Ivory Tower Page #4

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and they've turned into

these large businesses

that have structures around them.

They're mini cities.

Families do desire a lot of the amenities

that colleges have provided.

The proverbial rock wall.

To sustain those, colleges have to

borrow more money,

they have to charge more tuition.

To pay $60,000 for a college tuition...

You give momentum to this notion

of the student as customer

when you charge them

so much money for their education.

We tend to focus a tot

on student debt,

but over this last decade,

institutions themselves,

college and universities,

doubled the amount of debt

that they took on.

And in fact we've seen

more people be hired

that never step foot in a classroom,

and that's where a lot of the rising

cost of college has come.

Administrations seem

often to be the tail wagging the dog.

Some of our leading presidents

can be quite shameless

in the size of their compensation.

We're now starting

to question what we're buying.

Are you really buying a better,

higher-quality education?

It used to be,

you'd get to a public university,

it wouldn't cost very much to go there.

The University of California

used to have no tuition.

The tuition costs here in Arizona

used to be near zero.

And we need to get back to the point

where it's not a huge economic barrier

that you have to get over to gain access

to a world-class university education.

As a public university, our responsibility

is to take a broad cross-section

of talent from around our society,

move it forward with world-class

learning experiences

at the lowest possible cost.

A lot of people would say

that's not possible.

We say it needs to be possible.

ASU was ranked

as one of the top

public research universities,

but it also has another ranking

that many people think...

Party school.

It's funny, so we laugh about

this party school thing.

I mean, we literally laugh about it.

Our model for learning is the robed don

at Cambridge or Oxford

or the kid on the East Coast in

Boston or New York City or something

who's huddled around their lamp light

in the dark winter night.

When you live in a place

with bright sunshine

and palm trees and beautiful weather,

people think you can't be too serious,

but the whole party school thing

is just bogus.

It's the party school!

Come on, what are we doing right now?

It's paradise, baby! What's not to love?

ASU is a big school,

and of course people party and drink

and get crazy and all that stuff. Um...

But you don't have to.

They say that ASU is, like,

"one of the top party schools"

according to Playboy or whatever.

The average ASU student

comes to get drunk out of their minds

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