'Skin in the Game'- The Economics of Higher Ed and the Student Loan Debt Crisis ft. Carlo Salerno

[00:00:00] Kriti: Hey guys, welcome to WhyFI Matter$! Real quick before we get to today's episode, if you consider yourself a GenZ, a teenager college student anything under that lens, it would be amazing if you could fill out a really quick survey that I'm doing about GenZ and podcasts. I'll have the link to the survey in the episode description, and it's going to be super quick, so it would be amazing if you could do this. Now onto the episode! Earlier this month, and I'm sure some of you might know about this, several elite colleges and universities were accused of colluding to reduce the financial aid they gave to students through anti-competitive behavior. And as soon as I heard about this alleged conspiracy, I wanted to learn more about the actual financial system of higher education. In the summer of 2020, I did do a few episodes on financial aid for prospective students, but now I want to learn more about the actual student loan debt crisis. And why are there so many people who have, who are in debt because of student loans, and why are colleges being accused of violating anti-trust laws? And what are the potential solution to this crisis? This is part one of two episodes where I hope to get answers to my questions and I am super excited to talk with Dr. Carlo Salerno, who is an education economist. Carlo has had over 20 years of experience studying the economics of higher education, and he's done research for the federal government and started his own education analytics company. Currently, Carlo serves as the vice president of research at CampusLogic, and I'm so excited to learn more about the financing of higher ed and some of the very interesting solutions that he has for the student loan debt crisis. I hope you enjoyed the interview.

Hi, Carlo. Thank you so much for coming on WhyFI Matter$ today. I am super excited to have you on the show. You're the first education economists that I've talked to, so that's the first, and I'm really excited to dive deeper into college student financing. And I guess you've spent your whole career dedicated to learning about this and then teaching others so I'm super excited to get into it.

[00:02:49] Carlo: Well, Hey, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

[00:02:53] Kriti: I want to start off what exactly sparked your interest in pursuing a degree in economics. But then on top of that, you also are interested in education. So what kind of led you to combine the two?

[00:03:10] Carlo: Well, that's a good question. I went to college a lifetime ago now. It feels like, but when I was in college, I found economics made better sense to me than anything else. A lot of other people did political science and sociology and for me, just the way. I think makes really good sense. And then as I started spending my time I realized that there are a lot of problems in education and there's a lot of things that we can do and that we can do better.

And when you're thinking about student loans, you're thinking about thousands of schools and billions of dollars of loans and millions of students. And so as a career, it just kind of made sense I think, wow, here's a place where I can do something. And even if I just help a fraction of that population, you're helping hundreds of thousands of students. So you're saving billions of dollars. So it just made sense.

[00:04:06] Kriti: Yeah I'm a junior in high school, so I'm obviously like thinking about what I want to do when I'm older. But as I learn more, I definitely really like economics. Like you said, there's a certain, like way of thinking. There's a really interesting intersection like you said, just like the amount of people who are in student loan debt and even everyday financing and just spending in college as a student, like all of that's interrelated.

[00:04:33] Carlo: I think you're right. I think you know, a lot of people when they hear they think, oh, inflation and interest rates and that's not what economics is. Economics is trying to make sense of the world when you understand you only have fixed resources, right?

We only have 24 hours in a day. We only have a certain amount of money. We only have, you know, X number of people to help us. And so economics is really just thinking about what do people do when they have scarce resources? How do they figure out the best way to do things? And so, it applies itself really well to education and to student loans and paying for college.

[00:05:10] Kriti: Exactly. So, can you take us through a timeline of your career? And right now you're working as the VP of research at CampusLogic. So can you tell us more about your current role and how you came to be where you are right now?

[00:05:28] Carlo: Sure. Like you said today, I'm the VP of research for CampusLogic. We're a software company that's based in Chandler, Arizona. I don't live in Chandler, Arizona. I live in Los Angeles. So my company what we do is we sell software to college, financial aid offices to help them make it easier for students to get financial aid while they're in school. Right. There are always forms to be filled out documents to be signed and paperwork, to be pushed back and forth. And what the company that I work for does as we help colleges make that process easier for their students. So, yeah. And so I do research for the company. So like you said, I'm in, I'm an education economist. I've been doing this for about 22 years now. I'm from Michigan. And I did my undergraduate degree in Michigan and then I went to Penn state and did a PhD. I lived overseas in the Netherlands for about five years doing education finance research for a European countries and African countries, which was lots of fun. And then I went to the government accountability office the federal government in like the mid two thousands. And I worked for Congress and I did research on paying for college and student loans for them. And I got bored because it was a big government job and I wanted to do something more exciting. So I started my own company and we did some education analytics. So we did a lot of financial modeling. We were trying to, we were trying to figure out like why people were struggling to pay for college. And we were trying to figure out ways to like, make that easier. And so, so I did that for a while. And then I worked for a large foundation that did higher education work and research. And then that brought me to CampusLogic, right. Ben for the past three and a half years.

So. I have spent a lifetime now whether it be in government or as an entrepreneur or with foundations or with even regular companies, just trying to understand why do people struggle to pay for college? Why is it so hard to make a good decision about where you want to go? Why don't more people complete college? Can we make it easier? Those are the things that I think about and that I write about and that I collect data and do research on. And then I go talk about it to anybody who will listen.

[00:07:46] Kriti: I'm excited to talk more about your writings, but I do definitely believe that CampusLogic, is filling this gap because filling out FAFSA I've heard is, extremely tiresome and frustrating and all of the different paperwork. The college process itself is all over the place, but streamlining one of the arguably most important factors to make in a decision is spending and how are you going to pay for college? And that process is not streamlined enough

[00:08:18] Carlo: yeah. And I think you're right. I think we, I think what you're saying is exactly right. That the way we pay for college is broken, and it's not normal, right. When we buy anything and everything else that we buy in life, the first thing we usually do is decide how much can I afford it? And we go out and we figure out how much money we have and we figure out what a monthly payment would be reasonable would be. But then, as you said, when it comes to college, we do exactly the opposite. We say, let's go find a college, and then months later, we'll figure out how we're going to pay for it. And that's, and we're going to use grants and loans and scholarships, and maybe some money that we've saved aside. And it's so complicated that, it's, it's surprising that more people don't know. Bad decisions. Right?

[00:09:08] Kriti: Exactly. So it's so strange to think about how flip-flopped it is. It's interesting because I, I do know some people who have lived in Europe, specifically Germany, and I know that like school there is all, it's all free. So why hasn't the U.S adopted this European model at all?

[00:09:34] Carlo: Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, you know, to start, there are people here who would like to make college free, right? There've been big pushes and you've seen President Biden talk about this, and there are other groups that have talked about free college. Bernie Sanders spoke a lot about free college. I think there's effort and this sort of agenda to try and make college as affordable as possible. And to mimic some of the things that you're talking about. The challenge with Europe and the United States is that it's a scale problem, right? For example, in the Netherlands, which is where I lived, there are only like 15 million people. And it's the size of New Jersey. Right. So

it kind of is. I agree, but no, but you're right. But the idea, is that in the United States, like education, isn't a federal thing, right? Every state gets to decide what it wants to do with education. So Vermont can design its own colleges and universities California can design its own and Illinois can design its own.

We don't have a federal system. Which means every state gets to do what they want and because every state gets to do what they want and they get to set their own rules, they get to do things differently, which is why we have these. Like, we don't have a big, common unified system, like in Germany or the Netherlands or France, where you can say, we're going to make all these universities for you. We're going to make the cost of college free. It's just, it's a lot harder to do in a, in a system like ours because the federal government doesn't have any control of those things. So, but it's a great idea, and it's doable and it's workable. We've seen other countries, like you said, do it right. Germany's always done this. You know, the Scandinavian countries are super affordable when it comes to tuition and fees. So we know that there's a model that works. It's just, you have to get used to paying the high taxes and that's kind of the big thing, right? That's the one thing people don't talk about is in European countries. Like you pay a lot more in taxes than we pay here. You get more things, but you pay the taxes for it. Does that make sense? Yeah.

[00:11:41] Kriti: Yeah, that's an interesting point to add. Does it relate to, I don't know if I'm pulling this from my history class and this is entirely unrelated, but state sovereignty, is that like why the states under the constitution, they're able to do some of their own different things in that sense.

[00:11:57] Carlo: Okay. That's a good, that's a good way to put it. Like the way we were taught and the way I talk about it to people is that you won't see the word education in the constitution because the founding fathers decided that education was not a federal issue. It was a state. And so because of the word education, doesn't show up in the constitution everything that isn't in the constitution gets relegated to the states. And so if it's not exactly, so if it's not talked about in the constitution, it's a state matter and states get to decide what they want to do. And colleges and universities are one of those things.

[00:12:34] Kriti: Exactly. one of the reasons that I really wanted to talk more about college financing is because of the recent antitrust lawsuit that basically said that a bunch of schools have violated the antitrust law in the financial aid process. Basically, I want to give sense to the numbers around student debt. And I have a few numbers here that I'm just going to read, but around 20 million students are currently enrolled in post-secondary institutions, but less than 60% of these students will graduate with a degree and more than half leave college with debt. So can you give us a breakdown and highlight the impact of what these stats mean? And also like, how are they detrimental to colleges and the economy?

[00:13:28] Carlo: Yeah, so the numbers that you gave are pretty right. Like we're talking millions of students. A lot of these students aren't going to graduate. The majority of students who go to college today, take on some kind of student loans to help pay for their education. And so if somebody doesn't graduate they have the worst of both worlds, right? They didn't get a degree, so they can't get the job. That's going to give them the greater wage. And they have a debt that they now have to pay back as well. And so this is the thing that we constantly ponder because college is expensive. Every single year, the tuition and fees and living costs go up and up and up. And even if you want to get a bachelor's degree at a four-year university, right? Like you're easily going to pay 40, 50, $70,000. There's only one way to pay for that if you're a middle-class family or a lower middle-class family and that's with loans. So, so we have a lot of people who are taking on a lot of debt, but unfortunately they're also not graduating. And this has been national crisis that people spend their time talking about. It's like, how are we going to saddle students and families with knowing that they're going to probably struggle to repay at some point down the road, if they don't get that degree. So the numbers you hit on are exactly the numbers that we spend our days talking about, trying to understand how do we fix this tide? How do we make it cheaper and how do we get more students to graduate? Right? Those are the two holy grails of education.

[00:14:59] Kriti: And so you've wrote several articles surrounding this, but I specifically wanted to talk about two, but this one in particular was interesting. It was called 'Skin in the Game' and I think you touch on some solutions that could solve this crisis. So I want to get into this article a little bit. So what do you mean when you say to impose skin in the game on institutions?

[00:15:26] Carlo: So when people it's a good question. So when people talk about skin in the game, what they really mean is the university or the college should have some consequence. If the students that enrolls don't succeed, right, there should be a cost or penalty that they have to pay, which means if their students don't succeed. They have skin in the game. They pay a price for the failure as well.

[00:15:50] Kriti: But like, how would you define success? Because what if the student didn't graduate, but then they went on to start a company or what if they graduated, but something happened or they lost their job and now homeless. Like, how are you able to define what success is after they leave the school?

[00:16:13] Carlo: Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And so I think what most people feel is that if I enroll in college I'm going there to get a credential, a degree, a certificate, whatever it is. Right. And so the standard test is at a minimum, I should get a degree. I should get something out of my experience there. And your point is a good one because a lot of people leave, right? Maybe I, maybe I enroll at Northwestern University and maybe I spend a year there and I just find that it's not a good fit for me. And I just decided, you know what, this isn't the right place for me. I'm going to go to Roosevelt university and step. That doesn't mean that Northwestern did a bad job necessarily. It doesn't mean that Roosevelt did a good job. It just means that it wasn't the right place for me. And that's what we should be spending our time in policy circles talking about like. How do you make sure people choose the right school the first time to begin? Right? That's the hard part. The hard part is finding a place that you love and that loves you back.

[00:17:20] Kriti: So basically imposing skin in the game is making colleges accountable for their students success later on after, right out of college.

[00:17:31] Carlo: Yeah. So, so here's a good way to think about skin in the game, right? Every single person who goes to college, right. They want to, you know, find a school. That they love, they want to enroll. They want to get a really good education. They want to learn something. They want to get a degree so that they can go out into the world and use it. And then they want to get a good job. And every college wants to find students that are going to be a really good fit for their school. They want them to enroll. They want them to get a great education. They want them to get a degree and then they want them to get jobs afterwards. And so colleges and students actually are really well aligned. Right. And so this is what I mean by skin in the game, because let's say Carlo university enrolls you and let's say you decide that you don't like it there and you leave. So now you leave and now I have an empty classroom seat, so I have to go spend some money to find somebody else to fill your seat. And maybe you're not happy. And so maybe you go out and you start criticizing me on social media. Which means now I have to spend more money on marketing to make sure that people think my school is still good. And maybe you took out student loans. And so now you have some debt and you don't have a degree. And so now maybe I have to hire a debt management company to help make sure that you can pay your student loans. And so what I mean is that when you fall off the track in this example, The school has, I have to pay real money as a school, right? I have to pay somebody. I have to figure out how to fill your seat. I have to spend money on marketing. I may have to spend money helping you, you know, pay your student loans. That's what skin in the game is.

Skin in the game means that when you fail, I pay a financial price. And so that's what we're talking about. And that's why. We want schools to have more of, we want schools to be really focused on this so that when students fail, they're just so hurt by it, that they will put all of their time and effort into trying to make sure their students don't fail.

[00:19:43] Kriti: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I was wondering if this is applicable to all types of schools in the U.S, because say you took, you talked about Northwestern, which is a very, very, very good university. And I think they have a lot of history. And if someone went there and then they started trash talking them after they dropped out. Don't they have enough of a leverage that, that wouldn't affect them that much. Would this policy would this policy affect those top university?

[00:20:18] Carlo: Yeah, that's a really good question. And the answer is it affects everybody long enough over a long enough period of time, but in the short run, right, it probably doesn't right. If somebody drops out of Northwestern university, there's probably 10 people that would be give up their arm to get into Northwestern university. Right. And so, in the short run when these things happen, there's probably a lot of people that the university doesn't pay much of a cost, but if you keep consistently having students drop out and drop out over time, there are going to be fewer, fewer students who want to go. And so elite universities as we call them, those sort of like nationally recognized high value universities. They probably can weather that a little bit more. And if you're in, if you're a no-name school or if you're a very not well recognized school, then you know, the cost is probably. And I think we want everybody to pay the cost though at the end of the day.

[00:21:14] Kriti: Yeah. I think that it's good if it applies to every type of school, because otherwise it kind of furthers that divide an elite university which I don't think more of that should happen. So what exactly, I think you touched on this a little bit, but what exactly is that price they're going to be paying.

[00:21:38] Carlo: You're right. I've already touched on this, but that's, again, the price of failure is that if I enroll a student and he, or she doesn't finish their degree I have to pay money for a whole bunch of activities. What I was trying to do in that paper was to say, well, here's an idea, what if schools had to co-sign for the loans that they make their students take out. If you wanted to buy a car and your parents, co-signed the loan for you, right. Your parents are probably going to make sure that you don't trash the car, right? Because they know that if you trash the car, they have to pay for it. And they know that if you lose your job and you can't make your monthly payments anymore, as the co-signer, they're going to have to make the monthly payments. And so, because they're going to have to make the monthly payments they are going to care an awful lot about you taking care of that car and you doing all the things that are responsible driver would do, and also making sure that you have a job right. To cover the car. And so the same logic that applies to school, right? Imagine. If I tell you, Hey, I want you to spend $30,000 in loans to come to my school, but I have to co-sign for it. Which means if you don't graduate, if you don't get a good job I'm going to have to pay those loans off. As the school, as the co-signer go, what would the co-signer do in that case? What would the school do in that case? It would make sure you've got a degree. They would also want to go to great lengths to make sure you've got a job afterwards. Right. Because if you have money to pay your own, guess what? I don't have to pay your loans. And so can we think of ideas that would make schools would always be responsive to students and would always have students' interests at their best heart and want these students that they enroll to graduate quickly with as little debt as possible and get jobs afterwards because that's why everybody goes to college to get degrees so they can get jobs..

Right. Yeah. We spent, we spent four years or eight years in college, but we spend like 30 to 35 years working. Yeah, exactly.

[00:23:42] Kriti: Exactly. In your article, you said you talked about income shared agreement. So I want to talk a little more about the pros and cons of implementing them, but also how they are different than say a college can co-sign on a loan because these are basically the two strategies that you came up with.

[00:24:04] Carlo: Yeah. So, so income share agreements are a very new financing tool. They're not widely adopted. There are some schools that use them. There are some companies that offer them, but in general an income share agreement basically says, Hey I'll give you some money up front today to buy something you want in this case college and in return, instead of paying that money back to me. How about you just give me 3% or 5% of whatever you earn for like say 10 years after you graduate.

Yeah, exactly. And so the idea would be like, I give you $30,000 to go to college. Maybe you turn out to be Zuckerberg and you make billions of dollars. Right. And so if you make a billion dollars and I said, okay, you just have to give me 5% of your income for the next 10 years. I mean, what's 5% of a billion, right? That's like $50 million, right. But the I, but the idea is, is that I gave you $30,000 and we're being silly here, but then I would get $50 million in return. That's an awesome investment. But I could have also given you $30,000 and maybe you struggled to find a job for the next 10 years. Maybe you couldn't find work. Maybe somebody got sick, maybe who knows what happened in your family life and personal life. But then, so you didn't earn any money. And so I got 5% of nothing, right? And that's okay, because you still you still fulfilled the contract, right? Your contract was never to give me $30,000 back. Your contract was just to give me 5% of what you make for 10 years. So what that means is that income share agreements are a great way to give people money, to do things and let the people who give them money, shoulder the risk of the success. Right? So like, I can give you $30,000. And maybe I can also give you a job afterwards, right? Because I want you to have a job because if you have a job you're going to earn money and you're going to give me 5% of what you worked for 10 years. Right? So you can see that there are ways to incentivize people and income share agreements, kind of look and walk and quack like a loan, but they're not loans, right.

Again, a loan would be, I'm going to give you $30,000. You have 10 years to pay it. And you're going to pay me back $30,000 plus interest. Right. That's different from an income share agreement. And so the reason why people like. The concept of income share agreements is that they're forward looking, right?

I'm making a bet on your future, right? I'm betting that your future is going to be rosy. And so I want to be a part of that rosy future, right? Loans are backward looking right. But alone, I say, I'm going to give you some money and I'm going to look at your credit history and see how likely you are to repay debts when people get, you. See what I mean? The problem is, is if you're 18 or 19 or 20, you have a really rosy future in front of you, but you don't have any credit history behind you. So it's really hard to give a loan to an 18 year old. Because I don't know that you're going to pay the money back to me because you don't have any credit.

Right. So this is why people struggle to come up with ways to help students pay for college, because. Like, I would love to give you a loan, but I don't know if you're a good credit risk or a bad credit risk. And if you're a bad credit risk, I'm going to charge you a lot of interest. And if you're a good credit risk, I'm going to only charge you a little bit of interest.

And so increasingly people are like, Hey loans for students really kind of suck. They're not really good. Can we do something better and that's what income share agreements are there a way to say, like, let's forget about somebody's credit history and let's instead give people money based on their prospects going forward.

[00:28:03] Kriti: Interesting. So you said a big issue about loans is the fact that students don't have a credit history. I know that right now, there is definitely a push in especially FinTech banking companies for teens to help teens build up their credit score. And do you think that say in the future more teens will start, having that history, do you think student loans won't necessarily be all that bad if that

[00:28:35] Carlo: of, yeah. So that's a good question. So to be clear today when you get a federal student loan from the government, the government doesn't care about your credit history, right? They just give everybody the same loan on the same terms. When I was talking about loans before I was trying to explain why income share agreements exist. So today, like whether you or me or any, one of our friends goes to college, we all can get a federal student loan at the same interest rate. There's no, there is no credit checks for any of that stuff. So, so the government gives out loans to people and it gives it to them at a really competitive rate. And again, Nope, there is no credit check. why that's important is because this is taxpayer money, right? The government uses our tax dollars and it makes loans to people. And then if we go back to the top of this call, when you said, Hey, like 20 million students go to school, a lot of them don't graduate. A lot of them have student loans, right? There are lots of people who don't pay their student loans. Because they. They struggle because they financially don't have the resources. And so the government cares about getting its money back the same way anybody else cares about getting its money back and so even though we give loans to everybody, the government still tries to collect on them. And so it's complicated. It's a really complicated thing that, you know, as, as teenagers and young adults build credit history I don't think that will ever affect student loans. I think we will always make sure that people have low cost student loans available to them.

Right. But again, when we start thinking about alternative ways to pay for things, We want to care about people's futures, right? And if you're going to, if you're going to focus giving money to again, young adults, teenagers, young adults, it's always going to be better to look forward than to look.

[00:30:27] Kriti: Exactly. So are you in favor of income, shared agreement over colleges? Co-signing student loans.

[00:30:35] Carlo: So that's a really good question that, you know, nobody has ever asked me. I don't know what I prefer to be totally honest with you. I think the short answer is there's a place for both. I think there are some schools that would benefit from having a co-signer students loans. I think that they would do a much better job of making sure their tuition cheaper, making sure students got out of school faster, helping them get jobs later. So I think there are some schools where a co-signer making them a co-signer would be great. I think we would get a lot out of it. And then there are other schools where there are some really neat opportunities where having an income share agreement might help somebody just do something they've never been able to do before, because you know what they're afraid of debt, right? That's the biggest problem that, most people have today is.

It's really easy for me to stand up and say, oh, take out $20,000 or $50,000 for college. But it's $50,000 is a lot of money to pretty much everybody. It's really easy to say, just go borrow it. It's really hard to actually do that though. So, there are people who don't want to take on debt.

[00:31:48] Kriti: Right. It's just like a mentality people don't want to be in debt to somebody. It just, just a feeling that I don't think a lot of people like.

[00:31:57] Carlo: That's right. I at the end of the day, like we want people to get college degrees because they're going to be smarter, they're going to be they're going to make more money, we know that people with college educations are healthier, they live longer. They're less likely to commit crimes. There's a lot of really great reasons for people to go get college degrees. What we want to figure out is how to make paying for it as easy as possible. We can't just tell everybody, Hey, you need a college education. Now go figure out how to buy it because it's really expensive. We need to tell people, Hey, you need a college education and Hey, here are several different ways that you can use to make sure that this.

[00:32:41] Kriti: Yeah. So as we're wrapping this up, where do you see this student loan debt crisis headed in the future? We've been through two years of this pandemic, that's definitely changed the way people view college and higher education in general. So, where do you see this whole issue going. And obviously there are some solutions that, economists and policy makers are, , discussing. And also how can prospective students like myself understand all of this?

[00:33:13] Carlo: Those are all very good questions. Let me start with the first, which is, I don't think that student debt is going away anytime soon. I think people will still be taking out student loans five years from now. I think people will still have student loan debt 10 years from now. Will it be. Probably, I think people are going to start enrolling in shorter programs and shorter courses. Right? I think a lot of the money that people borrow for college typically goes for living costs. Think of residence halls and dorms and all of those other things. I think people will find ways to make things cheaper there as well, too. But I don't think we're Europe yet. I don't think we're just going to start making college free for everybody cause it's very expensive. And given the fact that every state it's the decide what it wants to do, it's really hard for like the federal government to impose that rule. But if I were to think, like, if I was a high school student today, or the parent of a high school student today, and I'm thinking about college and the college investment in front of me look college on balance is a good investment, right? There's a great payoff to go into college. Some kind of training is absolutely important. Do you need to have the on-campus leafy lawn on college football games on Saturday experience to get that? No, you don't. It's nice. But do you need to spend to have all of that? Not in every circumstance, right? Again, the long game is the college will eventually for every single person being nothing more than a line or a box on our resume. We'll spend four years in college or eight years in college. But at the end of the day, the rest of your life, every job application is only going to ever ask you. Did you go to school? Where, and what degree did you get? And that's it. And 99% of your resume will have nothing to do with college. So college is important for getting you in the door and getting you started on a career. That's gonna make you happy. But should you mortgage the bank for that four years? I don't know that you should. My advice would again be just be thoughtful and think the long game, right. It's really easy to enjoy several years of college life. But you'll be much happier with 20 more years of like really good adulting. Do you know what I mean?

[00:35:38] Kriti: I liked that, I feel like everyone's just like, oh, college is the best four years of your life, but you have to also plan and think about what's going to happen after. And those can also be really fun. So, what exactly would be your advice to your 17 year old self? And this can be in terms of anything.

[00:36:00] Carlo: I did not anticipate this question at all. Man, what would I tell 17 year old me? I think I would probably tell him I think I would probably tell him don't buy that new car, which I did when I was 17. And I would probably tell him also don't don't follow that girl. I think if I would have spent more time focused on school and my career, instead of trying to have a nice car maybe I would be doing something even more interesting today.

So in the grand scheme of things, Yeah. I

[00:36:33] Kriti: mean, I think what you're doing is very, very interesting and it's helpful for like society, but I think your advice was on most like real and like just honestly the most truthful advice that I've gotten on this show that made me.

[00:36:50] Carlo: Yeah,

[00:36:52] Kriti: thank you so much for coming on the show today, Carlo, it was great to have you here. I didn't know about colleges potentially co-signing or income shared agreement any of that, so that was really insightful and this whole notion of college having skin in the game and college being accountable for your future it's as if you're personifying the college in that sense. I think it's really interesting some of the ideas that you're working with. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:37:23] Carlo: Well, once again, thank you for having me. And yeah, like I said, these are just ideas, right? Like these are ways to get people thinking how to make college, a better place for everybody. Hopefully some of these things come true, but until then we get to do stuff like this, which is sit down and talk about them and know them. So thanks again for having me. This has been a really great time.

[00:37:44] Kriti: So that's the end of the interview and wow the economics of higher education is just so interesting. I think some of the policies Carlo suggested that could help the student loan debt crisis are really fascinating. And I wonder if they're going to be mainstream. You know, me and my peers, we get to college. If you have any more questions about this, or want to get in touch with Carlo, I have his Twitter in the episode description. Also stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where we hear from a professor of economics at U Chicago booth and talk more about the actual conspiracy or alleged conspiracy, and also learn about other solutions to aid. The crisis subscribe to the WhyFI Matter$, emailing lists to get all of these updates. Thanks for listening and I can't wait to talk to you next time!