Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling is a live call-in radio program providing doctrinal dialogue, cultural commentary, and insightful interviews with some of today's foremost Christian authors and leaders. Knowing the Truth is the outreach ministry of the Mountain Bridge Bible Fellowship located on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest. The goal of the church and the radio program is to seek the glory of God in the salvation of sinners and the sanctification of the saints. by the Ministry of the Word. For more information, go to www.knowingthetruth.org. Here with today's edition of Knowing the Truth is Pastor Kevin Bowling. Hey, welcome into this edition of the Knowing the Truth radio broadcast. This is Pastor Kevin Bolling, so glad that you joined us for the broadcast today. On today's broadcast, I want to talk about March Madness. And you're listening, now you're going, wait a second, they're re-airing one from March and the pastor has now digressed. to talk about basketball. No, that's not what I'm talking about. We're actually just a day away here from Thanksgiving. This is a live broadcast taking place. And what we're talking about with March Madness is the student march that was taking place on college campuses where the students were demanding This is how it's worded, demanding the right to free college education, the right to free college education. Well, you know, when I hear rights articulated, typically, you know, we talk about right to life and right to free speech and so forth. I don't normally hear mentioned in that list the right to a free college education, but this is what they were marching for. Now, you may have missed that. There was a lot going on, on college campuses even, and so it may have gotten lost in the noise, all the noise that was taking place over a number of different issues around that time. But my guest today wrote about that subject on The Stream, www.thestream.org. You can go out there and read his article. The article was entitled, The Empty-Headedness of the Million Student March. And the guest today, my guest today, should know something about that because he's an author, a speaker, and a professor at California Baptist University. He's also the author of a best-selling book called Thriving at College. and another one called Preparing Your Teens for College. And his latest book is called Beating the College Debt Trap, Getting the Degree Without Going Broke. It's published by Zondervan. You can go out to their website, zondervan.com, in order to get a copy of it. I'm speaking about Alex Chediak. Chediak. I got it. Okay, Alex Chediak. And Alex, it's a pleasure to have you on the Knowing the Truth radio program today. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Do I get extra credit for doing your name somewhat correctly there? You do. That was very good, Kevin. It wasn't too bad. Believe me, I'm well skilled at mutilating guest names, and so it was iffy there just for a minute, but I got it. Chediak. And so our listening audience, let me spell it for them just so they have it if they want to look up, because you have a website, of course, that people can go to, which is yourname.com. So I want to make sure that they know about that. It's www. Alex Chediak, and it's C-H-E-D-I-A-K, chediak.com, and you can go there to find out more about Alex and about his book and so forth. Alex, walk us through your article that appeared out there on thestream.com, and tell us a little bit about what you wrote concerning what's going on on this particular college campus, but it was broader than that, college campuses in general. Yes, so basically the Million Student March, as it was called, had three demands, as you noted. One of them was tuition-free public college. Another one was the cancellation of all student debt. So there's about $1.2 trillion in student debt in the nation right now. They wanted all of that forgiven, and they wanted a guaranteed $15 minimum wage for all campus workers. And I just walked through each of those demands and explained why granting them is easier said than done. Well, let's start with that. The first thing you talk about in the article, you mentioned those three items, tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, and $15 minimum wage for all campus. And let's throw world peace in there at the bottom since, you know, they've got this wish list that they'd like. Let's just throw that in there, too. But you can then go on to talk about the idea, number one, of free public college. Tell us what you have to say about that. So the price tag on that is estimated, for the current students, about $70 billion a year to do free public college. And the problem with that is what you would be doing is essentially creating a monopoly power for the public colleges and giving them a captive market. It's hard to compete with free. So if you really made them free, There's no reason why their costs wouldn't continue to rise. Something can be free and also expensive. It can be free to the people attending, but expensive to the taxpayers. So that's one of the things I think the group doesn't really understand, that if you make it free, if you just tell the colleges, no matter what you cost to provide an education, we the taxpayers are going to keep on footing the bill. There's not a lot of reason why those schools would continue to see bloated bureaucracies and increased costs, which would then be an increased bill to the taxpayers. I think the issue there, though, is that there's not a whole lot of thinking about others in this march. It's about my bill and my debt. and, you know, just, I want my thing for free without thinking through the idea of what this will do to the country as a whole and the fact that somebody's going to have to pay for that education. There is no, just like there's no free lunch, there's no free education either, right? Right, exactly. And ironically, student responsibility, if we enhance and increase and draw attention to student responsibility, in this equation, that could lead to lower debt loads for all students. Because if the students are informed about how the system works, how paying for college works, and how they can maybe be wise about how much they pay for their education, then they'll actually be more savvy customers who will actually in turn pay less for college and have less debt. So taking responsibility away from students and putting it on the government or on the taxpayers will in fact go in the wrong direction, putting the responsibility more on the students. That's why I wrote Begin the College Debt Trap, to help students understand how the system works so that they can in turn work the system in a smart way and not overspend on their college education. It seems that this may be part of the new math or something or common core math, you know, that you go ahead and, you know, we want it all for free to the tune of 60 to 70 billion with a B. price tag, that's a tremendous amount of increased entitlement that we would then have in the country, which of course the country is already, the economy is lackluster to say the least. This would have a dramatic effect on those students then coming out hoping to get a job afterwards. right what's ironic is that right now community college if you have a come from a family that makes less than sixty five thousand you already have on average enough grant aid grant aid to cover tuition and fees for some of your other expenses we already have in essence free community college for those in the lower half of the income distribution uh... tuition-wise fee-wise not books not living costs but at least your tuition and fees and yet only thirty one percent graduate in three years so The problem is more of graduation rates, not access to education. It seems like when we talk about graduation rates, there seems to be more and more going on on these colleges that really, college campuses, that really don't relate to the learning. As you just pointed out, you know, a great lesson that they would be able to learn here with going to college is that you have to be wise about your financial situation in order to budget for it and plan for it. as your book points out, there's ways to do this if you're willing to be wise about it. There would be a great lesson for them, a good economics class on just doing that, real-life experience on how to manage your money. Instead of doing that, though, We're going to teach them how to pout and stamp your feet and march in the streets and demand that you get something for nothing. And boy, that's exactly the wrong lesson that we want to be teaching. Exactly. And what I found, Kevin, as a professor, is that students who have some skin in the game, who are putting at least part of the bill themselves they actually care more about their grades, they care more about studying, they care more about learning, and they care more about developing a resume that can help them get into the job market and stop spending and start earning. So those students in turn end up doing better by virtue of having had some skin in the game. It makes them better students and better people. We tend to see all of these other things that are free, as you've already pointed out, but that the quality then goes down. when there's no skin in the game for the student, you know, the quality on their side of applying themselves and diligence and so forth goes down. But we could expect to see, I think, then the quality on the other side of the desk go down as well, wouldn't we? Would we see the quality of teachers that would be involved and so forth? Would there be an impact there as well? Yeah, I think so. If you gave monopoly power to public colleges by saying, We're going to make it free to students no matter how much you charge, no matter how you do things. Then you're going to see the fact that if they're guaranteed students because it's going to be free no matter what, that kind of monopoly power creates a bloated bureaucracy and encourages wasteful spending, as we see to some extent in the kindergarten through 12th space and in public education. at the in high school and junior high and and and elementary we basically have monopoly power so what happens is those schools don't have incentive to innovate and that's given rise to the charter school movement and the homeschool movement those movements have all increased as parents are looking for alternatives uh... because you have basically monopoly power so yeah i do think that we can equality decrease if in fact uh... We gave the public colleges that monopoly power. Yeah, we've seen at that level, at the K-12 level then, that when the government is in charge and running everything, that it was very difficult then to gauge who was doing a good job and who was doing a bad job. Additionally, the teachers had tenure and very difficult to even remove them. Even if something egregious was done, it was difficult to move them out of that space. But when the measures were put in place then to try to quantify or to qualify the quality of the teaching, that was taking place, you know, by the marks of the students and so forth, how many students were graduating. We found a couple things happened. One, we found that some of the teachers, I believe it was in Atlanta where that big story broke, was that they were fudging the numbers because they had all this pressure upon them that if they didn't keep up the pace that the school could be closed down and so forth, so they were fudging the numbers. And in other cases, we find out that there's a lot of pushback from the teacher unions then that there shouldn't be any marks like this, any sort of benchmarks that are used, that it isn't fair to the teachers and we don't understand how the teaching process works. And so it seems that we just can't come to a way of measuring it or doing much about it to manage the quality of that education. I don't think we want to get into that now at the higher education level as well, right? Exactly right. And I think those who argue for a free public college do believe that if you put the federal government in charge, they will then drive quality and drive cost containment. But the reality is, in the K-12 space, what we've learned is that that really doesn't work very well. I mean, we asked, we've discussed a little bit about the Free Public College section of the article that you wrote at thestream.org at their website. Again, for our listening audience, the title of the article, so you can go out and read it in its entirety, is called The Empty-Headedness of the Million-Student March. And it's written by Alex Chediak. Exactly. That's right. I pulled it back again. Yep. And his new book is called Beating the College Debt Trap, Getting a Degree Without Going Broke. Again, it's put out by Zondervan, zondervan.com. You can go out there to find out how you can get a copy of it. We talked about the first point, Alex, free public college. The second point was canceling all student debt. What did you have to say about that? Well, the price tag is about $1.2, $1.3 trillion, and the money would have to come from somewhere. So what the marchers believe is that they can get the money from the higher income, people in higher income brackets, the top 1%, top 5%. But the amount of money you have to get is just too much. You wouldn't be able to get that much money from them. And what we know is that when we massively raise the tax rate, we disincentivize wealth, and people find ways to hide their wealth overseas, or in principle they could even move overseas. it just doesn't work to try to get that much money from the top of all the earners in the country plus what message would that send to today's graduates if you can rack up seventy thousand debt and get it all paid for what message does that say to the guy who worked three jobs through college and only had five thousand in debt We're basically disincentivizing responsibility. And so we'd be disincentivizing responsibility by bailing out today's generation of graduates. And what are we going to do 10, 20 years from now when the problem's just exacerbated? Do I have to do it again? At some point, you just can't keep paying for that kind of thing. We have to go the other direction and encourage personal responsibility, more informed students making empowered decisions. being intentional about how they earn money, intentional about how they spend money, and delaying gratification, being creative, and earning their degrees without going broke. That's what I talk about in the book more, how to do that. You know, we throw around these dollar figures, too, of billions of dollars. Government does it, you know, without even blinking an eye. But just to put it in a little bit of perspective, remember, for our listening audience, you know, a billion is a thousand million. a thousand million. So two billion dollars. You could have sent your wife out Christmas shopping and told her that she could spend a million dollars a day beginning on the day that Christ was born here when he came to earth in human flesh. She could have spent $2,000, I'm sorry, $2,000,000 or $1,000,000 per day from now until our current age, from then until now, and she would not have come back and asked for more money to keep going. So a little bit better perspective, a billion seconds ago was in 1959. Jesus was born, as I mentioned before, was alive a billion minutes ago. So now we're talking six billion dollars just for the education then. That's just one billion is the number of minutes. If you put it in minutes rather than dollars, then Jesus would have been alive here on the face of the earth a billion minutes ago. So it's just a staggering amount of money. And of course, we're talking about a country that is somewhere around trillion dollars in debt. So it's just something obviously that we can't afford to be doing, but that doesn't seem to stop everybody or anybody. It seems like we go back to that same trough to more of a political issue where they say, well, let's get it from the wealthy. Let's get it from the millionaires and billionaires. They've got the money. We'll go ahead and get it from them. Well, the truth is, they don't have enough money to keep up with all the times that people want to go back there and demand that they pay for something for somebody else. It's just not right. Let's talk about, now you talked about the idea of the cancellation of student debt. The last thing that they threw in here, which was kind of odd because it's really a different issue altogether, in my mind anyways. But they threw in the idea of campus minimum wage of $15 an hour. It seemed that they were throwing a bone to some sort of special interest group and not really sticking with their topic here. but i think that they were trying to grab onto the event that are happening out from the country and the minimum wage protest by i think uh... retail workers and others that are asking for up to two thousand an hour minimum wage they're trying to set jump in with that i think but what they're not realizing though is that When minimum wages go up on campuses, we hire fewer students. This is something that I've dealt with here in California, because California has raised minimum wages quite a bit in the last couple of years. At least more recently, we're now at $10 an hour, and I think we're going up even higher. What that means is that we cannot not hire as many students with our budgets, because if the minimum wage goes up by 10%, our budget doesn't rise by 10%. We didn't just start hiring the same number of students for the same number of hours and paying them more. We hired fewer students for fewer hours, and they get more per hour, but we have fewer students working. So that means fewer students getting access to being lab assistants, graders, tutors, TAs. And what that means is that fewer students get that first academic job. That often is what sparks their love for scholarship, intellectual creativity, going on to graduate school, and being able to pay their bills when they're in school. So we actually have more students wanting employment at colleges if the minimum wage went up. You'd have more students looking for that first job. That is such an important point, because I think along with the academic knowledge, the actual hands-on in the job is vitally important. I've met so many people that have something like a degree in civil engineering, and yet I find in the companies that I work, they'll be like working in the purchasing department. And then I'd be like, well, what are you doing here, you know, if you went to school for the civil engineering degree? Well, you know, when I actually got out there and started to do it, I didn't like it. And so it wasn't really what I thought it was gonna be. And so not a complete waste, but there was a lot of wasted time and a lot of wasted money because they didn't actually know what they wanted to do. And I think these more of an apprenticeship type approach allowing students to work in these jobs and get their, there's a certain amount of learning that can happen there that's outside the classroom that is vitally important. And I think that it would be a great shame if that got lessened because of this demand for more money in the minimum wage. Alex, the last part, last part of your article, we'll have to make it the last part of our interview today. What's the real solution then to this issue? yeah the solution really more not less personal responsibility more students shopping for value when they choose a college more students choosing them an academic major uh... based on an informed understanding of what the jobs are like in that major in that field and what the job prospects are more students limiting their borrowing based on a realistic sense of how much they're going to be earning when they're twenty two twenty three years old coming out of school more students starting college with adequate preparation and personal discipline to graduate in a timely manner, and more students working hard and working smart during college, leveraging their skills to earn above minimum wage compensation, and more students pursuing quality when they're at school, both in the classroom and out of the classroom, to develop resumes that are going to be strong that the pollution what do you think of former students making life choices that will drive down the overall level student debt Excellent. Alex, thank you so much for taking time out in order to talk with us for a little bit about your latest book, Beating the College Debt Trap, Getting a Degree Without Going Broke. We really appreciate you doing so, really appreciate you coming on today and just informing us about what's going on on college campuses and how people can do this, send their children or they themselves can go back to college and get the training that they need. Thanks so much, Alex. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Appreciate it. Okay, again, that was Alex Chediak. And Alex, again, as I talked about in the beginning of the broadcast, he's an author, a speaker, and a professor at California Baptist University. He's the author of a couple of books, a best-selling book entitled Thriving at College and Preparing Your Teens for College. And now this is his third book, I believe. And this one, again, is called Beating the College Debt Trap, Getting a Degree. without going broke. You can get it out at Zondervan. That's www.zondervan.com. And when you get it, you go out to their website, just put in Alex's name and you can get a copy of it. Again, he has a website as well talking about these issues. It's Alex Chediak, C-H-E-D-I-A-K.com. You can go out there to find out more. You're listening to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bolling. For more information about today's program, the radio ministry, and the resources we offer, go to www.knowingthetruth.org.