First things first, id like to welcome beth to the Manhattan Institute where shes recently become a fellow. Prior to joining us, she was a fellow at the Brookings Institution center on children and families, and before that she was a taffe economist staff economist at the president s council of economic advisers and worked extensively on Higher Education policy. Second, id like to welcome beth back to new york. Beth received her ph. D. In math excuse me, her b. A. In math and economics from cunyalbany and her ph. D. From columbia university. Beths here to talk about her book, game of loans. Recently published by Princeton University press and written with matthew of the urban institute. So after reading beths book, i can assure you shes going to fit right in at the Manhattan Institute [laughter] where the scholars really delight in debunking poorly argued narratives in the press and the public debate. And beths book does just that. Its a timely corrective to the wildly exaggerated student debt crisis that persists in the media. Her thesis is that theres no broadbased student loan crisis that the New York Times and others would have us believe. And she makes a powerful, datadriven case that i think while also giving the reader a really broad and full accounting of the Higher Education finance and how it works. In light of beths analysis, i think its safe to say that Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders proposal to make college free is an indulgent solution looking for a problem. Beths book, i think, will be of enormous value to lawmakers, to policymakers, to university administrators, to parents, Prospective College and graduate students and concerned taxpayers and citizens because it explains things simply and clearly. Even if theyre things that not all of us or not Everyone Wants to hear. And ill take my own case. In our culture today, obsessed with selfesteem, no one likes to be told that theyre average. Well, from reading beths book, i learned that, well, i was average. [laughter] like other prospective students, young people from families of modest means, i made a decision to invest in my own future and took out what turned out to be, i learn now in retrospect from beths book, the average amount of Student Loans required to attend a selective new England Liberal Arts College in the eve 90s. I had little sense of how much id actually borrowed at the time or from whom. Then that woman, sallie mae, started sending me all these letters. [laughter] however, like other average borrowers, i also had little difficulty actually paying back the loans to my own surprise because it had seemed quite daunting at first. So much for the media narrative that all undergraduate borrowers are in deep trouble. I also learned another hard truth from beths book. When it came to graduate school, i learned that i was, in fact, well, below average. You know, taking i was below average in the especially is of the amount in the sense of the amount of loans it took me to complete my ph. D. In this case, fortunately for me, being below average actually turned out to be a good thing, and this is because as beth shows one of the most disturbing elements of the world of Higher Education debt is the amount thats taken out by graduate students. So, look, i could go on about the virtues of beths book which are many, but let me just end by encouraging all of you to pick up a copy at the book stand. I gather that theyre for sale outside, and if you dont pick one up there, i suggest amazon or the equivalent online, and as i say, i think theres a lot to chew on in the book, so without further ado, let me welcome beth akers. Beth . [applause] well, thank you, dan, very much for that generous introduction. Im thrilled to be here, meaning here at the Manhattan Institute and part of this great organization, but also here today to be able to put some of my ideas into your ear and hope that they stick. So thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. So it sounds like, you know, you already heard what the book was about, but ill do my best to fill in a little more of the detail and kind of sell you on some of my argument here. Ooh, i think you took the first page of my notes, which is going to make it [laughter] i was going to say, thats not the first idea i wanted to talk about. [laughter] so i think its helpful when talking about the book to start back before the book started and give you a sense of why i wrote the book, why i embarked on this agenda of research in the first place. So i joined the think Tank Community about five years ago. I had just finished graduate school, and i was studying economics in a pretty theoretical department. So i had this new experience of having reporters call me, and i had to pick up the phone and answer whatever questions they threw my way which was a fun and daunting exercise. One of the questions that i found that i was asked almost daily through that process was is a student loan crisis on the horizon. As i just said, i had come out of graduate school at this point, so i was intimately familiar with the academic literature on the financial returns to investments in education. I was somewhat familiar with the headlines that were pervasive on the issue of student debt, but it wasnt as obvious to me why the media was really obsessed with this question about a student loan crisis. We were just a few years out from the mortgage crisis, and i believe a lot of people were drawing parallels between what could happen in Student Lending and what we had seen happen in student mortgages. So using the economic lens that i had been given in my training, i was imagining a Higher Education in the lens of it was an investment that pays off over the course of a lifetime. The estimates that we have on the academic literature suggested if you think of education that way with and aggregate across all the experiences americans have had over history, over the past decade the financial returns to this investment have held steady at about 15 . Okay . So a 15 rate of return, and i knew full well that the federal government was making loans at sub subsidized Interest Rates which range at least currently about 46 . So if you think of it in this way, think of it again in the lens of a longearned investment, youve got students making an investment with a pretty decent margin, a large margin of return at least for the typical borrower. So it seemed obvious to me that there was a huge dissonance between the way people were talking about student loan debted in the popular media, in the policy world and the evidence that we had to support that conversation. And so this really inspired me to embark on this agenda of research that was aimed at, one, reconciling this dissonance that i saw, but also just giving more descriptive evidence to what was happening in the student loan market more generally. So what does it look like. Just for a bit of an overview. So the first thing we know that more people are borrowing today than have ever borrowed in the past. Is so only only some of the most recent data tells us among young households, 40 are currently holding some form of student loan debt, and thats up drastically from two decades earlier when just 14 were. We also know that people are borrowing more than, so during that same period of time, over the past 20 years, the average debt has more than tripled for these same young households who are holding some level of student debt. And the statistics that weve all heard over and over and over is those two things have amounted to an outstanding student debt burden for this nation of 1. 3 trillion. Again, we heard the statistics over and over, but the discussion generally stops there. So instead i say lets consider applying a different lens to this. Think of, we think of investments in education as paying off over the course of a lifetime. We can think of these increases in debt, in fact, as a symptom of increased investment in education which we know pays dividends both to the individual and to society. For instance, when we talk about the 1. 3 trillion in student loan debt, we rarely talk about the increases or estimated increases in gdp that will result from the increased productivity from the investments in Human Capital that have taken place. So this is the right way to be thinking about investments in Higher Education and what needs to be done, if anything, with our Student Lending situation. So what else do we know . In contrast to the general understanding, the outstanding the very large outstanding student loan balances are, in fact, exceedingly rare. Only 7 of households have more than 50,000 in student loan debt, and just 2 have more than 100,000 in student loan debt. And, in fact, the large balances are held by the folks who have very lucrative graduate and professional degrees and also have high incomes. Of course, there are individuals who do not have high earnings who have high incomes, but generally speaking, this is the trend we observe in the data. Among bachelors degree holders, less than 40,000 is the norm, and less or greater than 60,000 is largely unheard of for individuals who have just attained a bachelors degree. So its easy to understand why the media has focused on these very high balance borrowers, in contrast to the more typical experiences that are far less newsworthy. I sometimes imagine what the headline would look like if instead these stories or were accurately portraying whats happening, and i think it would look Something Like student borrower gets well paying job after college and faces affordable Monthly Payments. [laughter] it sounds a little bit like an onion article headline, in fact. So i think the problem is that the truth in this case is not as catchy of a headline. And weve been able to quantify this, in fact. So in 2014 someone did a study looking at the popular Media Coverage of student loan debt. They looked at a hundred recent articles, and the average borrowing for those individuals was in excess of 85,000 which is three times the actual average for borrowers. So if youre getting your information about what student borrowing in this country from the newspaper articles, youre going to have an inappropriate understanding of the issue. So burdens are not as large as we imagine them to be, with but the question remains, are they squeezing borrowers . On a transitive monthly basis, what does the squeeze look like for individuals . This is an important question to dig into empirically to really get understanding of what this looks like. What we find when we look at the data is that the average Monthly Payment that a borrowers facing is under 300, so 276 a month. That amounts to 7 of their income, and the median is even lower, 4 . And that has actually declined or held steady over time, so the monthly squeeze of these types of debt has actually declined or held steady depending on if youre looking at the mean or the median. So this is actually an incredible finding, largely in contrast to what i think most people believe. Things are not getting worst, at least on a worse, at least on a monthly basis, for this borrower. The other thing that we uncovered with this work is that the struggling borrowers are not who you think they are. Again, the newspaper covers these stories of these high balance borrowers, and were all led to believe these are the folks who need help. The highest rates of default are amongst borrowers who have less than 5,000 in debt. At least statistically speaking, we know those pay off with large dividends. So the problem is not where we believe it to be. So generally speaking, i draw the conclusion that, in fact, we do not have a crisis in Student Lending in this country. At least not the crisis that a lot of folks have been talking about. And what i like to say is that instead we have crises. There are places where there are very Serious Problems with our federal lending and Student Lending system more broadly, but it is not appropriately characterized with this notion of a student loan crisis in which the sky is falling on all borrowers and every dollar of debt makes an individual necessarily worse off. So who are the people who we need to be worried about . It is the people who have made these investments in education but do not see those returns i have been talking about repeatedly. There are people who are upside down on their Student Loans, okay . A and individuals have a very difficult time accessing the benefits that are currently available to them and as a result we have millions of people in this country who are in default on their Student Loans despite a very robust system that does exist. We also have an information crisis. So we expect in this country consumers to access the entire Education Market but we want them to make savvy choices and to cost analyst unfortunately we dont give them the information thats necessary to do that so the government is Holding Information on the financial returns to every institution in this country but because of its lack of Data Availability consumers are not able to use this to assess the options that are available to them. Also we know the information problem exists after citizens are in school with the borrowing issue as well so in survey data we know that if you ask people who are enrolled in school how much they are paying to be enrolled in school only half of them can tell you within a reasonable margin of error. If you ask them instead how much they have borrowed only about one third of them can tell you within a reasonable margin of error and the people we know that our borrowing again the survey, 28 will tell you that they have no doubt at all. So these are earning facts especially if we wish for this Higher Education system to look like the market because we know that the market cannot exist if the consumers are not operating with information. So not to criticize the narrative at this book if you do believe there are crises are issues in the Higher Education financing space is why be dismissive of the notion of a crisis . At least its being bringing attention to the issue. The argument is clear that ms. Characterizing the problem that exists in the state will lead us to the wrong solution and solutions that do not provide relief to people who needed the most. As an example one of the most prominent policy reforms has been discussed in this space is refinancing about due to loan debt reducing Interest Rates on all of the outstanding volume of debt that folks are holding. This sound like a great idea off the bat for providing relief to the people who are struggling the most but in fact if you take a second look at it we know again that the bar worse who have the most debt are the most welloff, at least on average so the positive relationship between income and debt means that this is a largely regressive policy and does not succeed in helping people who are really struggling with those debts. So in general the popular discourse on this issue is missing the necessary nuance that is needed in order to create reasonable and appropriate policies. Generally we are missing the point that not all debt is bad debt. Debt in which the bar were ends up upside down is concerning and debt that enables an education that pays off of the positive return is less concerning. We need to capture that in our policy discussion. In order to characterize what we should be thinking about it being the conversation needs to shift away from the number of dollars people are paying for tuition and the number of loans people are borrowing to pay for tuition and this is an investment that amounts to a gamble. Some people are going to win and some people are going to lose. We need policy to be focused on helping the folks that would rather gamble to lose than propping up with an general. I will stop there and i think we are going to open up to some questions. [applause] i have been asked to help out with some questions so lets start right up here with this gentleman. Please wait for the microphone. What are the default rates currently on Student Loans . Its a difficult question to answer unfortunately again to two Data Availability in this space. We can measure to year and three year default rates. I dont know the specifics off the top of my head but currently we have about 8 million u. S. Borrowers who are in default on their Student Loans today. Many of them if we could shift them into a payment which they are eligible for but again the information barrier people are unaware of the benefits that are available to them. [inaudible] i dont know the total number of borrowers off the top of my head. Was go to this gentleman here on the left. Im just curious whether you look at your data in the context of the majors that they take . Increasingly on campus as we refine measures like median studies, black studies, gender studies usually the argument you hear at least that ive heard and im an academic is that if you are medical school or Computer Science and its another thing quite different if you are in a field that doesnt pay very much in the world work for starbucks and never paid off so the question really is is there any effort to align that with what they are studying and if they look at it what has to be paid if you are majoring in media studies. Yeah, sure. My research has not looked at this but others have looked at it and of course the financial returns to different degrees are exactly what you would have imagined. The returns im much greater for s. T. E. M. Said engineering economics mathematics goes to really blow when it comes to the rate of return type measure. Our current lending system is really inconsistent with the notion that you suggested so frankly we just dont have underwriting so the creditworthiness or the likelihood of repaying is not a factor and a lot of people i believe argue that thats the way it should be. I would not make that argument in fact. In the discussion of Higher Education washington there seems to be theme that we dont want to drive individuals into a particular program of study because we will have under subscription and careers that are important for society and this is used as a rationale for not giving people access to financing regardless of their future ability to pay. I would argue that in fact it does disservice to taxpayers because it leads to more defaults and we would see otherwise but its also a disservice to individual borrowers so to not tell an individual through any mechanism that inhumanity they are likely to pay less and less likely to pay it back as someone in the s. T. E. M. Field. Maybe we could take the gentleman right here. Hi. You started off your talk with a statement that i very much agree with that loans are really an investment paid off over the lifetime of the individuals and then you talk about a 15 return on this. It might be paid off over the lifetime of the individual but in actuality it only has to be paid off within three years, five years, i dont know. The standard is 10 years. So how do you deal with that difference and tell us more about how you got this 15 return on it. Is it the s. T. E. M. Or the steam . C to 15 rate of return comes from a study that was published at the new york fed and it was the average across all folks who completed a an associate or bachelors degree. Im sorry, you asked the question. I guess the first had to do with the fact that if are you advertising over the lifetime of the individual or the lifetime of the lone . Exactly. The practical constraint means in theory the individual being able to pay it back the financial obligation over the course of their lifetime and doesnt match the term of the loan to the term of the assets which is the increased earnings capacity. In practice the borrowers are default that at least in the federal program into a 10 year repayment plan. They can consolidate loans if they have enough going to a longer third year plan and then the income driven repayment plans have people paying back their loans over 20 years. The way that monthly applications have changed over time because we were concerned in fact that in theory we are expecting people to pay back over the course of a lifetime which is not matching the practice but we looked at the squeeze it was caused by the mitch match a mismatch wayside had not increased over time and it was a relatively modest burden. I personally would like to see a longer payment period for these loans. I can tell you that folks to our participating in a policy discussion around this issue in washington are not keen on this idea. There seems to be a reaction to the idea that someone would pay off their obligation over such a long period of time. I dont think its a theoretical objection. I think its more of an emotional objection and the fact that behavior evidence suggests that people make different decisions when they are carrying debt or have an emotional burden i think to balance those two things what is he optimal and what is attractive is the way that people perceive the stats. Thats right up here. My name is ron, thanks beth. I just had one question. I think we can all agree that there are a series of crises going on an underlying issues that are swept under the rug because everybody is buying into the idea that just like real estate is part of the American Dream, everybodys entitled to an education. However think the biggest failures the data and the transparency or the gentleman in the black blazer with brought up the great points there different pricing mechanisms that should be taken into consideration before the debt is consumed and thats our biggest failure. One thing you didnt mentioned is if we are looking at this as a product in the marketplace why isnt there more Equity Financing focus and one of the companies that we Just Launched is focusing on income shared which we believe to be the future organic methodologies solving if not reducing this bubble of 1. 3 trillion. I know thats not in the name of your title but equity is a possible future for us. Absolutely. We do actually talk about income share agreements as a potential future solution in the book so for those who may not be familiar with the concept of Financial Concepts or maybe people in new york are more familiar than the audience in d. C. But this is the idea that a student would be in theory or in concept at least selling his share of their future income to an individual who gets the money up front to make their tuition on the front end. This is a theoretical concept that was first introduced in the 1950s as an appropriate way to think about supporting investment Higher Education. The clever thing about income share agreement in the thing that makes me the most excited is income share agreements essentially operate over the Financing Mechanism and is an insurance mechanism that talked about making the investments but do not see the 15 rate of return or end up with worse off. And income share agreement is an elegant way of providing relief to the individual because the contract that the individual pays back a portion of their income over time so they are protected from the full extent of the downside risk. We have Seen Movement in the air with innovation happening with income share agreements so perdue has an increased a program which is the first institutional he indoor income share Agreement Program and so researchers are very anxiously awaiting the data from that Pilot Program by having students respond to this as an alternative to traditional Student Loans. Im very excited about whats happening. I think we will see more private institutions getting into income share at treatments. There is not a Regulatory Framework to support thats i think the investors are bit squeamish about putting money behind these Financial Instruments that may be predatory in the future. Its a space im watching and im very excited about as well. Beth my understanding is one of president obamas policy initiatives was to in effect nationalize the Student Loan Program that is take private owners out of it. Is that correct . Do you the Obama Administration do that and have a followup. Sure, rhetorically yes, that happens. We used to have a system of federal Student Lending that had two strands. The federal government financed some fraction of the federal student loan in the air stepped in and financed the other portion of that. So it is true with Health Health care reform it was simultaneously passed. I will say before i let you give your second question that it is a mistake to think of that system as really having any more characteristics of the marketplace than the system we have in place today. Even though private lenders were participating in originating in financing the Student Loans there was no pricing mechanism to the other point it was made earlier. The terms for these loans were set by legislation just as they were the federal loan so it looks like the market and it in fact was not a market. The followup then is to that policy change work . Was it effective or should we be looking at bringing the private sector back into the student loan business . Sure. It worked in one sense. Because that program in particular was not well designed it was more expensive for taxpayers to administer loans through the private lender that it was through the federal government. That said i think there are ways for the private sector to be more involved in Student Lending that would improve efficiency in the market. For one i would like to see the government stop making parent plus loans and graduate Student Loans unless the private market takes off that loan volume. In terms of getting private lenders into the federal Lending Program is a bit dicier. I think there are ways to think about the federal government subsidizing loans. Government subsidized loans we have a Record Number of failure. Without a federal loathing system we would have been sufficient investment in Higher Education generally so we can rationalize that but the question is how to do that. An alternative way to doing that rather than having government administer the laws the way they do now as the government could offer Interest Rates so if you allow the private market to exist private loans could be driving all the Student Lending thats happening but give each borough borrower and interest vouchers or they can shop around. I think we are trained to think about the private ways to get the private lender back into the space but theres a lot of opposition because of what happened with the way was previously designed and largely recognized to be an inefficient and wasteful program, unfortunately. Beth, thank you for your remarks. One of the things i see as a companion issue on this is these nonprofit colleges and universities and the taxpayer it looks like we are going to be assuming a lot of that debt and perhaps misrepresentations. Does your work look at where this debt and a disproportionate number of students that attended the forprofit sector . What we have found is didnt loan repayment looks very bad that these private institutions and so i should say in theory years ago i was making the argument there is no reason theoretically speaking the forprofit institutions can provide the same quality of service as a nonprofit republicans edition. In practice we didnt have a lot of evidence one way or the other on that issue for a long time so we had to debated in theory. That changed two years ago now. The Treasury Department obtained some of the data were available for public consumption and when that happened they released a report that showed very clearly that the repayment, the repayment success for students coming out of forprofit institutions was far, far worse than students coming out of Community Colleges or comparable public institutions. So yeah i think we do need to consent be concerned about that. Our current regulation of institutions i think is insufficient. When the federal government looks at the temperatures stay then they federal program of landing in france, we have some quality measures are Student Outcome measures produced in that determination but they also use accreditation as an indicator for whether or not an institution can participate and get access to taxpayer funds. The Accreditation Process is broken. Its based largely on inputs so what does an institution do on a daytoday basis . It turns out and i think we are starting to see over and over the insufficient way to think about creating a gate between these institution in the taxpayer dollars to the federal aid programs im hoping that discussion continues in washington. I have lost track of the fact that a loomis of was coming up with a scoring system where there had to be a publication of Graduation Rates and return and it seemed like the Free Enterprise crowd got the upper hand and removed the thought of having some kind of transparency and accountability. Wheres that whole issue ad and in your mind is that a good idea or a bad idea . This is a Big Initiative that happened maybe two years ago now the administration came out and announced we are going to create this Information Portal for consumers. We are going to put Graduation Rates and earnings in things like that we want consumers to be looking at when they are shopping for colleges and at the same time we are going to. Institutions. Wasnt clear what that meant exactly if they were going to get the ab or c excellent or good or whatever rating it was but when i came out i argued very strongly that i didnt think the government should be in the business of putting quality ratings on an institution but i thought very strongly also that the byproduct of this initiative was more data behind the Rating System because i figured in practice a lot of people would dismiss those writings anyway but at least consumers would have access to the data that was used to create those ratings. In fact what happened is the data became public. Unfortunately it has a long way to go in getting perfect data out there and then they dropped the idea of putting forth quality Rating System. I kind of one in terms of what i hope to get out of it. Lets go to the back. Are the lenders suing the students . My story is when they default they say i cant pay and a lawyer at the bank says you have a mom and dad that of cosine then they go to mom and dad and they say youve got to get some kind of a loan to pay us off. Is that for real . What you might be hearing about is whats happening in the private markets of the majority of volume of outstanding debt comes from the federal program because Interest Rates are lower than the private market but that means you still have a gap in their financial need they will turn to private lenders. The common practice for private lenders at the graduate level is to require a cosigner for that loan. So we do have a lot of instances where people are very upset to realize they are on the financial hook for an investment that they help their child and we are starting to hear a lot of stories about that. Unfortunately its a Consumer Loan like any other just like an auto loan or a personal loan so we would anticipate the same repercussions and i dont think people are cognizant of that when they go ahead and sign on that line. Again this information are brought up before. Lets go all the way back to the middle. There seems to be an explosion in tuition rates across the country without any concomitant increase in quality of education but with a direct correlation in administrative expenses, administrators in general. Have you given any consideration to the lack of discipline on the part of universities in terms of tuition rates which seems to be related to the ease of financing education in terms of the amount of loans . Yeah, absolutely. Theres almost no question that the availability of federal aid is driving up the price of tuition so people refer to the more subsidies that are available the more the increase in tuition. If we draw our supply and demand graph and introduces subsidies you have elastic demand you are going to have an increase in price of institutions are able to increase their price. I was a real theorist in terms of thinking about architecting only way to see the world i would say students are willing to pay this. That must suggest that its worth it. Its not a good argument and its not a good argument because the asymmetry that we talked about before. Why do i think inflation is continuing to increase is that we have an environment where we have encouraged people to go to college essentially at any cost. We have told people that a bachelors degree is essentially part of the American Dream now and we have not been good culturally in terms of the narrative at telling people that when you think about going through college think about it as the cost benefit analysis and when you shop for an institution compared the outcome one verses another relative path to the cost of one to another. We have consumers that are not not we have institutions who are aware of a subsidy generous environment. We have students who dont appreciate that loans are in fact not grant and all of this to me is whats leading to this dramatic inflationary environment we have been Higher Education. I honestly think that our past first step in addressing it is to get consumers to be more savvy with their dollars. We cant continue to perpetuate the idea that college at any cost is a good idea. In fact we know from the evidence that is not and a lot of people are making this gamble and the less market discipline we have an up week continue to go in that direction we are going to see more and more inflation. Right there at the first table. Please wait for the microphone. The probability of getting a job and making a decent salary if you decide to take some ridiculous some coarser study that doesnt necessarily lead iraqi to a job. Yes, absolutely. I recently sat in a focus group of students and i think it sheds some light on my thinking about this. Of course im thinking of someone who is economic reminded that the way people are making the decision is what are the future opportunities to become available and what are the tracks that i would choose to go down that path. This focus group of students nontraditional students when you ask them why they were going to college or how they chose what to study they gave me this blanket answer which was they had been told a bachelors degree equals success so i think the narrative and the way the oaks are making decisions that lease for a segment of the population is really divorced from its way of thinking. Absolutely i would love to see a student be able to make decisions based on program of study so i talked about Data Availability. Currently we have Data Availability unemployment rates and earnings across institution so again thats the best data that we have data. I can in theory look at the set of institutions im considering going to. I know what the employment rate in the earnings are for those graduates. Why dont know is what engineering majors in that school and humanities majors. In order for it to work as a market and for people to use information to make savvy choices we do need that because averaging across those disciplines does not give people sufficient information but we also need to choose a culture of decisionmaking around collards of people who do not have the luxury of just following their heart and studying whats inspiring to them can make decisions that are likely to lead them to Financial Wellbeing in the future. The more people to go to college the more people that the hired to teach the courses. This does raise the cost. More students means more tuition dollars coming through the doors but yeah point taken. I think we have got time for one more question we will keep it right here in the center. I think we may be approaching the whole topic from the wrong end. These are loans to the institutions who have no skin in the game whatsoever. What do you think of every Student Loans carrying a 5 first loss exposure for the institution . For the student defaults the college pays the first 5 of the loss because the discussion so far as illustrated essentially students are ignorant. They are not informed consumers and its almost impossible to expect them to be informed consumers. The colleges know their business they are the ones who should assess the risk. Yes, so this is touching on a conversation thats happening right now that we are calling risksharing the i. D. Of the institutions that skin in the game. I cant get behind exactly what you propose that i can get behind something similar. The federal loan program is not really dollars going into the institution. The borrowers future dollars going into the institution enabled by the government. When it becomes a taxpayer dollar is when the student defaults if they do fall so especially essentially what we have for the federal government offering an insurance policy institution on the service they are providing so they say okay you are going to offer a degree of study whatever degree that of a payoff for your student we will ensure their bad outcome. This is a step leading directly to the institution and the argument you are making and i can get behind having a premium based system for the institution to pay for the insurance that they are essentially being provided. I think thats a reasonable way of thinking about this proposal thats on the table. Lets thank beth. [applause] and thank all of you for your terrific questions which made for an enlightening discussion and as i said before that this book is on sale outside. Please help yourselves. [applause] [inaudible conversations] im very honored to have a chance to be with you today and to be able to moderate our Wonderful Program on the death penalty. I am Michael Gerhardt a constitutional law professor and also i have the honor of being a scholar at the National Constitution center. We have three terrific panels today who are going to be available after the program to be able to sign their