Note: This transcript was provided by a third-party servicer.
Mushtaq Gunja: Hello, and welcome to a special episode of dotEDU. I'm one of your co-hosts, Mushtaq Gunja, and today's episode is a little different. It comes from a conversation we recorded back in December in Boston. Jon Fansmith and I were there for a meeting of the New England Commission on Higher Education, and while we were in town, we sat down with Kirk Carapezza, who's the managing editor and a higher education correspondent at GBH News. Kirk's been reporting on higher education for a long time and has talked with a lot of people across the sector, including our own President, Ted Mitchell, and several of us here at the American Council on Education.
We talked with Kirk about what feels different about covering higher education today, why so much of the reporting focuses on a handful of high-profile campuses, the national debate about cost and value, and what Kirk is seeing on the ground at the schools most students actually attend. It was a great discussion about the challenges colleges are facing right now and some of those quieter stories that don't always make the headlines. Here's our conversation with Kirk.
And we're back today with a very special guest, Kirk Carapezza, who's the managing editor and correspondent for higher education at GBH News. And I don't know if you're a friend of ACE, but you interview many of us.
Kirk Carapezza: Yes. I interviewed Ted Mitchell over the years when he was at the department and now at ACE. Terry, Molly Corbett Broad, all longtime sources. And I find ACE to be a trusted source that speaks for the industry at a time when sometimes the industry wants to just put its head in the sand, or the individual members want to put their heads in the sand. So I appreciate you guys being the voice for the industry when it's a hard time to be covering higher education.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, this is going to be a fun conversation, and maybe we can just start there. You've been covering higher education for a very long time. And Kirk, what feels different about covering higher education in 2025 than it did, let's say, 10 years ago?
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah, it's changed. I mean, I think we're all aware of public perception, the polls. I was just looking at one Gallup poll that came out that said only 35% of Americans say that a college degree is now very important. That's down from 75% a decade ago. It seems like we're in uncharted territories in a lot of way, and even if you just go back a decade ago when we launched the desk, a lot of the public narrative was student loan debt, and it just seemed like that was the one story over and over and over again. Right now, it's the political attacks on higher ed, rising costs, growing political interference, declining enrollment.
I mean, these are the things that we just hear over and over again. And I think what's changed is that it's in the national news. When we launched the desk, I'd have to fight to get our stories into a national newscast. Now, it seems like it's rare when higher ed isn't in the national newscast. And the way we talk about higher ed, I think, has changed, too. The public has become increasingly skeptical. I think as we've been covering the beat, we try to avoid all the ... Not avoid the politics at the national level, but keep it grounded in what's actually happening on college campuses. And we do that by filtering all pitches and all stories through certain themes.
So I look at stories that involve access and affordability, innovation, new business models. The big theme really for my desk is what I call global competitiveness. So we're always asking the question, are we providing enough high-quality, affordable degrees to remain globally competitive? There's the debate, the perennial debate, is college worth it? Our take on that is, yes, of course, college is worth it. 70% of the jobs in this country are going to require post-secondary education. So it's really about how do we get there? How do we make sure that college remains affordable and accessible to more Americans?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I might jump in there, too, because I think that's an interesting place that there is so much discussion about higher education in this increasing conversation about, is college worth it, right?
Kirk Carapezza: Right.
Jon Fansmith: You're in this really unique position of the people we talk to, at least, of you are trying to explain what's going on to a broader audience, and especially with this administration and separating out even the politics. There's just a lot of noise in this space, and certainly, it's not a shock that members of the public increasingly say college isn't worth it despite all the economic data saying, "Oh, no, no, no, it's definitely worth it."
Kirk Carapezza: Right, right.
Jon Fansmith: So doesn't that present an enormous challenge for you to explain what's happening when people are coming in with more and more messaging around them, maybe some more firmly preconceived notions about what's happening?
Kirk Carapezza: Totally. Right. And their ideas of what college was like when they were in college. I think of my dad's generation, he paid for his college education with a summer job, so he looks at the cost, and he's like, "What happened to this industry?" And that's a fair question to ask, but I do think with the noise, this administration has set its sights on schools like Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. And it's my job, I think, to remind people that most people do not go to those schools. In fact, only 15% of Americans go to a four-year residential college. 40% of Americans go to community college.
I'm sitting here in Boston where you can walk in any direction from the studio and be on a college campus, and it's probably going to be a four-year campus. So I'm constantly reminding my audience that, yeah, you might have some relation to one of these schools. You went to one of them or you work at one of them. But the reality is most Americans aren't going to these schools, they're going to state colleges, regional universities. So we're constantly trying to get out of New England as best I can. And most of my reporting I can do from here. But I remember in 2016 when Trump was first elected, we're here in solid blue Massachusetts. I think a lot of people in my newsroom were blindsided by Trump's first election.
And my editor and I decided to read Hillbilly Elegy and they sent me to Ohio to report on Sinclair Community College, where there's a real estate tax in Montgomery County, chaired by the taxes, chaired by the Democratic mayor of Dayton, Ohio, and the Trump-supporting sheriff of Montgomery County because they know that in order to remain economically competitive, that community college needs to remain affordable to the people who live there no matter who you voted for. We also went to Montana where there's a statewide real estate tax that funds public universities. That, in my opinion, that story of what our higher education system actually looks like, isn't told.
Mushtaq Gunja: Kirk, when you think about what college looks like today on campus versus what it looked like when you were on campus or when your father was on campus, what do you think is the biggest difference? Oh, actually, let me put it differently.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: What do you think the public most misunderstands about what life is like on a college campus today? And let me break it up into your four-year residentials, and then let's say our community colleges. That was one of the breakdowns you had. What's life like that the public doesn't quite understand?
Kirk Carapezza: I think when I ... I'm dating myself now, but I'm going on a couple decades since I was in college, but the message when I was in high school was just go get a four-year degree and you can do whatever you want. And that was, you could do it without taking on too much debt. The idea was like, "Oh, then you could go to law school," or I remember even when I started on this beat, I was reporting on Hampshire College, which is one of these small four-year schools that's struggling with this business model, struggling with enrollment. And I think after the Great Recession in 2008, a lot of families started thinking, "Is this a good investment?"
It doesn't make sense to go to a four-year liberal arts college, not to single out Hampshire, but Hampshire's one of those schools where there's no majors, you're rolling the dice when you do that. In my opinion, we need more Hampshire graduates, we need more Ken Burnses, people thinking outside the box. Unfortunately, that business model is really hard. They used to tell me when I'd asked them to make the case for the ROI for a Hampshire degree, the message 10 years ago was, "Oh, well, we send a ton of people to graduate school." That's no longer a selling point, I think. I mean, it's really ... Now there's so much focus on, you are here to get a job, and that's the number one reason why people go to college now. It's to get a job or get a better job.
And part of that is the cost function, if you're spending that much money. Even though very few people are paying the sticker prices, the discount rates are now 60% on average for these four-year schools. I think that's the biggest change is the consumer has become more savvy and wants to make sure that the degrees lead to a job. And I think, unfortunately, that's horrible for certain departments because there's no clear link between I was a history and Italian major.
I love that. I use it every day. It informs my reporting and how I think and see the world. But I think more people are deciding like, "Well, it might be easier just to be a computer science major or economics major."
Jon Fansmith: Well, and this is one of those things that ... So as a history major myself, I'm with you on that, and I find it really ... I talk to employers a lot about this idea and the perception of value and what they want. And especially with the growth of AI and the fact that you're starting to see computer sciences is a great feeling. It actually has a pretty high unemployment rate relative to other fields, in part because a lot of the coding functions and other things that you used to have to hire a person to do, now AI is doing, and they can replace that function.
And so employers are telling us, "Look, the skills you get in the liberal arts are actually the kinds of things we ..." If you teach somebody a skill, it's obsolete in three years. If you teach them how to adapt to new technology, how to think, how to communicate, how to process information, those are the kinds of things that are employable. And yet at the same time, I think the public has very much gotten this message like engineering, I'll get a job, computer sciences, I'll get a job.
Kirk Carapezza: Right. Or you did two years ago.
Jon Fansmith: Right.
Kirk Carapezza: And now with AI, it's ... We just did a story about looking at Wentworth Institute of Technology where, four years ago, they had a ton of people going into computer science and hoping to get that lucrative career. And now they just launched a whole degree called Adaptive AI, where they're trying to future-proof their learning. So you're learning about AI, and I think that's what I'm focusing on now is we all know the threats to higher ed and the challenges facing these institutions, but what do they do now?
We just did a story about Brandeis University, where they're adding a second transcript. I think that's the future is a transcript that just shows you what your courses and grades are isn't good enough anymore, especially at Harvard, where 60% of the grades are A's. Richard Freeland, the former commissioner of higher education here in Massachusetts, and former president Northeastern, always said to me ... And he was a huge advocate for what's called the competency-based education, measuring what students actually know and know how to do. And his whole thing was, we know these kids were smart enough and maybe wealthy enough to get into Harvard, but what does that degree signal? And I think that's what these schools are being forced to do now.
And it took a crisis, right? It's several crises actually at once. It's cost. It's growing political interference. It's declining enrollment. We've been talking about the demographic cliff for, what, 20 years now. We knew this was coming. Most schools didn't do anything to prepare. I mean, you guys tell me, did any schools really prepare for this moment?
Jon Fansmith: Some schools did, but certainly, I would not say the majority prepared with the idea that they'd ever see the actual cliff hit them.
Kirk Carapezza: Right. And who can blame them? I mean, most of them are just trying to meet enrollment for that next year, and they're competing for this shrinking pool of students. And I don't think anyone could have predicted that new international enrollment was going to drop 17% in 2025 because of visa restrictions and anti-immigrant rhetoric. This is a perfect storm and it took a crisis, but I think in many ways, it's forcing schools to do things that they probably should have done a long time ago. And we're seeing it now, and I love doing stories. It's a really innovative time.
When you get to the messy middle of higher ed, when you leave the Ivy Leagues, because those schools are going to be fine, or even Brandeis University here in Waltham, the president told me we have a $1.4 billion endowment. We could have just coasted along for years, spending down our endowment, discounting tuition-
Jon Fansmith: Without changing the model, right.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah. Discounting tuition 60% as enrollment slowly drops off, but they want to do something because they believe in their mission and total Brandeis bias. My dad is a Brandeis graduate, and he's the first in our family to go to college, and it changed the trajectory of our family. And granted, he paid for it by working at a local bakery in the summer. But the mission of Brandeis, like a lot of schools, was to increase access to higher education for ethnic minorities and women after World War II. And in the 1950s and '60s, Italian Americans in Boston were ethnic minorities, and it changed the trajectory of our family.
And I think, unfortunately, that has become less of a guarantee when you roll the dice by going to a four-year college. And until the costs are under control and schools are able to answer families' honest questions about whether it's worth it and they're getting a good return on their investment, we're going to see more families vote with their feet.
Jon Fansmith: And I'll just recommend to people listening, if you haven't already, you should read Kirk's piece on what's going on at Brandeis. I mean, I'm not just sucking up to you because you're here talking to us. It's a really well-written but also fascinating story about what Brandeis is doing that I think will be really interesting to a lot of listeners.
Kirk Carapezza: And we should say ... I mean, we highlighted Brandeis because it's here in our backyard, but other schools are doing similar things, too. We've reported on them recently. Clark University is undergoing a similar reorganization, and we went down to Atlanta last summer and looked at what Georgia Tech has done with its College of Liberal Arts there. It's fascinating. I mean, they're just leaning in a little bit into the career training. They're not saying that you need to stop teaching Victorian literature, but we talked to one professor there who's been teaching Frankenstein for years, and no one was taking her Victorian literature course anymore.
And they said, "You know what? Keep teaching that, but let's just rebrand it as bioethics and culture." And she enrolled a ton of pre-med students and computer scientists who are going to be writing all the code and apps that we're going to be using someday. And she just said, "Look, there's lessons that we all can learn from Frankenstein." It's not changing that much.
Jon Fansmith: The substance remains the same.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah. Right.
Jon Fansmith: That's right.
Mushtaq Gunja: Give us some advice, Kirk, because-
Kirk Carapezza: You came to the wrong place.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, you said you didn't have advice for us. I'm going to ask for it anyway because-
Kirk Carapezza: Three questions.
Mushtaq Gunja: Kirk, what's tricky here is there's a bunch of things that are true all at the same time. So when I look at the unemployment rates for folks with bachelor's degrees, and when I look at the unemployment rates for recent college grads, they're very low. I mean, that has been the case since the Great Recession. It's particularly the case now. There's a slight uptick in recent college graduate unemployment, but for the most part, students, especially those who are completing college, have very high employment rates. They're out earning those without a college degree by a substantial amount on a weekly basis, and certainly, lifetime earnings are that way, too.
When you look at what the net price is that students are paying, and I'm just going to contrast that with sticker price just for a second, but when you look at the net price that students are paying on average, it's up, but it's not up significantly more than inflation. So I mean, the outcomes look on the whole, pretty good, and we have a completion problem, no doubt. And yet I'm not arguing with what the public is feeling about what is happening in higher education and value proposition. What's going on, who's to blame, and how do we-
Kirk Carapezza: I think a lot of it's out of college's control. You can't control issues like affordability, the cost of living in cities like Boston. And that's the-
Mushtaq Gunja: And let me just jump in here just for a quick second because that is a very important thing that a huge part of the cost of going to college are things that are about things that are external to the university. So healthcare costs, the cost to own a car, the cost of housing or things. I mean, the college might be able to help a little bit on the housing side, but a lot of those things are outside the control of the college.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah. I think the sticker price is ... And we've done reporting on this, and some of our best stories, I think, ask very simple questions like, why are schools discounting 60% on average, or here in New England, a four-year private schools for first-year freshman students, I think the discount rate is something like 70%. It would be great if all these schools could just reset their sticker prices. Unfortunately, what we found in our reporting is that the way the American psyche works is people think that if it costs more, that it's more valuable, even though there's no research that backs that up.
Mushtaq Gunja: Right.
Kirk Carapezza: And I think that's ... I'm not an economist, but that would be where I start the growing cost and the increased cost and the political interference. Colleges won't be able to control that in a lot of ways. It's become a punching bag for the Trump administration, but I think control and cost would be the number one thing, and making that argument, showing that what you're paying is actually closer to what they're spending. I'm not sure how they get out of that because this arms race has just gotten out of control, where they're all competing with each other for the same shrinking number of students.
In many ways, the way I see it is these schools, for a while, they were almost tearing each other down a little bit as they were competing with each other. And now ... And you guys have done this, I think, a little bit with your Higher Ed Builds America campaign, actually realizing that banding together to make the case for the industry might be more effective than having schools compete with each other. Even around here in Boston, I commute on the Mass Pike at 93 every day, and there's always a signup that says, "Come to the University of Maine for the cost of University of Massachusetts." That competition is a death spiral for the industry. And I think that's ... Unfortunately, it's going to be forced upon them. I think we will see ... I agree with the economists who think that we'll see a ton of consolidation in the years ahead, mergers, closures. And that's ... I think some of the predictions are as high as 20% of schools will close or merge.
I'm not sure if it'll be that high, but I do think, unless the costs come under control, people are going to see ... Yeah, the unemployment rate is or the unemployment rate's low for recent graduates, but a ton of graduates are underemployed, at least right out of school. And so that's where they start to think, "Well, is it worth it? If I'm paying all this debt and I have a job that doesn't necessarily require anything more than a high school degree, was it worth it?" That's the predicament that a lot of these schools find themselves in.
Jon Fansmith: So can I take this in a little bit of a different direction, more in the line of the things that I work on? I'm really fascinated. So we have seen something that I think is relatively new in the higher ed world, which is that in part because of this increased attention and this increased politicization of what goes on on college campuses, we've seen this, maybe I'd call, the new media environment, where you can have a student who has a disagreement with a faculty member. Suddenly, through social media, governors are intervening. Then the national media is covering it because a governor has weighed in on an incident on campus, and it becomes a national news story overnight.
And certainly, we've had situations in which faculty have been disciplined or fired. We've had presidents who are forced to resign as a result of things going on on the campus. You're covering all this. In some ways, a lot of this seems intentional to draw that outside attention. I mean, you've talked about focusing on the things that matter.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: I think a lot of people would argue these are not necessarily stories that matter to most people, and yet they're the ones that we keep hearing more and more about. Is that a symptom of social media? How do you, as a journalist, trying to get the word out to your sister about the things that should matter to her, filter through this, and treat that? Because if you're not covering you talked about, the stories you spend the least amount of time on get the most of eyes on them.
Kirk Carapezza: Right. You're talking about the campus crazy stories, the Fox News, Tucker Carlson headlines. Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: It starts on the blog somewhere, or the email to somebody, and whatever else. Yeah.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah. I mean, I try to avoid those stories as much as possible, to be honest, because I see them as general assignment or just like cotton candy. There's no sustenance to it. It's confirmation bias. People already think that these schools are woke or too liberal, and if there's a case or an individual professor who says something and it's caught on videotape. So I try to avoid those as much as possible. I mean, if you take the most recent example in terms of what I would describe as a flashpoint story in higher ed, the Larry Summers case. I ate my words two weeks ago when I was speaking at a conference in Baltimore at the Complete College America Conference, and I said, "Oh" ... It was just starting to percolate about the emails.
And I think I said something like, "Oh, that's a general assignment story, I probably won't cover it." It's a comings and goings. I usually don't cover those controversies. Of course, when I came back to the newsroom the next day, my team was like, "Oh, we want you to cover the Larry Summers story," and I agreed to cover it as long as it was from an institutional perspective, will he or won't he keep teaching.
Mushtaq Gunja: So what is one story that folks aren't paying attention to? So you don't want them to be paying attention to what was going on at the Harvard Dining Club.
Kirk Carapezza: Right.
Mushtaq Gunja: Give me one.
Kirk Carapezza: The demographic cliff is the biggest story, in my opinion. We just did ... Not to be that guy who's like, "Listen to my podcast," but listen to our podcast. College Uncovered, produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, we did a whole series of stories about the demographic cliff. It's just such a huge story and it affects everything. And I don't think we fully understand exactly how much of a challenge this is going to be for regions like New England, where the number of 18-year-olds ... I think the number of high school graduates peaked when I graduated from high school here in Massachusetts, and it's going to drop off next year, 18 years after 2008.
And I think what schools do now is just a huge story. I mean, here in New England, the only population that's growing is the Latino population, and we don't do a great job of recruiting and retaining Latino students on our college campuses. So I think that's a major story in the years ahead. What I love about it is it's not just a business story or a demographic story. It affects the workforce. It's race, it's class. There's so much wrapped up in that story. And another one that we've been paying attention is how that will change admissions. We've done a bunch of stories about directed missions. There's this ... Again, going back to myth-busting. There's this idea out there that it's really hard to get into college. No, it's hard to get into a few colleges. It's actually ...
Jon Fansmith: Small percentage of schools, yeah.
Kirk Carapezza: ... really easy. 80% of colleges, I think, admit more than half the students who apply, and it's getting easier to get into college. That's a really fascinating story, I think, especially now when we've done reports on reporting on mental health issues, and the stress, and the anxiety that this generation's struggling with. I think reminding them that it's actually easier than you think to get into college, and your life doesn't depend on which college you go to. Jeff Selingo's done a lot of good reporting and writing about this recently.
I also just think stories that slow it down. I've done some, what I call, Trump adjacent stories, where schools like Brown are responding to the criticism and trying to recruit more students from rural America. And they've got the resources, and they're part of a network of schools that's going out and actually flying students to their campus so they can see what Brown is like. And some of these students have never been on an airplane. And what I loved about that story is that I try to be a fly on the wall and not project politics into everything. I just stood there for an hour as these 30 students from all over the country were in a dining hall at Brown. None of them talked about politics. Donald Trump never came up. They were talking about what most of us talked about when we were 17-year-olds. Getting your license. I think Taylor Swift album had just come out. And just ... I think reminding people of that. When we put that on the air, it's a breath of fresh air.
Jon Fansmith: Just personal curiosity. Weirdest story you've ever covered.
Kirk Carapezza: Oh, man. Weirdest story. Again, I love the stories that just answer a simple question. The stories I hate to cover are college closures, like Mount Ida shutting down here in Newton, was a really weird story to cover because there were no warning signs at the time. And that was a shock. And it was weird because for the first time, family started calling me asking, "Oh, I'm thinking about sending my kid to this school. Do you think it will still be open in four years?" And so we actually did ... We did a whole podcast on that topic on how do you know whether your school will still be open in four years? And there are things you can look at.
Jon Fansmith: Sure.
Kirk Carapezza: So that was a weird one in its own way. I love, again, getting at ... I love telling stories just about how higher ed works because ... You guys probably disagree with me, but I think it's a relatively opaque industry that people don't really understand how it works and certain things.
Jon Fansmith: I don't disagree at all, actually.
Kirk Carapezza: Okay. All right. So my former general manager here at GBH, Phil Redo, came up to my desk one time and my whiteboard had a bunch of stories on there that I was working on. And he goes, "Oh, you should" ... He said, "Forget about those. Do stories just ... Why is the course catalog so long?" And I thought that was just a great question to ask. And I convinced the academic dean at Amherst College to walk into the archives with me. And we pulled the two archives ... We pulled the two course catalogs out of the archives, one from, I think it was like 2018, and one from 1968. And the whole piece is just me and the dean going back and forth, and her defending every single course in the new catalog, which is twice as long as the one from 1968.
Jon Fansmith: That's a good dean.
Kirk Carapezza: Yeah, she was very ... Yeah, Catherine Epstein, thank you very much for playing along. And we got that one on the network. And again, emotional reaction to that kind of thing. That's the kind of story that ... And it was just a quick explainer about how faculty have taken over the course catalog, and they teach whatever they want, even if it's like French avant-garde poetry from 1870 to 1917 or whatever it was. But they defended every single one and they made the argument, going back to your point, Jon, that it's about, doesn't matter what you're teaching necessarily, as long as students are learning how to communicate, how to think critically, how to adapt, now how to be digitally savvy.
And I think the more schools that lean into that and measure those competencies and can prove that they're really giving those students those skills, they're going to be the ones that survive will be a very, very hard few years.
Jon Fansmith: Well, Kirk Carapezza, we are lucky as an industry, as a nation to have you covering this. Please keep bringing us your weird and interesting stories. Please keep covering what matters.
Kirk Carapezza: Thank you for listening to them.
Jon Fansmith: No, and this has been a pleasure, and I hope that you have enjoyed being on the other side of the microphone.
Kirk Carapezza: This is kind of nice. It was nice not have to ask all the questions. You know what I mean? Welcome to GBH. Come back any time.
Jon Fansmith: Mushtaq's got the voice for it.
Kirk Carapezza: Oh, yeah, exactly.
Mushtaq Gunja: If you have any openings.
Kirk Carapezza: You just need a name.
Mushtaq Gunja: Definitely the voice, if not the face.
Jon Fansmith: Thanks again, Kirk.
Thank you for joining us on dotEDU. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is important to us, and it helps other policy wonks discover our show. Don't forget to follow ACE on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes and other higher education content. You can find us on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And, of course, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us at podcast@acenet.edu. We love hearing from our listeners, and who knows, your input might inspire a future episode.