New UO President on Portland campus, the Ballmer Institute and affording the cost of college

Fall classes have started at the University of Oregon in Eugene with a new president at the helm: Karl Scholz, an internationally respected economist who came most recently from University of Wisconsin-Madison where he served as provost. Meanwhile the university is getting ready to consolidate its Portland presence at a new Northeast campus, the former Concordia University. The property that was purchased in 2022 will house the university’s new Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. UO also plans to move graduate programs currently housed at the White Stag building in the city’s Old Town neighborhood and is putting that building up for sale. We sit down with Scholz in our Portland studios to hear more about the Ballmer Institute, the university’s footprint in the city and how he’s thinking about the rising costs of higher education, as an economist, a university president and the father of a UO graduate student.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. I’m joined now by the new president of the University of Oregon. Karl Scholz is the 19th president of the University. He started on July 1st. He’s a professor of economics with a focus on poverty who has spent his academic career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, most recently as provost. He’s also had stints working in two presidential administrations, first at the Council of Economic Advisors and later at the Treasury Department. He came to Eugene at an interesting time with the University, expanding its presence in Portland and leaving the PAC12 for the Big 10. It’s also a challenging time for higher education more broadly, as American confidence in colleges and universities is plummeting. Karl Scholz joins me to talk about all of this. Welcome to the show and congratulations.

Karl Scholz: Thank you very much, Dave. It’s really a treat to be here.

Miller: I wanna start with the big picture that I mentioned there. There’s been a massive shift in public sentiment about the value of a college education in recent years. According to one poll that was written about recently in the New York Times, the percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell from 74% to 41% in just 10 recent years. What goes through your mind when you see stats like that? And there are many others. That’s not an outlier of a poll. There is a real trend that has been seen in many polls.

Scholz: Anyone in higher education finds these worrisome trends. But confidence in all types of institutions across society has fallen. So higher education is not immune to that. But those of us who are inside America’s leading research universities know about the great work that happens every day. We see the transformation that happens with our students. We see the contributions of our research to the greater good. And we see the kind of magnificent cultural contributions that happen at universities.

So there’s this disconnect. Every day we see the great work that’s being done yet, as you point out, there is this feeling that college isn’t worth it or our values are antithetical. The antidote to that, I believe, is being out and meeting and telling our stories. Not just telling our stories inside the university, but telling our stories to community leaders and faith leaders, having others who have benefited from higher education do the same. Most of the graduates of higher education feel that the experience was precious. And that’s our great strength. Those who are experiencing it, believe deeply in the value. And we need to amplify those voices.

Miller: If I understood you correctly, essentially what you said was not that we need to change something fundamental. But we need to do a better job of telling our story. Is that a fair very short encapsulation of what you just said?

Scholz: It is. Telling our story is part of it. But of course, we are constantly thinking about what we do and how we do it and how to do it better. And so we’re interested in change. But also the tell, if you will, is [that] almost everybody who graduates, who experiences it, is enthusiastic.

Miller: We have to talk about money though because, from my reading of a lot of these polls and the analysis of them, money is at the heart. I mean, you did point out something which I think is important, that American trust, in all kinds of institutions, is dropping. But when it comes to higher education, it seems that a big culprit is debt. For a long time, people in your position have argued, truthfully, that there is an income boost that comes from going to college. But what some of the newer studies have looked at more deeply, and maybe more helpfully, is what happens to overall wealth. And that includes the debt that people accrue often when they go to college. And when you do that, the picture is a lot less rosy. It’s much more complicated. What are the implications of that?

Scholz: Yeah. So I think the facts are still very contested. There’s a very popular or widely circulated New York Times Sunday Magazine that makes the argument that you’ve made.

Miller: But based on research from folks at the Fed in Saint Louis and other places, they didn’t invent this data…

Scholz: There is a well-cited study at the Saint Louis Fed, but then there’s an article recently out [from] a Harvard economist in The Atlantic, that calls [that] into question. So this is hotly contested terrain. I’m an economist by training. I think a lot about these [things]. I think the research results are overwhelming, about the college wage premium. College graduates earn, over their lifetime, $1 million dollars more than those without a college degree.

When you translate, then, someone says “Well, think about wealth rather than earnings.” There is a widely cited Saint Louis Fed study but, again, pretty contested. And my reading of the evidence still is that the financial return to college is very, very positive, very strong. Moreover, college isn’t simply about making a good living, although that’s an important part of it, but it’s also about leading a good life. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think there are probably any investments in society that provide a higher rate of return than investing in one’s human capital that is going to college.

On debt, I can give you some statistics for the University of Oregon. Nearly 60% of our graduates, at the time of graduation, have $0 debt. Among those with debt, the average debt is $25,000. That’s an investment of $25,000 for, again on average, an increased earnings of $1 million dollars over one’s career, overwhelmingly positive return.

Miller: Do you have any knowledge right now of what that looks like by race? And you said, it’s contested, and we’re not gonna get into the methodology of that Saint Louis Fed study…

Scholz: But your listeners would love that. I’m joking.

Miller: But the reason I bring it up is that the researchers have also found that, to the extent that there is currently an overall wealth bump from going to college, white graduates are much, much more likely to have it than Black graduates. And this has changed over time as college has gotten a lot more expensive, but for people who went to college who were born in the eighties, for white students, there is an appreciable wealth bump still. But for Black students, it’s almost negligible. It’s barely there, which shows just one way of a million to see racial disparities in our society, including in higher education.

Do you have a sense of what that looks like at the U of O?

Scholz: I do not. Again, tracking returns to college with wealth, we tend to observe wealth at points of time. And so one of the challenges with the Saint Louis Fed study is earnings premiums of college increase as one ages. And if you have a point in time snapshot on wealth, you don’t capture that divergence.

Miller: And that’s why you think that looking at people born in the 1980s may be an unfair version of it, as opposed to saying that society has changed and it will hold true for those younger graduates as they get older?

Scholz: I agree with you.

Miller: [So] you’re saying you don’t think they will hold true?

Scholz: We’re getting into methodology, and I don’t know enough to weigh in one way or another. But Black/white wealth gaps in society are a real thing. Earlier in my career, I wrote on it and college is one of the, probably, leading ways we have to try to ameliorate those gaps. But there are big generational differences in wealth. And so you see differences in inheritances between white families and Black families. You see differences in housing wealth. There’s all sorts of things. College is one of the ways to try to ameliorate those.

Miller: Do you think that higher education in this country is too expensive for the people who are going?

Scholz: I mean, higher education is such a broad sector. I think there are plenty of colleges and universities where it’s maybe not such a great deal. Places like the University of Oregon, I think, are a phenomenal deal. And I’ll repeat my statistics that nearly 60% of our students graduate without a single dollar of debt. The amount of institutional aid that we contribute at the University of Oregon is roughly the same size as that at my previous institution, even though our student body [at U of O] is about half what it was or what it is at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And so lots of institutions like the University of Oregon are doing their utmost to make college affordable.

Miller: Without naming names, because it’s unnecessary, you said that there are some schools where maybe it does not make financial sense. What are the categories of schools where you think it’s too expensive for the value? And I ask you this as an economist, as opposed to a fellow university president.

Scholz: Private for-profit institutions [are] not a particularly good sector of the higher education marketplace, I’d say, without trying to cast aspersions on people who are trying to do great work.

Miller: I want to turn to some of the political aspects of this because negative views of higher education have risen among all respondents to surveys. But there is a growing partisan gap. Conservatives and Republicans now are much more likely to be mistrustful of colleges and universities these days than people who identify as progressives or liberals or Democrats. What do you think is behind that?

Scholz: I think some have made the charge that the values held or embraced in our institutions are antithetical to the values of those who don’t have college degrees. I don’t think that’s true. But skillful politicians are able to use that as a wedge issue. I think what’s important, there’s a great misconception about how higher education is structured. So overwhelmingly, people think that we run for-profit businesses, for example. And institutions like the University of Oregon are nonprofits and, like all nonprofit institutions, are focused on our mission. And so there’s a lot of sort of misunderstanding of what we do. And as I said, there’s so much polarization in society. And we’re not immune to that.

Miller: So, where does that leave you? Because it doesn’t seem like a good trend for society if about half of the country starts not going to college.

Scholz: I agree.

Miller: I shouldn’t say that having negative views about higher education means people won’t go. But an increasingly polarized set of campuses around this country cannot be good for the country.

Scholz:  I agree, just as faith in political leaders going down cannot be good for the country or views about the integrity of elections can’t be good for the country or views of the media can’t be good for the country. And so what do we do? We continue to focus on our core missions and that is creating life changing experiences for the students we serve. Because then our graduates can be the greatest advocates and spokespeople for us, and their families and their loved ones and their broader networks.

We continue to advance knowledge and contribute to the state, the region, the world. And those who we touch will be our greatest advocates. We consistently, relentlessly, tell our story and get out of the ivory tower, so to speak, to meet our alums, to meet our civic leaders, to meet our faith leaders, to meet others. And as people see, people’s perceptions, even, are different, how you frame things, from higher education which polls terribly as you are saying, to America’s leading research universities and people are more encouraged about that. And so when people start to think, oh, we’re the places that do scientific discoveries to help get us out of a pandemic, to help slow aging, to help attack the mental health crises that are afflicting America. People start to feel better about us and it’s those kinds of efforts that we continue to make relentlessly.

Miller: I wanna turn to another demographic split in colleges and universities. And this has been happening for years, a gender split. But it shows no sign of abating right now and I think it’s worse than ever. There are more and more women on campuses and fewer men right now. At least last fall for the freshman class, 57% of the class were young women and 43% were young men. What does that mean for your university now? And in all universities?

Scholz: The gender split is a little less dramatic at the University of Oregon.

Miller: But that was at the U of O, last year.

Scholz: I thought it was 54/46.

Miller: But that was just for the freshman class last year.

Scholz: I see.

Miller: But I’ll check my numbers and if I’m wrong, I’ll post it on our website.

Scholz: All right, I appreciate that. But more generally, changes in the labor market have a pretty significant effect on gender composition of college going. And so as labor markets are tight, you see fewer men going to college and entering trades to a degree that’s different from women. But the story remains the same. We continue to talk about the value of higher education. We continue to work hard on our pathways programs to expose students in middle school and high school to what college is about and why college makes sense. And these things tend to have a bit of a cyclical component. And so I don’t think those gender differences will be an enduring feature of higher education.

Miller: Well, but they have endured for decades now.

Scholz: They have gotten more extreme in recent years, which I think is why you’re asking the question. But as there’s changes in the labor market and as there’s skills - as an economist, we talk about skill-biased technical change - I think we’ll see different patterns of college going.

Miller: It’s now been about three months since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. Enough time I think, to let the dust settle a little bit for people in your position. How do you think about that decision today?

Scholz: Well, at the University of Oregon, we’ve always embraced holistic admissions. And so the Supreme Court decision sets up some boundaries. But it does not fundamentally affect how we’ve been admitting the class at the University of Oregon. We, of course, will be following the law. But we will also seek to create a student body that is representative of the State of Oregon. And I think that’s necessary to do for the experience of the students that we serve.

Miller: People driving through Northeast Portland over the last year, I bet many of them have seen some of the many signs saying “University of [Oregon] this way.” They’re striking when you are driving through Portland, a place that people don’t normally associate with the University of Oregon. I mean, there has been a building in downtown Portland for a while now where some people study urban planning, architecture or other things. But what are the University’s larger plans now for Portland?

Scholz: Right. Interestingly enough, Dave, the University of Oregon has been in Portland for 150 years. And so, we’ve been committed to Portland. We recognize the success of Oregon depends importantly on the success of Portland. And we have a set of graduate programs in law, business journalism, design and education that have been in Portland. And now we’re able to move to the former Concordia College campus in Northeast Portland, as you say. It is 19 acres. It’s beautiful. We have housing, we have green space, playing fields and we can expand our footprint and make a bigger difference in Portland, both for our students for internships and for other jobs placement.

But one of the most exciting things that’s happening at Portland is the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. Now, for the first time, we have our first class of undergraduates who are coming. They spend their first two years in Eugene and then their 3rd and 4th years in Portland. What the Ballmer Institute is doing, it’s an audacious vision, because we have a child and adolescent behavioral health crisis in America. We have it at the University of Oregon.

And what we’re doing at the Ballmer Initiative is trying to create an entirely new employment category. Because right now, the specialists who work in this field invariably require master’s degrees or PhDs and there is simply not the supply of people to intervene in a timely way before they’re full-blown crises. And so what we’re trying to do, with the Ballmer Initiative, is create a new employee class of well trained, evidence-based people who can be embedded in the schools and pediatricians with just a bachelor’s degree to intervene before problems become crises.

Miller:That’s one undergraduate program, a new one that’s just starting up.  But is the overall goal to have Portland be to the University of Oregon what OSU Cascades in Bend is to Oregon State? A place where U of O undergrads who aren’t just in that program can study in Portland?

Scholz: No, we will keep things pretty confined to the areas that we have expertise in Portland. Sports Product Marketing, our Journalism programs, our Urban Architecture programs, the Children’s Behavioral Health. And so this will not be an omnibus satellite campus, all-serving of the University of Oregon. Rather we’ll focus on the specialties that we have here that make the most sense for Portland and the University of Oregon.

Miller: Finally, I want to turn to the U of O’s announcement that it’s leaving the PAC 12 to join the Big 10. When it happened, you wrote in a statement that, “The connections we will make with some of the leading public research institutions in the world will lead to new opportunities for our students, staff, faculty and university stakeholders, through the Big 10 academic alliance and other venues.” Are you saying with a straight face that having football players fly to games in Ohio is going to lead to collaborations between U of O, professors, scientists and their counterparts in Big 10 universities?

Scholz: Absolutely. I’m dead serious about that.

Miller: Can you explain? I truly don’t understand that.

Scholz: I welcome the question. And then, I wanna talk about the academic excellence aspect of this. But then I’d like to step back and say a couple other things about the move to the Big 10. But on this question of academic excellence, let me be clear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the Big 10 Conference and academic conference is necessarily better or worse than the institutions in the PAC 12. I’m not weighing in on that at all. But the Big 10, as a conference, has done things academically that no other conference in the country has done.

And that is through the auspices of the Big 10 Academic Alliance. So let me give you a handful of examples. The Big 10 has something called the Big Collection, where the libraries of the Big 10 share resources in ways that libraries elsewhere don’t. And you can imagine how difficult it is for every university library to have comprehensive collections in every dimension of human inquiry. And so what the Big Collection will do is say, all right, Michigan, you will specialize in Southeast Asia. Ohio State, you can specialize in South Asia. UCLA, you specialize in Africa collection.

And that way we can share resources, whether electronically or by shipping resources. I can get an item held at the University of Michigan on my desk, as an Oregon faculty member, in two days. And that makes us stronger. We share the teaching of less commonly taught languages. And so not every university can have a full sequence in Swahili, despite the fact that tens of millions of people in the world speak Swahili. And so we can have Michigan State teaching Swahili One. We can have Indiana teaching Swahili Two. Oregon can teach Swahili Three and multiply that across all of the less commonly taken languages across the globe. The Big 10 Academic Leadership Program has often been tried to replicate and no one has been able to do it. And so for someone who’s interested in being a department chair, a dean or a higher level administrator, this is the premier program in the country.

And lastly, the various vice presidents of the institutions get together two or three times a year to share best practices. These are the provosts, the chief enrollment officers, the chief financial officers. And that makes us better. And no one has been able to do that. And those activities will elevate the academic enterprise at the University of Oregon. That’s what I was speaking to.

Miller: But is it fair to say that, for you, this is a kind of academic cherry on top of a $5 billion dollar-over-10-year TV deal that happened because of that money and then you’re saying there are some academic benefits as well?

Scholz: There’s some significant academic benefits as I just said. And then there have been people who’ve characterized this as chasing money over mission. And I couldn’t disagree more. One, is the academic reasons that I just told you. But there’s three other reasons that are critical. First is stability. I don’t have to do the litany. But when USC and UCLA left the PAC 12, 40% of the media value of the PAC 12 disappeared with it. Colorado then left before a media deal was on the table. So full 25% of the PAC 12 had vanished.

Then there was a deal on the table. And my colleague Bobby Robbins, the President of Arizona, said, “The Apple TV deal on the table would be like selling candy bars to support your little league team.” Anna Murray from the University of Washington said, “When the best feature of a deal is that you can get out of it after two years, it’s not a very good deal.” So by joining the Big 10 Conference, we have found stability. We’ve joined the most stable academic athletic conference in the country. That stability is really important to us.

Miller: We just have a second so briefly. And then one last question.

Scholz: The second is visibility. So we are now on conventional TV in ways that would not have happened if we were having to buy add-on packages to Apple TV. And that’s indispensable for recruiting our classes.

And lastly, resources. Resources, of course, matter. But the University of Oregon has one of 25 universities where our athletic program is entirely self-funding. So I’m not having to ask the taxpayers of the State of Oregon or the parents of the children who come to the University of Oregon to pay for the athletics program. And I’m very proud of that.

Miller: If you could wave a magic wand and create a world of American universities and colleges where the heads of all these universities didn’t spend so much time thinking about the impact of TV deals for football, would you wave that wand?

Scholz: That’s a hypothetical. It’s hard to entertain. I live in the world that we’re operating in.

Miller: And what do you think of this world?

Scholz: Major intercollegiate athletics provides a wonderful front door to the University. We had more than 10 million people watch the Oregon- Colorado football game. That’s 10 million people exposed to the extraordinary setting that is the University of Oregon. It helps us with recruiting, it helps us with philanthropy and helps us in all sorts of different ways.

Miller: Karl Scholz, thanks very much.

Scholz: Thank you very much. It’s really been a treat.

Miller: Karl Scholz is the president of the University of Oregon.

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