make it. and we re not educating people to that purpose. and voc ed is not just about plumbing or being an electrician but computer engineering and all the new skill sets related to the digital economy where we need to have an educated expertise. the new cover of time reinventing college. rick stengel, thank you very much. that s a real chalkboard, by the way. is it really? the artist did that and we photographed it and we had to close it early because you can t change chalk. that s true, you can t. all right. rick, thank you very much. thank you, rick. more morning joe in just a moment. s
going up because there s fewer there s less government support for it. but one of the things you see in private four-year colleges is that it s become a kind of vicious cycle to justify the costs, they build beautiful gyms and theaters and then they say, well, how come you re charging $45,000 a year? they say, well, we have this beautiful gym and we have to pay these brand-name professors. you know, one of my bugaboos is tenure. that s an issue in high schools as well as colleges. is the efficiency of professors what it should be? are they teaching enough? are they teaching in the right way? you know, you re paying that much money to have your son or daughter out of your own money to go to college, you really want to have something that actually is pretty darn practical. so we have we have a poll that we did with the carnegie corporation and the gates foundation looking at how regular people look at look at this, 80%, colleges are not worth the money. regular folks think that
56 or almost 60% of all jobs will require a college degree. and yet there are people talking about fewer people going to college and why do so many people have to go to college. and even that image of the classic college student, a young person at a four-year college walking across campus and living there, that s only 15% of all students in higher ed now. 40% are in two-year colleges. another 35% are over the age of 25. so it s a whole new universe out there. and our cover story by amanda ripley is about these mooks, they re called, massive online courses. and she took a physics course online and talked about that experience. and one of the things about online courses that they do is they teach you the way you learn. you learn best at night. you can study at night. if you learn best early in the morning, can you do it in the morning. and it goes at your own pace. it interrupts you constantly because it shows that the brains of college students need to be interrupted every eight to ten
and then we also did a poll with carnegie among college presidents and educators and about 40% of those folks think that it s not worth it. i also want to say that today we re doing a one-day conference with carnegie and the gates foundation at the time warner center looking at these issues of access, cost, quality. and i ve got to tip my hat to the real person who is the prime mover behind this who is the head of the carnegie corporation of new york and a great educator, a great american. can i ask you thank god they re a great american. thanks for putting that in there. you could have been a republican congressman. he s a great american! so let s talk about do you get into votech? do you get into vocational training and kids that don t decide not to go to college? because you know for years we had this attitude like oh, you
and so much of the traditional education is basically like it always was. you know, a person standing in front of a blackboard during a lecture. you say colleges are going by way of magazines? well, i do think in a way? it s funny, if you look at every business, that old core, whether it s the movie business with theaters and colleges with bricks and mortar campuses or stores with bricks and mortar stores, so much of what was once the center is now being eroded by digital, by other platforms. and it s a kind of creative destruction which is often beneficial. what do you do about costs, rick? because they ve exploded above and beyond the rate of inflation. it s not just expensive to get in but even if you do get in with a loan, people are saddled with loans for decades after college. is there any way to stop the rate of growth of that? there s almost $1 trillion now of college debt among students. it s roughly equal to what credit card debt is. costs of private colleges ar