In the big ten conference, including student death, admission policies and campus safety, this interview with Indiana University president Michael Mcrobbie is 45 minutes. This morning, the cspan bus is on the campus of Indiana University in bloomington. On it, we are joined by the president of Indiana University, Michael Mcrobbie. Thank you very joining us. Delighted to be here and welcome to Indiana University. Thank you for the invitation. Can we start, president , with your general thoughts before we talk about the details of your university, but your thoughts on the greatest challenges facing those in Higher Education today . Oh, i would say that probably the greatest challenge in front of us is to continue to provide a quality and affordable education, especially to the students within the state of indiana. We are a state university, after all. And keeping that education both affordable but also ensuring its quality so that our students are graduating with very high level skills that will enable them to prosper in the workplace, i think is one of the greatest challenges. Of course that involves a whole range of factors to do with the sources of funding for an institution with a budget of 3. 3 billion. So what steps do you think have to take place in order to balance that affordability with quality . Well, i think one of the key things that we are doing in terms of affordability is we have really focussed in lazerlike in the last couple of ars on the whole issue of student debt. Youre probably aware that this has got im sure youre aware that this has got enormous and appropriate national attention. And it has been a concern of ours. And so, last year we introduced a comprehensive Financial Literacy program that involves things like modules that all entering freshman have to complete on Financial Literacy, courses on Financial Literacy for a variety of administrative matters that gives students much better control and knowledge of their student debt. And what is remarkable about this is that we saw 11 drop in the amount of debt that students took on this year. And that amounted to 31 million. And what i think is remarkable about that is that if you multiplied that across all the institutions of Higher Education in the country and there are 4,500 of those, if you multiplied that, you could see how one could have an enormous impact on the amount of the student debt that students are taking on. Of course, debt is a critical opponent of affordability. Can one actually find the resources to fund an education. So that has been a really Major Program that we have been focussing on, aimed at affordability of an ininn university education. So on the larger aspect, president mcrobbie, if college was worth it, if they asked you that, how would you answer . Well, i dont think theres any doubt that college is worth it. Study after study after study shows that your prospects in the workplace in general are better with a College Degree than without a College Degree. Now, it certainly is the case that there is a growing emphasis on the kinds of skills that students are graduating with. And we have put in place in fact, i announced this last year that i asked all of our schools to comprehensively evaluate opportunities for creative degrees of certificates, associates qualifications, masters degree and so on. And just last week we announced a new program between our very highly ranked school of business and a college of arts and sciences that will provide an accelerated bachelor plus masters degree that will provide a bachelors degree in a field like economics, mathematics and so on and oneyear masters degree in business. So thats an accelerated process and that oneyear masters degree can be completely completed online. So you can see how students in a number of different fields can graduate, go into the workplace and then complete another masters complete a masters degree online in obviously a very practical applied area of business, which is a skill that is always going to be sellable and marketing by our students. So were looking at initiatives like that across the board. We have a program already that provides certificate of business on top of writing different bachelors degrees as well. And we are very mindful and i think we have a responsibility to our students to be concerned about their welfare after they graduate. I mean, we simply cannot as an institution complete a students education and waive them goodbye and not be concerned about what happens to them then. So the programs ive described to you are really focussed in part on responding to the need for greater schools to go along with the classic kind of liberal Arts Education that we provide at Indiana University and were also mindful of the fact that inspite of the fact that unemployment is still relatively high, though falling, there are by some estimates 2 or 3 million Unfilled Positions because not enough graduates are graduating with the right kinds of skills. All of that is what were focussed on. The final part of that is a comprehensive approach across the university to really improve career consulting, career advising, sorry. Were really focussed on ensuring that all of our students have access to top quality career advising to help to maximize their opportunities to find employment once they graduate. Cspan bus is doing a Big Ten College tour. President s are joining us on the bus to talk about issues of Higher Education. Were joined by the head of Indiana University, Michael Mcrobbie. And hes here to take questions on the issue of Higher Education. You may specifically gone to the school or have questions generally on the issue of Higher Education. Here is your chance to talk to him about. Students, 2025853880. For parents 2025853881. Perhaps youre an educated at a university, 2025853882. About 46,000 students at the Indiana University in bloomington. 36,000 of those so are undergraduate. 10,000 undergraduate and faculty and staff of 8,300. When you talk about cost of college specifically for Indiana University, how much of your cost is taken up by employee salaries, staff salaries and facilities . Oh, Personnel Salaries are the largest single component of the cost of the university. It would be around 80 of the total cost of the university, personnel related salaries, plus benefits and health care and so on. We are a personnel intensive organization, like most other universities there. So, we are very much focussed on that direct interaction between students and instructors in the classroom. And although i think were seeing a greater and greater impact of online education, i still dont think theres an enormous amount of evidence that its going to completely replace that fundamental student teacher relationship which has existed for as long as universities have existed which is over 25 centuries. The annual budget for the Indiana University, 1. 4 billion, endowment of 2 million in alumni approximately 370,000 worldwide as far as your annual budget is concerned, you talked about personnel. What about facilities . How much do you have to spend to keep up facilities and add facilities . Well, this is actually been this is my eighth year as president. And this has been a major focus of our board of trustees over this period. Like many institutions, im afraid we actually had a very large deferred maintenance bill. This is the kind of stuff thats not glamorous. Its the roads and sidewalks, the steam tunnels, et cetera. But theres a rule in business that every dollar that you dont spend now youre going to have to spend 4 in the future to rectify that. So, weve been putting over the last seven or odd years or so an enormous amount of effort into trying to at that level catch up with the significant burden of deferred maintenance and more recently weve had just excellent support from the state. Now, on top of that, were also looking at renovating major buildings on the campus and bringing them up to the kinds of standards and to provide the kinds of facilities that are required to support the type of research of the 21st century university. Over the last seven years, we have constructed or have under construction at the moment or in planning over 50 major facilities. And we have spent about this is cost about 1. 5 billion. Whats interesting about that is that only 30 of that has come from the state. The other 70 has come from a whole variety of other areas including considerable amount of individual philanthropy. 2025853880 for students. 2025853880 for educators. Lets start from ann from dayton, ohio, who is a parent. Good morning, ann. Caller thats a beautiful campus and beautiful town, bloomington, but i want to talk about my direct experience as a single parent with three daughters and not much economic help with my ex. I have encouraged my three daughters all in their 30s to be excellent students and that that was their job. And they did. And i was middle income. And they qualified for great scholarships at small private schools, my oldest went to ober lin and i only ended up having to pay 4,000 a year there. And then the other one got into loyola, they all got into small private schools. And what we experienced the youngest decided to go to the university of colorado and they didnt give a great package. And we found out that after her first year, you know, and we went into debt for that first year, that we ran into a lot of extremely wealthy kids who were lying about being instate status at a large school and then getting instate pay, which she did get after jumping through all the hoops of living in states after her freshman year for a year. So, do you have that same kind of thing where wealthy kids are claiming to be in state, actually getting money from parents, which happened at the university of colorado big time. So talk about Small Schools and giving, i believe, better scholarships and big funding than large state schools and i hope cspan goes and visits some of the small, private schools. So if you could address that issue, thanks. Ann, thank you. President mcrobbie, go ahead. Yes. Firstly, let me say that we take very seriously and are acquired to by the state the distinction between instate students and out of state students and we have pretty rigorous requirements for what the requirements are for a student to be regarded as an instate rate. We have committees that deal with appeals and requests to be considered as instate on a regular basis. But they are very hardnosed about what the criteria are and we sort of pride ourselves on applying them consistently across the whole university all campuses. Now, with respect to Financial Aid and scholarships and so on that you were talking about, i mean, were a very large university. We have on this campus over 46,000 students. But and 36,000 undergraduates, but we also pride ourselves on the fact that the students with average family instate students with average family incomes of 50,000, they pay almost no tuition because the combination of state, federal and university based Financial Aid pretty much covers the total cost of their tuition. Then students of family incomes of 100,000 or less, they pay somewhere in the vicinity of about half the total cost of tuition again because of all the different sources of Financial Aid that are available to them. In fact, at iu on this campus, about two thirds of our students get some form of Financial Aid. It was a major focus of our last two campaigns. It will be a major focus of our upcoming campaign. In our last campaign for our bloomington campus, we raised over 200 million. If you include graduate scholarships probably close to 300 million in support of scholarships, fellowships and so on for undergraduate students of both need and ability to come to Indiana University bloomington. So president mcrobbie, what qualifications do you look at in accepting potential students . Oh, firstly we look at obviously the kind of things that all institutions do, sats or acts, their gpa at school, class ranking, what other Extracurricular Activities that they have engaged in. But we also use what we call holistic evaluation. That is, on the whole, most students a decision is relatively easy to make, yes or no. Theres still a significant number of students who fall somewhere in the middle where you want to actually take into account everything about that student, maybe their gpa is not that great but if you look at their gpa, it started low in their freshman year at high school but by the time they got to their senior year it improved so theres clearly some sign of maturity or maybe an Extracurricular Activities theyve been major leaders or innovators at their high school. So we want to take all of that into account and as a large state Public Institution that we really are doing all that we can to identity and find those students who we think will prosper at Indiana University. What about students who may need some remedial help once they enter the university, what kind of assistance are they offered . Well, in indiana, as a state, most of the remediation is actually carried out by a Community College system. So, we actually on this campus provide very little remediation anymore and that is actually provided externally. And we find that our students on the whole arrive pretty well qualified for the courses of study that they are intending to undertake. And if they need remediation, they take that in one of the Community College campuses of which there are in excess of 20 around the state. How many of your students are taking humanities classes or social science majors versus professional and technical majors, whats the breakdown . I dont have the exact figure in my head, pedro, but i think in our college of arts and sciences probably Something Like a third of the students there are taking courses in the humanities and social sciences. We actually are a university that is very strong in the humanities and in the social sciences with some very highly ranked departments in those areas. And i showed this is probably an opportunity to add to that that languages has been an area that weve been particularly strong on. We teach in any one year we teach somewhere between 70 and 80 different Foreign Languages which is probably makes us in terms of the number of languages toward one of the top institutions in the country. There are a few other universities that teach that many Foreign Languages. We teach Foreign Languages in just about every part of the world, the commonly taught ones but also a lot of the less commonly taught ones as well. We also teach the culture and politics, economics, history and so far, we have series of title 6 centers that cover the whole of the world as well. But we decided that we needed to bring all that together to try to increase the kinds of Educational Opportunities that we provide for our students. So, now about two years ago, our board of trustees approved the formation of a new school of global and International Studies. And your colleagues will no doubt see the very large building that were building at the moment that will house the whole of that new school. And that school will house language programs in about 70 to 80 Foreign Languages and all the associated programs in this culture of those particular culture, history, economics, et cetera. Those particular regions of country. And we appointed a new dean of Foundation Dean for the school last year. And hes just commenced his position here. Hes a former u. S. Ambassador to poland and has worked in the white house and elsewhere in washington. So, our goal frankly in that area is really to become one of the Top International study schools in the midwest. Consequently provide not only specialists qualifications in International Studies but to expand and enhance the kinds of majors that we can provide to our students, because in my view, its certainly been a priority of mine and the university and our trustees, one of the most important things that we have to provide as a university is international literacy. A parent, hello. Caller hi, how are you doing . My question is regarding the endowment. You see the endowment at 800 plus million dollars. What is it used for . My second question, i see a lot of date rape and alcohol use on campus . What is the university doing about that . Ill take it offline. Thanks. Let me deal with the second part of your question first. There is nothing more important to us as a university than the welfare of our students. I mean, we are obviously deeply concerned about the welfare of all of our students. So, earlier this year we announced a student welfare initiative, which is a comprehensive approach to problems of Sexual Violence and the other kinds of issues that you have raised across the institution that is actually managed and administrated at the very highest level in the inst