situations, and were willing to pay effectively what they paid before it Actually wasn't surprising to me because we've come to see this residential undergraduate education experience as a sort of rite of passage in the United States. And I don't see any freight train of technology coming down the tracks that's going to blow all that to smithereens.
- [03:22]
D
If anything, I'm wondering if the pandemic experience showed people that actually being in physical proximity to other people and teachers is actually really important, despite what some people in tech might say.
- [03:34]
C
Well, so here's the thing about that, right? For all of the intellectual and research prowess at these institutions, they are remarkably uncurious about themselves. We don't know very much about how people learn and what people learn and how much they learn and what makes for an ultimately satisfying undergraduate educational experience. It's almost as if they're afraid to find out. Right. But if you look at what supposed experts are saying in public. Right. The president of Spelman College wrote just a searing essay in the New York Times in the spring about all that had been lost academically when everybody went home. It's just taken as a given. Jonathan Zimmerman at Penn just wrote a book about college teaching called the Amateur Hour. Right. Which gives you some sense of how well he thinks he was trained. Right. And know, given that the state of undergraduate teaching is uneven in general, when you throw a bunch of middle aged professors into a zoom room, right. It's not necessarily going to get better.
- [04:38]
B
It sounds like the pandemic didn't do much to tampen down demand for college. Like customers came flocking back in September, like you said, Ron. But what about financial consequences for the schools? Is there anything that we need to be thinking about or worried about, especially for public schools now that the pandemic's economic consequences have been so grave?
- [04:58]
C
So the trouble tends to start for the public institutions roughly 24 months after any recession. It takes a while for the systems kind of gears to creak into action, right? Because what needs to happen when a bunch of people lose their jobs for the dominoes to start to fall is that tax revenues need to decline and then budgets need to be adjusted for the following year. And then the universities themselves need to adjust their prices, which can take 12 months in a cycle. So two years later you start to see the after effects. And it absolutely went down in a really severe way during the last recession. But it is unclear what we'll see this time because every recession is different and the market for higher education might be a little different right now too. But the effects will be non zero for public Institutions. That's absolutely right.
- [05:55]
A
And private institutions too. Right. There was a lot of hand wringing about how the big cash cow for universities in general across the United States, not all of them, but many of them, was foreign students who invariably pay full whack. And obviously no foreign students are coming to crossing borders right now. And it's not clear when or whether they might start doing that again. How big of an impact is that going to have?
- [06:19]
C
The loss of the revenue from full paying international students has been a real factor for these higher education instit institutions. But wow, did they have a good week. Right. I mean, it may be a year until 19 year olds in the developed world have needles in their arms, but it's not going to be four more years of Donald Trump making them feel completely unwelcome. And so they are stoked to use an academic term.
- [06:49]
A
And the Muslim ban has already been overturned. So that's step one.
- [06:54]
D
And could you maybe explain a little bit about what actually happened at universities and their finances and how that affected financial aid after the financial crisis?
- [07:03]
C
Sure. Well, let's start with the private institutions. The richer ones have large endowments. And if your endowment falls by 20 or 30 or 40% over the course of a year or two, that means that it throws off less income and you have less money to spend on things like financial aid. And so you have to make a decision as an institution how you allocate limited resources. And in many instances, there were schools that used to admit people without any consideration for their ability to pay who then had to make an adjustment. Right. Where maybe like the last quarter of the class, if you could write a check for $70,000, you might have a better chance of getting in lower down the food chain. There were schools that just more trouble getting bodies in the door. Right. Because Americans were suffering. A lot of people use home equity and borrow against home equity to pay for college. The banks were cutting people off. 50% of equity was disappearing in some parts of the country and it was a real mess. And the way in which some colleges respond to that was just to discount further, not based so much on the ability to pay, but just as a sort of coupon to get people in the door. So how will it work this time? It's not completely clear. I mean, it's a very different recession and there are lots of people, especially educated people, which people with degrees are more likely to send their kids to get degrees. Those people are better off than they were 12 months ago. Economically, for the most part, the market has gone up, their 529 college savings plans have gone up, their incomes have stayed intact. In many instances, they're not spending on fancy clothing or going away for the weekend or for the week. And so, you know, it's possible that those folks have more money to spend and might be more likely to invest it in a fancier, more expensive institution that might provide a sort of force field shield of protection for their 22 year old. I mean, you can see how people talk themselves into things when the world looks very scary outside their window.
- [09:13]
A
So I'm fascinated by this concept of what you just called the food chain and the top tier institutions, middle tier, bottom tier, that kind of thing. And one of the things that really jumped out at me, probably the main thing that really jumped out at me from your book, is this idea that universities really do compete on price and that different universities have different clearing prices, that there's a revealed preference at each university in terms of how much people are willing and able to pay to send their kids. And that number is different from university to university, obviously. Like, it's higher at USC than it is at some place in Alabama that we've never heard of. And universities have an incredibly sophisticated and incredibly opaque system. Basically, it's a little bit like airline seats. Everyone pays something slightly different. No one knows how much anyone else is paying. And this, I think, cuts against the impression that I had before I read your book, that universities were largely price setters. They were like, this is the price and this is how much you're going to have to pay. And if you want to come here, this is the bill. And it turns out to be much more reactive to demand. And so I have two questions, first of which is like, does this basically mean that universities don't have any real room to raise prices? Because they've already been trying to. Most of them, like the bottom 95% of them, have already been trying to sort of maximize revenues anyway. And secondly, do you think this revealed preference that people express in terms of willingness to pay for this university rather than that university, does that correlate significantly with those three things that you were talking about earlier? The education, the credential, the friends you make along the way, are those clearly or implicitly better at the more expensive institutions?
- [11:07]
C
So, you know, Felix, you're describing the world as I would like to see it and as I would like people to act in it. But what we're really talking about here is, you know, a world governed by snobbery and elitism and pride and shame, right? So how does that work? Right. What are we talking about here? Well, the thing that I was most fascinated by, it's sort of a corollary to what you were talking about, is that I wanted to explore the part of the market where the ability to pay was crashing into the willingness to pay. So if we're just going to name check some schools here, if you look at the 25th most selective college or university in the United States, if you're at spot 25 for selectivity, maybe you're Colby College in Maine. Colby is really worried that it is going to have an Oberlin problem. So what is the Oberlin problem? The Oberlin problem is that 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 20 now, people in the Midwest in particular, decided that while they had the ability to pay for Oberlin, they were no longer going to have the willingness to pay full price. And that was because all of the other small liberal arts colleges in Ohio had already made the decision to give out coupons, including to the affluent, to try and sort of induce the smart set to come there. And Oberlin had to sort of fold and begin to offer discounting as well. Oberlin was one of a tiny number of institutions that flat out refused to talk to me about this. They want nothing to do with this conversation. Are they ashamed? Are they embarrassed to be participating in what is essentially red blooded capitalism and discounting even though they're a nonprofit institution? I don't know. They wouldn't say. But if I'm the president of Colby College, I am worried sick right now, because in my sports league, Connecticut College in the last couple of years has started aggressively using merit aid. And so Colby's a more selective institution. But now we're competing in the same sports league for lacrosse players who can get a $20,000 coupon for going to New London instead of being in Waterville, Maine. And the market is eroding. But you asked about pricing power just down the road for Colby. In the same day, I met with the president of Bowdoin College and the president of Bates, and they just blithely tossed off the fact that they're headed to a $100,000 a year in eight or nine years. And the president of Bowdoin is also on the board of bank of America. I mean, he's no elbow patched slouch when it comes to understanding pricing and economics, and he just assumes it's going to happen. And why is it going to happen? Well, if you look at the demography here, you see that because of inequality, there are actually Going to be more people, not a ton more, but they're going to be more with the ability to pay full price. And what are we going to pay full price for in America and around the world? We're going to pay full price for.
- [14:15]
B
Our children to sort of reflect back what Felix just said and some of my feelings reading your book, Ron, because the conclusion I came to was just, college in the United States is kind of a scam. It should be free, and no one knows how much it costs. Like, you've come close to figuring it out. But I mean, the guidance to parents in the book, I mean, my oldest is 12, so I have some time, I guess, but is just like the research it's going to take to figure out how much it costs to send my son to school. It seems overwhelming to me. And you have a quote from someone in the book, a college admissions guy who says, like, what else do you buy where you don't know the prices until you've already limited your choices? And I couldn't really think of anything as opaque as this at the same time, as important as this, and as elitist as this is, it's just like a whirlwind of unfair and outrageous facts in a book is what you've done.
- [15:20]
A
Without a solutions chapter. Like, by the way, to be clear about this, you're not coming in saying this is how to fix it. You're just saying it's broken.
- [15:26]
B
Well, he has advice on navigating.
- [15:29]
C
Yeah, I mean, I'm no policy guy, right? I mean, this is the role I play in the newspaper, too, at the New York Times. I'm here to tell you about how to live and win in the world that we live in. But I'm not smart enough to solve the problem for people. But, Emily, I like the way you frame it. And there is another question that gets asked rhetorically, but should not. And in retrospect, I wish I had put it in the book, but I didn't, in part because it was uttered to me off the record by somebody who I have a previous relationship with. But let's just say he is a pretty fancy academic dean at a pretty fancy school that is able to command full price more than most. And so he was sort of grilling me, like, are you coming for us, Ron? Like, what's going to happen here? Are you, like, holding the pitchfork? You know, so I sort of. I sort of fill him in, right? And he says to me, you know, he's got two kids, right? Makes a good living, but, you know, is Definitely in the part of the market with his income where, you know, the ability and the willingness to pay might well be clashing. He says, I don't know. He says, what else are we going to do with our money?
- [16:35]
D
What you do make the point in the book as well that while this can differ, if students do go to college and finish and finish within four years for the average student, the return on that investment is not bad.
- [16:53]
A
Oh sure, but they're not making the investment. Their parents are.
- [16:56]
D
Well, actually some kids are.
- [16:59]
C
Well, they're going into debt. They're going to debt for $30,000 on average. But I think it is important to frame the parenting question almost in the same larger frame as the financial planning one because the way Dean Friend of mine put it, I sort of wanted to have a whole conversation with him about it because well, okay, what else are we going to spend the money on? Well, if you're an upper middle class person who has everything they need and some of what they want, what would you actually do with the $100,000 you might save by sending your kid to Ohio State instead of Denison? Right. Are you going to take $100,000 away from your child who desperately wants to go to Denison so you can have it for your 401 or you know, upgrade your kitchen? Are you gonna upgrade your kitchen?
- [17:55]
B
Yes.
- [17:56]
C
Right. Or are you going to actually, are you going to actually invest in that child who you are hoping to launch into the world with a whole bunch of rocket boosters and whom you have like sort of loved and cherished and taken care of for 18 years?
- [18:11]
A
But to be clear, I just want to emotionally. It is very emotionally, but so are your children.
- [18:16]
B
But I could give my kid that money to buy a house, you know, and raise a family. And you know, there's lots of stuff I could do to help my kid with the money.
- [18:25]
C
You could do that. You could do that. And I'll tell you exactly what will happen because I essentially bore witness to one of these conversations where you know, the, the parents said, look, look, you know, the difference between. And this was interesting. This was a, it was an out of state public that was going to be super expensive and a very good private that was offering a fantastic package of merit aid money not based on need. And they said, look, this is going to be the difference if you go to the out of state public. This is going to be the difference between us being able to go on vacation for the next five years. It's going to be the difference between us doing a Whole bunch of things that we might want to do. And she burst into tears and she said, you're bribing me. And they were. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
- [19:11]
A
I want to ask the question that Anna pointed to about sometimes people pay for college on their own. Let's say that we're in this situation, right? You know, there's $100,000 difference between this college and that college. And let's say my parents say, okay, I want that $100,000 for your future house and, or my present kitchen. And so I have made the decision that, like, the parental contribution here is going to be enough to get you into the cheaper one, not enough to get you into the more expensive one. At that point, does this 18 year old kid actually have the ability to go to the more expensive one or no?
- [19:48]
C
No, not in the immediate moment. Right. So you need to think about if you're 18 and you're trying to like, work this out. Let me temper that. Not necessarily right. Here are all the factors in play and, you know, vis a vis what Emily was talking about, you know, about the complexity, man. Is this complex? Is that a complex question, Felix? So here are all the things in play. As an undergraduate dependent student, you can borrow up to, you know, call it $31,000 or $32,000 a year. So you can get access to that, right? Above and beyond the. Call it $100,000 that your parents will pay. You can make money, right? Maybe 10 or $15,000 a year after taxes. If you work full time during the summer and 10 or 15 hours a week during the school year, maybe you work a little bit more, maybe you find a higher paying gig and you can do a little bit better than that. So there's some money that you can. If that's still not enough and you happen to go to Purdue University, you can sign something called an income sharing agreement, which means the lender in effect, just grabs 4% of your paycheck for 10 or 20 years until that part of your obligation is paid off. You could take a gap year or two, right, and just work 80 hours a week and save all the money and hopefully your parents will let you live at home and maybe that, you know, puts $40,000 in the bank. Or if you know about how things work and your parents actually have this conversation with you when you're in eighth grade. Emily's gonna barf now. No, no barfing, okay? In eighth grade, right? You can say to them, look, we are only good for $100,000. You are an incredible student. So here's what you're gonna do. Even though you might be on a trajectory for the Ivy League, if we were willing to pay for it, we're not. So what you should really do, right, is shoot for Oberlin, which doesn't want to talk about it, right? But they will discount from $300,000 to $200,000 maybe because you are a lights out student. So you can earn your way into a discount, right? In that plus the debt, plus the gap year. Right. Plus maybe an income sharing agreement if it comes to Oberlin. Ohio by then might equal the extra $100,000 you need above and beyond the $100,000 that we're will so you can go to Oberlin instead of Ohio State. That's how it works.
- [22:10]
B
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
- [22:12]
C
I knew I could make you throw up.
- [22:14]
B
Thank you. Thank you, Ron.
- [22:17]
A
So let's move on to public policy, which I know you said is not your thing, but it's definitely the talk of Washington right now. It seems probable that some amount of student debt is going to get forgiven by the Biden administration and or Congress somehow. It might be $10,000, it might be $15,000. If you listen to AOC or someone, it would be like all of it. Would any of that have any impact on anybody except just the people who have their debt forgiven? Would that change the landscape at all?
- [22:52]
C
Well, the danger when you do something like that is that it may persuade some people or convince some people wrongfully who are coming into the system that debt cancellation will become a semi permanent feature of how we do things in America. Now, the fact of the matter is permanent debt cancellation already is a feature of how we do things in America when it comes to student loans. We just don't talk about it that way. So the messiness of the politics here, and I think the reason why the Biden administration does not want to do any of this through an executive order is they don't want another one of those Rick Santelli moments. You remember that crazy CNBC guy yelling on the floor of the Chicago Board.
- [23:37]
A
Of Entrepreneurs, undeserving homeowners.
- [23:39]
C
Exact. Undeserving homeowners getting the, you know, getting rescued. Right. Now, many of those homeowners did not have college degrees who were getting rescued. But now we're going to do debt cancellation for people who were doctors. Really. We're going to do it across the board. We're not going to put an income cap on it. Just to keep it simple. I get the Policy reasons for, you know, doing it across the board. But the politics have the potential to be ugly. Right, but what we don't talk about. Right. Is that we already have an enormous public service loan forgiveness program as part of the federal student loan program. It doesn't work very well, but we have it. We have something like 400 billion with a B. 400 billion of the $1.7 trillion in student loan debt is on a trajectory to also be canceled because it's in an income driven repayment program where at the end of 20 or 25 years, if you're not paying it back at a high enough rate, it just gets canceled by the of, like you've done enough, we'll let you go, we'll tax you on that forgiven debt. But you can go now. Right. So like a quarter of the outstanding student loan debt is already going to be forgiven. And we don't talk about it that way. Rick Santelli doesn't talk about it that way. I can guarantee you that.
- [24:56]
B
I think instead of canceling student debt, if you're thinking seriously about public policy, the proposals to make public universities free are the ones to watch. I mean, that would be game changing for so many people and go a long way in solving what is the inherent problem, which is that colleges and universities pretend to be meritocracies, but they're actually just elitist institutions that favor wealthy people and upper middle class people. They give discounts to people with money, as Ron explains in his book, which is so frustrating.
- [25:28]
A
But as we know from our conversation with Daniel Markovitz, if you made, you know, UC Berkeley free, it would still be just as elitist. It would probably be even more elitist because there'd be even more competition to get into it. And the ultra highly educated elites have the ability to get into those institutions.
- [25:45]
B
Yeah, but then there would still be a sorting where those ultra wealthy elites would still want to go to the Oberlins or to Harvard or Yale or to the non public schools.
- [25:56]
C
Right.
- [25:56]
A
Even when they could go to Berkeley for free.
- [25:59]
B
Yeah, because it's still a credential that means so much. I mean, Ron talks about in his book and we all know like if you've gone to Harvard, you have the edge over pretty much everyone else in the country in terms of job market, in terms of wealth in the future, like it's everything. So people still pay money for that.
- [26:18]
C
Do you believe that, Emily, or do you believe that's only true in certain segments of the economy?
- [26:22]
A
Yeah, I don't think that's true. I think Daniel Markovitz actually had data showing it's not true.
- [26:26]
B
In my experience, it is true. I went to a state school undergrad and then I went to Columbia for a year and I, I could see the difference in how I was treated and in opportunities. It was just, it was a world of difference. And I see it in the journalism world at least where everyone's got, you know, a lot of people, the most successful, the ones at the most prestigious publications have typically Ivy League degrees.
- [26:51]
D
Have you read that?
- [26:52]
B
I mean, look at the government, look at the Supreme Court, look at who gets to be president. I mean, on and on and on and on. The most fancy people in the country usually have gone to an Ivy League school.
- [27:02]
C
Fancy. That word, fancy. I tried so hard to avoid using the word fancy in the price you pay for college. But what you are talking about, Emily, is you're talking about snobbery, you're talking about elitism, you're also talking about pedigree. There's a Kellogg professor named Lauren Rivera who's actually going to grill me at one of my book events next week. I cannot wait. She did this terrific bit of like stunt sociological reporting where she embedded in a super elite. I'm pretty sure it's a management consulting, reading between the lines and just listened in as these interviewers who are 26, railed on the choices of 21 year olds who had gone to Brown instead of Princeton or had gone to Cornell instead of Brown and were like, what could these people have been thinking, right? And there's just like no, no awareness at all of how they sound. And also no awareness of the fact that somebody might choose one Ivy League school over the other because the need based financial aid package, $10,000 a year better and their parents, their immigrant parents might not have had to go into debt depending on. Right. It's like these people can't even imagine that choice even within the Ivy League, let alone the choice of somebody who might take the full ride at USC over a place on the Williams lacrosse name.
- [28:25]
D
Although I would say that while it is, I think it is certainly true that in some of the most elite of the elite industries and companies, and especially first jobs, having an Ivy League degree and especially having a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or I guess also Stanford, you'd probably fit in there. That makes a big difference and it obviously does, but I don't think that that is necessarily true for every extremely well paid job. And I think anyone who's ever done hiring knows that yes, it is true that if you have that Ivy League degree, you will probably get an interview and that is a big deal because when you have lots and lots of resumes, that's a big deal. But it doesn't mean you'll get the job.
- [29:07]
C
I think you're right on the whole. But here is what I am curious about. I generated all this data in the book where it is just absolutely the case that 30, 40, 50, 60% of the baseball general managers and the kids who get money from Y Combinator for their startups and MacArthur fellows and people on the Hill, a huge percentage of them come from the 45 schools in the United States where the undergraduates have the highest average SAT scores. This is true. It's a demonstrable fact. But I don't know about you all, I would just say, generally as I wander around in New York City, there is way more skepticism about 22 year olds coming out of the Ivy League than there has been by a long, long way in my 25 years in New York. And I would venture to say that an other elite or at elite adjacent parts of the country, industries or geographies, some of the same thing is true, right? I mean, isn't there more of a taste, at least in progressive hiring circles for the underdog than there used to be?
- [30:16]
A
Definitely. And we're looking at people like Josh Hawley, who's Harvard and Yale and clerk for the Supreme Court and is suddenly trying to pretend to be a man of the people. And you're like, yeah, no, this is all kind of bullshit. So with any luck, your book will help reveal just how kind of bullshit all of that is. I do want to change the subject completely though, and talk about this other thing you've been writing about, which is vaccine distribution, which looks like it's completely chaotic but somehow getting better. I want to ask you, is there a right way and a wrong way to do it? There's some people who are doing it the right way and some people who are doing it the wrong way.
- [30:58]
C
Felix, you're trying to trick me into answering a policy question when what I really am is just a bullheaded logistics guy, right? I mean, my beat is beating the system. I grew up in line outside of Rose Records in Chicago, waiting for the on sale moment for the journey tickets at Ticketron. Like, I know how to bust through those ticketing systems. I know how to the business class ticket, the only free seat on the flight with my frequent flyer miles to Hong Kong or whatever. Like all of those skills were made for this moment. I was built to help People crack the get me a vaccine slot legally, but make sure I'm the first one to get one. I was built for this moment. It was why I was called on to write the how to get a vaccine in New York City guide. And I was glad to do it. But in terms of, of like, how could we have done it better? Well, you know, it's still a little bit of a mystery to me why we did not stand up kind of like more and better, extra large centralized vaccination hubs. But, you know, then you have to ask yourself, all right, well, who is responsible for that? Today it's mostly like the states and the counties and the cities. Who should be responsible for that? Well, the people who should be responsible for it are the people with the most money and the entity with the most money is the federal government. Right. So you let all the states fend for themselves and the states are distracted with other aspects of the pandemic and they've all lost 10 or 15% of their tax revenue. And then you get a goat rodeo. Right. What do you expect you're going to get?
- [32:33]
D
Yeah, I think we probably all agree that if we had had a competent federal government the last number of months, that would have probably made a significant difference and hopefully moving forward that will get better. But I do think that there can be some arguments made that certain states seem to be doing things maybe a little bit better than others. And partly like, I think New York early on, the idea of this, like really strict rules for who could and could not get the vaccine was probably not the best way to go.
- [32:59]
C
Well, I don't know. Right. So in addition to writing about this, I'm living it personally. I'm like running vaccine ops for a household in Florida, helping to, you know, run it for my mom in Chicago. You know, I've seen it with my in laws here in New York. You know, I've got siblings and siblings in law like all working the system. And Florida and Illinois are actually a pretty interesting contrast. New York is kind of more in the middle. Florida just opened the floodgates. And I assume it was for political reasons. Right. Governor DeSantis rules a relatively purple state and old people vote. And they were one of the first states to just throw the barn doors open kind of willy nilly. And then you had a bunch of 67 year olds in camping gear as poor Things Overnight in 52 degree overnight weather in Florida. It's like really roughing it down there. But you know, the ones who were hardy enough were able to get out and stay up all night and be the first one in line for their further jabs. Right? But what we're seeing now is that Florida is having incredible shortages. You know, my father's dying of als, he's got full time caregivers. They're hard won, and I mean extremely hard won. Vaccine deployments were just yanked cause they ran out of vials. Right. And like what the hell are we supposed to do now?
- [34:17]
A
Now from here, is there an efficient and effective way of doing that? That maybe some state has found that the federal government can say ah, that state seems to have got it right. We can now scale that to the rest of the country.
- [34:32]
C
I'm not sure who's doing the best job in a bad situation, but that state is out there somewhere. Right? And we can almost certainly learn something from it.
- [34:41]
A
I think it's called Israel.
- [34:42]
B
Right, I was going to say that.
- [34:44]
C
Right. Well you know, it depends how much you want to talk about the equity issues in that country.
- [34:50]
A
Right, right.
- [34:50]
B
Ron, can you quickly tell us how to do vaccine ops or do you have any quick tips?
- [34:57]
A
Yeah, what's the number one pro tip except to spend a lot of time on the Internet?
- [35:01]
C
Well, I mean Felix pretty pretty much hit it, right? It's like, you know, you have to have a lot of privilege, you have to have the technology, you have to be, you know, know, reasonably fluent with it and you have to have the time to just like war dial these things, right? You know, just pound away at the websites. There are already, you know, third party software bots that you can like download that'll you know, scrape the sites every, you know, 17 milliseconds, you know, looking for openings. It's not clear how well those work. The New York Times security department declined to allow us to test them because they thought they were so sketchy. But you know that, that stuff is out there, right? You can an unemployed 23 year old bartender who lost his or her job to do it for you. This is the thing that's happening, right? So privilege, privilege, privilege. But the other thing, the other thing that's important to note, there are civic minded communitarian people all over the country. Even in Florida, surprisingly. So. As much as I love to rag on Florida, who are all kind of ganging up in Facebook groups, private Facebook groups, but groups that anybody that can join and everybody's kind of sharing information and swapping tips and I mean thank God for the South Florida COVID 19 vaccine group. I think that's what it's called. Somebody tipped us off and it has just been an incredible wealth of information. So if you're trying to sort this out in, say, LA county, right, where it's been pretty difficult for the old people and they waited a long time to let them in, Start yourself a Facebook group or just get a text chain going with all of your friends who are, like, geeked out personal finance nuts who always seem to, like, know how to crack impenetrable systems and get them all on a text chain. You know, all the ones who have aging parents or healthcare workers and can't get their slots and just, like, form a gang.
- [36:54]
D
This is obviously like a sample size of 1, but my mom got the vaccine last week or this week, and basically she said the website was slightly annoying and it took, like, her and my dad, like, a little bit to figure it out, but they figured it out within maybe like, 45 minutes. She got her vaccine appointment. She got her vaccine. My mom's 75, so she was in a group that was prioritized in Michigan, but it wasn't actually harder than that.
- [37:16]
C
You are incredibly lucky, or maybe people like me who live to solve problems and shine light on them are paying too much attention to the dysfunction, but I don't think so. I think things are way better for the folks who live where your mom lives than they are in New York, York or Chicago or Florida.
- [37:36]
A
They're certainly better than in New York. I just got an email from my physician saying, you know all that vaccine that we said we were getting in? Yeah. We're not getting that. So if you had an appointment, you're not getting it?
- [37:47]
C
Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty much anchored to the Jewish holidays at this point. You know, I feel like if I've got a needle in my arm by September, I'll be happy.
- [37:54]
A
Let's have a numbers round. My number is $58 billion, which is the amount that the market capitalization of Alibaba went up. After a one minute video of Jack Ma saying nothing in particular to Chinese schoolteachers appeared on the Internet. There was literally nothing he said that moved his company's stock up $58 billion, except for the fact that he was alive and on the Internet and sort of proof of life, and that apparently is worth $58 billion.
- [38:29]
B
Man.
- [38:29]
A
We don't know if he has any actual control of his company right now or what the Chinese government is letting him do or not letting him do. But just being alive is worth $58 billion.
- [38:38]
B
Still alive, Emily. My number is 10. That is 10 for the 10 hours a day that indigenous hunter gatherers spend sitting. I listened to this really good interview with a guy named Daniel Lieberman, who's a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, that was on Fresh Air while I was jogging this morning. He was talking about this idea that everyone likes to lament about now that we are gonna die because we all sit too much. You know, like, sitting is the new smoking kind of a thing. And he was like, actually, it's fine. And then he said he's gone to all these places and studied indigenous people, and they sit all the time, too. So it was very reassuring, especially now in the pandemic, when we're all, like, so sedentary. And he did say one key thing to know is that if you are sitting for long stretches, and we know this, it's really effective if you just get up and do a thing like make tea or anything, just get up for a second and the health benefits kick in a little bit. So I think people should feel reassured by this. I might read his book, even all the problem, maybe.
- [39:48]
A
Anna, do you have a number?
- [39:49]
D
I do. It's 144. The London metals Exchange commodities pit is officially closed. The open cry pit that has existed for 144 years is now officially done. It had obviously closed down in March, last March, because of the pandemic. But now they've said they are 100% going to go to electronic, like basically everybody else has. But of course, you've had people who've said, oh, no, this is this wonderful tradition. And it's like, no, no, actually, it makes absolutely no sense. And this should have probably happened a while ago.
- [40:23]
A
That's basically the scene at the end of Trading Places, right? Where they all crowd around and shout each other and have the hand signals. The last place in the world that happened was the London Metals Exchange. And now that one is dead.
- [40:34]
D
Exactly. And it was funny, too, because they were like. When they were trying to explain why they should have kept it, they were like, well, no, we need this because we have these really complex, complex contracts. And you're like, yeah, because it's a great way to understand complex contracts. A bunch of men yelling at each other.
- [40:48]
C
All right, all right, Ron. My number is 52. As in percent, as in discount, as in what actually happens at private colleges and universities the nation over. That is the average discount rate in the most recent survey for the national association of Collegiate and University Business Officers Discounting Survey, which is done each year. Right. So it is true that there are hundreds and hundreds of families paying $80,000 a year at the University of Chicago. It is true that there are thousands of families paying $28,000 a year at the University of Illinois. But what is actually going on behind the SC and this is true for 89% of all undergraduates. There's another number. What's actually going on behind the scenes is that people are getting deals. And while the net price that people pay has continued to go up and for public schools it's gone up at a, you know, a somewhat alarming rate, it is possible to pay much less than the RAC rate for college and most people actually do.
- [42:03]
A
And is it reasonable to assume that the higher the recommendation rate, the higher the average discount, that when you get that first official $100,000 a year tuition fee, that college is going to have an average discount of probably much more than 52%?
- [42:19]
C
Well, it will depend there on their commitment to need based financial aid because the schools that charge the most tend to be ones that are most elite and prestigious and therefore they can attract a higher percentage of people who are willing to pay in full. And therefore they do not have to give away the merit aid because people are unwilling to pay full price. They only give the discounts to the people who need the money.
- [42:45]
A
Okay, on which note, I think that's it for us this week. Thank you Ron Lieber for coming on the show. It has been most illuminating.
- [42:54]
C
It's a pleasure.
- [42:55]
A
Thank you to Jessamyn Molly for producing. Thank you all for listening and writing in to sleep money@slate.com we will have a slate plus segment coming up on Pardons, but otherwise we'll see you next week on Slate Money.