“If We’re All in It for Ourselves, Who Are We?”

Stephen DUBNER: So let’s talk a little bit about what you see as the purpose of college. I’ve heard you say that some people use it for “chasing status,” was your phrase, while others use it to prepare themselves to improve not just themselves and their families, but society. So what do you see as the mission? 

Tania TETLOW: Well, part of the ethos of Jesuit institutions from the beginning is that we want our students to learn and get all the tools they need to flourish, and we want to give them opportunity, but we also want them to have all of that not just for them, but for the world — that we have this enormous force multiplier of sending them out with the desire to matter, and the skills to really do that. And they will choose how. But we really need for them to understand that the saccharine high of just getting the job that pays the most or seeking status for themselves, that’s not what will make them happy, and that is not the point of their lives. And so they can do that, and still be happy, but what really drives you is knowing, looking back on your deathbed at your life, how did I matter? 

I’d like to introduce our guest for today.

TETLOW: Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University. 

Fordham is a well-regarded private university in New York City, founded in 1841 and run for most of its history by the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic religious order that dates to the 16th century. Tetlow is the first female president of Fordham, as well as the first layperson.

TETLOW: There’s a very daunting hall of portraits outside of my office. You know, all of these priests going back to 1841.

Tetlow’s own father was in fact a priest. But, while getting his psychology Ph.D. — at Fordham — he met his would-be wife, another graduate student, so he left the priesthood. Tania was born in New York, not long before the family moved to New Orleans. So: Fordham is in her genes.

TETLOW: A good way to recruit me is they can tell me, “You exist because of us.” 

Fordham did recruit her, and she returned, as president, in 2022. Before that, Tetlow was president of Loyola University in New Orleans — another Jesuit school, one of 27 in the U.S., and about 130 globally. The Jesuits have always been big on educating as well as evangelizing. Tetlow is a lawyer by training, and taught law for a while at Tulane; and before that, she was a federal prosecutor in New Orleans. What does it say about the state of higher education that Fordham chose as its president not only a non-priest but a former prosecutor?

TETLOW: We spend our time, all of us in these jobs, playing defense, and navigating crises. Everything from the protest movements to efforts from those who work here to make sure that they’re paid well and fairly, and how to balance that against remaining affordable to students. And bridging that gap just gets harder and harder. 

Today, on Freakonomics Radio: another conversation in our ongoing look at what college is really for. With higher ed under attack from multiple angles, Tetlow sees an urgency in turning things around:

TETLOW: The countries against whom the U.S. competes, none of them are disinvesting from education right now. 

We talk about the difference between religious and secular universities:

TETLOW: I don’t have to be afraid to talk about values in my out-loud voice.

And we talk about why, despite all the trouble and controversy, the enterprise is worth defending:

TETLOW: “If you want a great city, build a university and wait 200 years.”

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Kamala Harris — before serving as vice president and U.S. senator — was a prosecutor: the district attorney for San Francisco and the California attorney general. Now that she’s running for president, Harris is leaning into her experience as a prosecutor.

Kamala HARRIS: So in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.

TETLOW: As a fellow former prosecutor, I really admire that background in her. 

DUBNER: Can you imagine ways in which that background can be useful as perhaps president of the United States? 

TETLOW: Well, in a funny way, you have such ultimate power as a prosecutor over your one single case. I found really good preparation for having power in other settings. 

DUBNER: What did you learn from being a prosecutor that helps you in your role as a college president?

TETLOW: It’s the only kind of lawyer where your ethical duty is not to represent a client, but to do justice. That is what you’re charged with. And so I spent as much time talking to witnesses, or defendants who were cooperating, about how they ended up there, and what their lives were like, and really learning who they were as people in ways that I don’t know is typical of people in that job, but I really loved. 

DUBNER: Tell me maybe your most memorable case. 

TETLOW: I had a case where a high school teacher helped an old buddy, who was in prison, collect some packages. 

DUBNER: This isn’t going to end well. 

TETLOW: No, and it was just one of the most fascinating cases about human beings and how we delude ourselves. A high school teacher, whose old buddy from high school — the popular kid who would never talk to him in high school — finally reached out from prison to see if they could be friends. And he, out of so many high school drama kind of psychology, decided, oh, sure, I will accept these packages coming in the mail without knowing what they are, and got dragged into this whole drug scheme. So the teacher who got dragged into it cooperated. No one else would have been brave enough to do it, because he was up against some major kingpins.

DUBNER: He’s your witness then? 

TETLOW: He’s my witness. And we were going against the person who was running a heroin scheme from jail. But it took a long time to just get him to admit his real emotions rather than have bravado on the stand. I finally, after berating him in prep, got him to admit “I was afraid.” 

DUBNER: I mean, I don’t blame him. Did you win that case? 

TETLOW: Yes. 

DUBNER: So, when I think of the Jesuit tradition, I think of inquiry and intellectualism, and I think especially of the concept of discernment, which I gather is very important within the tradition. And it strikes me that discernment is fairly absent these days, at least in the public square. And that’s one reason I wanted to speak with you today, because I figured you could teach me and all of us a little bit about how to get in touch with that, and maybe apply it. So I’d like you to define discernment as you see it, and describe how you try to spread that as a president of a Jesuit university? 

TETLOW: It is basically the opposite of social media, in shorthand. So discernment means to take time to consider a big decision, and not to jump to conclusions. It means being open and curious. It means assuming good intentions of the person you’re disagreeing with, which we are all very bad at right now. And it means being self-aware enough of your own biases and filters that you realize what will prevent you from seeing the truth. And right now, I think we’re all feeling the pressure to teach those skills to our students, especially this fall, as we approach the election, and all the turmoil that society is going through. How do we double down on teaching those skills when they have become so countercultural? 

DUBNER: Yeah, but I would imagine that you are recruiting for students who already buy into the notion of discernment, no?

TETLOW: It’s chicken and egg, right? The students who are attracted to us tend to have this sense of purpose. And I will say, the two Jesuit institutions I’ve led have student communities who don’t lean into self-righteousness in quite the same way that young people are tempted by right now. 

DUBNER: What do you think would happen if you could play some version of Freaky Friday, and bring the entire educational architecture of Fordham to a place like Harvard or Penn for a week, and apply all the layers of discernment in education there? How would that go over with those student bodies, do you think? 

TETLOW: Well, there is a freedom I find in being in a religious institution where I don’t have to be afraid to talk about values in my out-loud voice in quite the same way that in a secular institution, we were just so afraid of offending by having any reference to religion at all.  

DUBNER: Can you give an example of some kind of conversation you might have liked to have at Tulane where you felt it wouldn’t be accepted?

TETLOW: When we would talk about diversity there, we were left to some of the more tepid values of hospitality and welcome. And when I talk about it at a Jesuit institution, I’m able to really lean into the fact that our faith believes profoundly in the equality and human dignity of every single person, that we believe that we owe people more when they need more. 

DUBNER: Pope Francis, who’s the first Jesuit pope, has said that “Some universities I know in America … are too liberal.” And he accused them of “training technicians and specialists” instead of whole people. I’m curious for your take on that. 

TETLOW: Well, it’s interesting because this parallel attack in this country on the value of liberal arts, and for us as Catholic institutions, we cling to our core curriculums fiercely. In this country, it’s not really a liberal problem. It’s more from the other side, this mocking of English majors as if much of the powerhouse of this country didn’t major in English, right? And when we talk to employers, they’re desperate for us to teach those kind of emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking skills that you learn in philosophy and English and all of those kinds of courses. Because that’s really hard to teach on the job. They can teach technical skills on the job. And frankly, the technical skills we teach are often defunct by the time the kids graduate, right? Those change too much. 

DUBNER: So, Fordham is a Catholic university, but the share of students who describe themselves as Catholic surprised me. Can you talk about that? 

TETLOW: It’s about 40 percent. We became religiously pluralist in a way that’s kind of a hidden story of American higher ed. Catholic students were not always welcome in the first half of the 20th century and before at elite institutions, which we sometimes forget were founded as Protestant institutions, and had attitudes towards, really, immigrants, Irish, Italians, others coming in off the ships and not wanting them there, in the same way they created quotas and caps for Jewish students. And so, Catholic schools, when they were founded, were full of Catholics who did not have other options. And we welcomed Jewish students who often did not have other options. When those doors opened, we had some of the same dilemmas of women’s colleges and H.B.C.U.s of, what do we do? And so we very much welcome students from all faiths. And it changed who we are. We became very ecumenical. But now, far more of our student body is just secular. They were raised with no religious tradition whatsoever. 

DUBNER: When I look at the student population at Fordham, I see that it’s got about 40 percent of what are called underrepresented populations — 17 percent Hispanic/Latino, 13 percent Asian, 5.5 percent Black. It strikes me that you’re significantly more diverse than a lot of the very liberal schools that talk about diversity a lot. How does that happen?

TETLOW: Well, partly success begets success. To come to a school that is already diverse means you have strength in numbers where you won’t be alone. And, I think it really helps to be in New York, a place that is already so diverse. We get to recruit in our backyard, we get to attract people to a city that has everyone in the world here.

DUBNER: I’m curious how the Jesuit tradition, and Catholicism generally, intersect with the politics of this moment. Many of my Catholic friends and family members are really torn because they don’t like Donald Trump as a person or a candidate, for a variety of reasons. But they do really like the fact that he’s created a Supreme Court that has put much stricter limits on abortion. And I’m curious how that plays out at Fordham. 

TETLOW: Well, Catholic doctrine does not neatly fit in either political party, because in many ways it’s the opposite of libertarianism, which also doesn’t neatly fit in either party. So Catholic teaching would be somewhat more conservative, restrictive on social issues, but far more progressive on economic issues than the Republican Party. Catholic social teaching, to many more conservative Catholics, seems incredibly radical, but it is in fact the doctrine we’ve had for a very long time in the Church. And it’s pretty clearly what’s in the Gospels.

DUBNER: Give an example of that for those who don’t know. 

TETLOW: You know, the Catholic Church believes profoundly in caring for the poor as a priority, of caring about the right to organize labor, racial justice, all of those kinds of issues that don’t neatly fit with a Republican Party that does care about restricting abortion and other things. In American society, we’ve always had a balance that was critical between individual rights and a sense of community and responsibility. That balance is really out of whack right now. We’ve leaned so heavily into individual rights, which are crucial. But if they’re unmoored from the idea of community, of what we owe each other, they’re really quite dangerous. If we’re all in it for ourselves, who are we? And so what Catholic teachings really offer is a reminder that we do have to care about community, that we have not just rights, but responsibilities. 

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As president of Fordham University, Tania Tetlow oversees roughly 17,000 students and 750 faculty. The biggest majors are in finance, psychology, and government. Fordham also has several prestigious graduate programs: in business and law, education and social work, and even some theology, still. The school is split between two main campuses, both in New York City: one in the Rose Hill section of the Bronx, the other at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan. Those two campuses are about nine miles apart. If you walked from one Fordham campus to the other, you’d pass right through Columbia University. This past spring, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up encampments at many schools, Columbia had some of the most intense protests, which led to more than 100 arrests. So what was happening at Fordham? I asked Tetlow to describe it:

TETLOW: We have students who are from Palestine who are very worried about parents and grandparents they can’t get in touch with. They’re going through all the stages of grief and trauma, and they’ve been extraordinary. And I’ve also felt, you know, if yelling at me will make you feel better for even half a minute, go for it. It is my honor. Because they are feeling so powerless. We also have members of our community who are Jewish and Israeli and who lost family members on October 7th. And so, it made me realize how close New York is to the Middle East, and of how profound that pain is for part of our community. And so what was really impressive this year is, student activists did prayer vigils and they did teach-ins, and they talked and they listened and they engaged with complexity. And they really tried to do the work of expressing outrage at that which they are outraged by, but without just yelling at the nearest authority figure or trying to disrupt the right of their fellow students to learn. That got ratcheted up when the clearing out of Hamilton Hall at Columbia happened.  

DUBNER: By the police, we should say. 

TETLOW: By the police, yeah. And so the next morning, students who told us later were really upset by that, came and started a little encampment in a classroom building in our Manhattan campus. We persuaded most of them to leave, but we did end up having the police arrest on minor misdemeanors about 15, mostly students. So that was painful because, you know, how do you navigate the rights of our 17,000 students to learn on the cusp of finals with the rights of those dozen students to express themselves and to protest? And it was really hard. 

DUBNER: And what happened then? Did it de-escalate after those arrests? 

TETLOW: Yes. 

DUBNER: I’ve read that, when you were a kid, your father — who was a psychologist and a professor, and also counseled prisoners — that he had a sign on his desk that said: “Question authority, but politely and with respect.” How do you feel that slogan relates to, let’s say, the campus politics around this particular issue at Fordham? Was authority questioned politely, with respect and fruitfully, or not really?

TETLOW: I think, for the most part, it was. We met with student activists, and they have been profound, and persuasive, and respectful, and thus very effective. Going to people and saying, “I think that you are an evil, awful person and now I’m going to scream at you until you agree with me,” it doesn’t work. It feels good. It’s venting, but it is not the same as activism. We have always authorized any request to protest on our campus that students bring us. We’re at 100 percent with that. But what we navigate with them is, you know, you don’t point bullhorns at the library during study session. You find ways to make your ability to express yourself not have to disrupt the education of your fellow students. And so when we think about those restrictions, we need to think about them both for protests we agree with and those we don’t. You can’t just imagine that the protesters are expressing a cause that you believe in. You also have to imagine one that you might find repugnant, because the rules have to be the same for both, or we lose credibility.

DUBNER: I know that back in 2016, which predates your presidency by quite a few years, there was a movement by Fordham students to start a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a national organization, and that was at the center of many of the campus protests last year. And that was denied. I believe that there was a court case around that. And the court upheld the Fordham decision, if I’ve got that correct.

TETLOW: Yes.

DUBNER: And I also know that according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, which looks at free speech on campuses, Fordham ranks in the bottom 10 for colleges or universities across the country. So how do you, as a president, try to create a balance where you’re not limiting free speech, but also not turning your campus into a hotbed where it can’t accomplish the central purpose? 

TETLOW: First of all, those FIRE rankings, we don’t really understand how they come to them. It’s always tricky. At Fordham, we famously — and it got litigated — suspended a student who, after a verbal argument with fellow students, went and bought an assault rifle and then posted that on social media. If he had shot up the campus, we would have been reamed if we had not done anything. It was so obvious a warning. But by suspending him, we got really attacked by some free-speech purist group saying, “How dare you? It’s just because you’re against guns.” So those are the kinds of lines we have to navigate every day. And what I find really a shame right now is those who push for more speech on campus have suddenly flip-flopped on a lot of those issues, right? Now they’re yelling at us because we don’t suppress speech more. This would have been a moment to really stand up and say, we find some of these protests to be anathema and disturbing, but this is what it looks like to put up with speech that you disagree with. But instead we’re just being called hypocrites because we don’t suppress it. And they’re being hypocrites in accusing us of hypocrisy. So it’s very head-spinning, because what remains is the question of: Are you for this freedom or are you not? 

DUBNER: Do you have any evidence that discernment, as we discussed earlier, can help fight polarization, or these kinds of standoffs, in the moment?  

TETLOW: I know from our faculty that every day in the classroom they try to not just teach knowledge, but the skills of discernment, of what it means to have reflective practices, where we’re going to really think about what we learned and stop and take time. This is something that as a law professor, is part of our ethos: I need for you to articulate the other side of the argument, not because we’re morally relativist, but because you can’t know the strength of your belief until you’re willing to think about the other side. 

DUBNER: And, as a lawyer, your job is to argue the best case for whoever you end up representing, which I guess is a way to train in seeing the other side, yeah? 

TETLOW: Right. I mean, legal education has a leg up in this because we’ve always done this work. And I think our faculty do a brilliant job of navigating how to take the temperature down when people disagree, how to say, “Okay, you are attacking the other student who you disagree with. You’re attacking them personally. You’re assuming they have bad intentions. You’re not listening to them.”

DUBNER: Are you sure this is the job you want? I mean, it’s a hard job. 

TETLOW: It is a very hard job. But I do love it, because it matters. And sometimes things are hard because they’re important.

DUBNER: So, one way universities are important, or at least supposed to be, is as an institution that can build social trust. Researchers who study this argue that universities and the military and even sports teams are places that do this well because in each case, you’ve got a bunch of individuals from different backgrounds coming together with a common goal, or at least as part of a community. And I’m really curious how you think about —  I mean, this is an absurd and large question — but how you think about the rights and role of the individual in a community or society today, with Fordham as the microcosm of that?

TETLOW: Well, universities are one of the places of great hope. We do bring people together. And that’s not just the obvious demographics — it’s also rural and urban, it’s different backgrounds economically, it’s just different upbringings. And we’ve leaned into that from a progressive point hard, but also that they find commonality, that they have so much more in common when they least expect it. I think that our job is to express both, and to treat diversity as we used to be allowed to do before the Supreme Court banned it, but about that quality of community and what it means. And so the court has continued to allow that in the military academies, because they understand exactly how valuable it is there. They’ve now forbidden us from overtly considering that in admissions. But regardless, we have the opportunity in our communities to really encourage, nudge, persuade students to know each other, to lean into that. For example, Greek life can be wonderful, but it can also divide. So we don’t have that here. We try to find ways to get students to bond that aren’t the obvious, finding people from exactly your tribe, but really reaching out across that. But it is —

DUBNER: What’s a for-instance of that?

TETLOW: Of kind of making student organizations really more about interest than about identity or self-selection and exclusivity. One of the most important places we teach is in the residence halls, of how we use peer mentoring, because we have RAs who are just a little bit older than the students that they’re mentoring, and thus have credibility that we don’t, and of how they’re on the front lines of navigating that profound loneliness that modern society has created. Social media sort of buries them in connection that is empty. Especially after Covid, when they were literally isolated — they have to learn the skills of how to really be with each other. And we’re now having to teach that in ways that we didn’t 10, 20 years ago. 

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DUBNER: Tell me a little bit about the finances of Fordham — maybe operating budget, and I’m just curious to know how things are looking. 

TETLOW: It’s going well. We’re not in the kind of crisis that most of higher ed is in right now financially, but it’s still a squeeze every year. We’re hitting the ceiling of what American families can afford to pay. In a world where we very much want to have normal and fair and generous pay increases for all of our employees, we’re basically a service industry. So most of our budget goes to our people. And so those pressures are hard. Because, we’re pretty tuition-dependent to pay for that. Our budget is about $700 million. Most of that is for the people we hire. It’s very labor intensive work to teach and serve and then maintain a campus.

DUBNER: What’s your endowment at Fordham? 

TETLOW: It is just about a billion. 

DUBNER: Okay. So that sounds like a lot of money to the average person, except Harvard’s is $50 billion. 

TETLOW: Exactly. It’s hard-fought for a school that mostly taught first-generation students for so many decades, almost two centuries. It’s sort of like a museum endowment, that that interest on that is what supports us and in our case, very specifically supports primarily scholarships. And for us it’s maybe five percent of our budget. It’s not like an Ivy League that’s no longer dependent on tuition because they get so much revenue from their endowment.

DUBNER: What would you do if you had a $50 billion endowment at Fordham? 

TETLOW: We’d be able to fully meet need for all of our students, first and foremost, which would be a joy. And we’d invest in everything that we want to do, and our ambitions.

DUBNER: Like, what would that be? 

TETLOW: It would be research, but it really matters to keep that in balance with the quality of our teaching. So, you know, research prowess, that also means those faculty are in the classroom every day teaching students. We are so strong in the humanities and law and business, and to really be relevant and at the table, we need to connect with what’s going on in A.I., with how to wake people up about climate change and find answers the threats to democracy all over the world. 

DUBNER: College is just absurdly expensive. Fordham is in the $60,000-a-year range, tuition, is that right?

TETLOW: Yeah.

DUBNER: So talk about how you deal with financial aid, whether it’s need-based, and also merit aid?

TETLOW: So we are need-blind in admissions, but we are not one of the handful of schools wealthy enough to fully meet need. And so that is our biggest priority, the biggest part of our budget is making ourselves affordable. We’re starting to try to shift more of our money from merit aid to financial need. The advantage of merit aid is you attract top students. You make them feel more special because of the scholarship. The disadvantage is, of course, some of those students who are the top students also have need, but some of them don’t, and so you’re spending money that you’d rather spend on those who can’t afford to be there. But we’re stuck in higher ed in a really stupid pricing model. The part that we know about is the price discrimination, where we charge the wealthy what they can afford to pay and thus supplement those who can’t. But the part that I think is hidden is that the market really drives sticker price being high, because sticker price signals quality. The elite schools tend to have more of the barbell, the very wealthy and those really struggling. Most of us have far more of the middle class who often, frankly, get squeezed out of the elite schools. When schools like ours reduce our sticker price to what we tend to actually charge on average, those schools have tended to fail, because the consumer is suspicious that that school is not as good because it does not charge as much. 

DUBNER: So what is your actual average price that let’s say, an incoming freshman will pay this year, with a sticker price of around 60K, what will the actual average be? 

TETLOW: 30. 

DUBNER: Wow. Well, there have been accusations that colleges and universities have colluded in the past. Sometimes they’ve been busted for it. There are others who argue that they should collude more. And I would think that this would be a case where collusion would be good, to fight this very problem that you’re talking about. Has there been any progress toward that? 

TETLOW: So, there’s a world where we would all say, “Okay, let’s all lower our prices to what we really charge, because that sticker price is so disheartening and so scary to those without the sophistication to understand it’s not real.” But we’re not allowed to do that. We can’t collude on price. So this is where the market is — you know, it sounds silly, except that when you go to buy a jacket, and there’s one jacket that’s $100, that’s 50 percent off, and one jacket that’s $50, even if they’re the same jacket, you’re going to go for the first one, right? This is human psychology. This is how we all behave. And if you get the 50 percent off because you are special — because you earned this scholarship — it makes you feel even better about it. And so it is very hard for us to break out of the system. 

DUBNER: Let’s talk a little bit about growing the size of student populations. Historically, the college population in the U.S. rose and rose and rose and rose and rose. But then it hit what looked to be a bit of a ceiling, and it’s come back down a little bit. There are some schools, however, who just don’t like to grow. There’s research by these two economists, Peter Blair and Kent Smetters, that finds that elite colleges have mostly capped their enrollment numbers since the 1980s. Their argument is that those caps have to do with mostly universities wanting to maintain their prestige, protect their reputations. And they argue in a kind of quiet voice that this is a shame, the idea being that if these universities are so good and so elite at educating people, they should educate more people, just like any firm that is successful wants more customers, not the same number. So let’s just start with that. Your thoughts on the notion that elite schools keep their populations about the same, why they do that, and why you’re not thinking like that.

TETLOW: When you look at when elite schools stopped growing, it was exactly the same time U.S. News introduced the rankings. And those rankings, until very recently, encouraged a major category of selectivity. It created these profound incentives for all of us, but the elites who battle with each other for top dog, to reject as many students as possible, that’s how you were measured. The elites get status and prestige and very specifically rankings by virtue of how low that acceptance rate is. My favorite satirical headline once was “Stanford Achieves Zero Percent Admission Rate.” It was a joke, but it was something very real. 

DUBNER: Just barely, yep. 

TETLOW: Yes, exactly. That’s where we’ve landed. The idea that the solution to this is to get a few thousand more students into those elite schools, I think begs the question of why they are the answer. Because what the rankings also did is, it took a higher-ed system of glorious complexity and variety, about 4,000 nonprofit schools, and it put us in line order when really we’re in clumps of ties. And it was never true that you could only get a good education at a handful of schools. I think to buy into that, to say that that should be the focus, really ignores the fact that there are probably 100 universities in this country that provide the same kind of academic excellence. And we need to remind ourselves of that. Because the more we just play into the rankings game of chasing status, the more alumni get status from giving to those universities, we’ve really ratcheted up the cleaving between the haves and have-nots. And that gets worse and worse. 

DUBNER: So Fordham, I believe, has increased enrollment by about 10 percent over the past 10 years, does that sound about right?

TETLOW: I think so, yeah. 

DUBNER: So talk to me about that. When you’re trying to grow, especially in a city like New York, what are the big challenges? Are there enough good professors? What does it mean for facilities? Are there enough students that you want, and so on? 

TETLOW: The biggest challenge is students, because right now, we have a demographic downturn in the number of 18-year-olds generally — and that will peak 18 years after the 2008 recession started. People dramatically had fewer children. But we also have a drop in the percentage of Americans going to college. And that has been rather dramatic. It’s a mix of Covid, and then most recently of the FAFSA form debacle — so you may have seen in the news — but, the Department of Ed stumbled for all sorts of reasons to redo the FAFSA form.

In case you haven’t seen the FAFSA debacle in the news — “FAFSA” stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It’s administered by the federal government. This past admissions season, there were technical problems that meant FAFSA came online three months late — and then sent inaccurate financial-aid offers to around a million applicants.

TETLOW: What it means is that for most schools, they’re looking at a decline in their populations, and in community colleges especially, a quite dramatic one. So for any school other than the very, very elites, to grow is not possible right now. What I worry about is that for most of higher ed, they’re just not going to be able to make it anymore. And the country will suffer so much from that. We understand still, as a society, that K-through-12 is a right, is not seen as some kind of commie experiment. But somehow higher ed is not seen as a right anymore. After World War II was the last time the economy really shuddered to a halt, because we weren’t building weapons anymore. And Congress made the brilliant decision to invest in all those millions of veterans coming home from the war who would not have jobs — to say, we will pay for your education. And it fueled so many Nobel Prizes and Pulitzers, and the rise of the middle class in the ’50s and global economic dominance in the world. It was such a smart thing to do. And yet now we’re doing the opposite. The Pell Grants — which, when they were unveiled in the ‘70s, were enough to cover tuition, room, and board for most schools — now are a pittance and states are disinvesting from their public institutions. China’s not doing that. 

DUBNER: The public’s perception of academia has fallen, a lot. It began on the right, but now the left is catching up. There are many perceptions out there, one of which is that college campuses can be hostile to young men. Fordham is now majority female, I was surprised to see. There’s another perception that colleges are hostile to anyone who leans even a little bit conservative in any dimension, students and faculty. There’s the perception that it’s too expensive, it’s too exclusive, it’s not useful enough in the real world. So how are you reckoning with that general perception of decline?

TETLOW: Well, it’s hard because there’s great political benefit to tearing down trust in institutions. It’s easy to do. It resonates with people who are understandably cynical. And once you’ve done it, it’s done. And it’s very hard to rebuild. You know, all of higher ed has become majority female and that’s a much deeper topic to grapple with, and one I worry about as well. 

DUBNER: You worry because there are all those men who are not getting involved in that kind of system?

TETLOW: Exactly. I think men are are opting out of the opportunities that they need in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, and we will all suffer as a result of that. And so I worry about that. So the return on investment is sort of laughable because when you look at the data, it is so clear the financial return on investment, right? Which just proves that you can make things up, and they stick. And I would say that part of what I find really offensive are politicians saying that it’s not worth it to go to college, none of whom say that to their own children. 

DUBNER: None of whom didn’t go to college either. 

TETLOW: Exactly.

DUBNER: And law school, on top of that.

TETLOW: And graduate school. So, we’ve become a political football of late in ways that make us really vulnerable. But what’s so sad about that is, you know, the countries against whom the U.S. competes, none of them are disinvesting from education right now. We are shooting ourselves in the foot in profound ways when we decide for political points, we will take away one of the great higher education systems in the world, that’s been the envy of the world for so long. We’re going to keep pulling back from it, pulling funds, pulling credibility, and trust, all for scoring political points in a temporary way. 

DUBNER: If we’re going to talk about the attacks on institutions generally, let’s not ignore the one that you’re associated with, which is the Catholic Church. That’s a case where it mostly revolved around the priest sex scandals that have been revealed, and the cover-ups, really, of the past 30 or 40 years. I haven’t seen numbers lately on the perception of the Catholic Church as an institution, but I’m guessing it’s fallen very similarly to the way the reputation of colleges and universities have.

TETLOW: The trust in religious institutions generally plummeted a while back. And then, of course, trust in the Catholic Church, given the scandals, deservedly plummeted. What I know from having spent much of my career fighting against sexual abuse is that that denial, those cover-ups, the level of abuse, still exists in all other institutions that have trusting relationships over children. And my worry is we’re not learning the painful lessons the Church learned.

DUBNER: What other institutions do you mean?

TETLOW: We’re seeing scandals emerge from Boy Scouts, from other religious institutions. But also, the vast majority of child sex abuse happens within families. What I used to do every day was to go into court and beg judges to care about that. And they found it so depressing that they just decided it was made-up most of the time. You know, that’s a whole other episode. But the reality is, again, these problems weren’t unique to the Church. The Church really messed it up. And my hope is that everyone else will stop being in denial about where we still have a crisis. 

DUBNER: Do you have much of a relationship with the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York? 

TETLOW: Yes. Cardinal Dolan and I get together at least once a year, if not more often. It’s not that Catholic universities report to the Church, nor do we get funding from them, but we exist in relationship. And I’m lucky in that it’s a very friendly and cordial relationship. 

DUBNER: Do you think it makes sense that academic institutions like Fordham have such big tax advantages in a city like New York? If you look at the biggest landowners in New York, two of them are universities — Columbia and NYU —  and then the Catholic Church is another big one. And they’re all tax-exempt. And you at Fordham are kind of at the sweet spot of those two. Does that make sense to you in a 21st-century tax environment? 

TETLOW: Here’s why it does. When you are taxing a for-profit entity, you are creating a business expense, you’re taking off a profit margin to fund city institutions. The idea in general is that if you are a nonprofit civic organization doing good for the world, we’d rather you spend your money doing that. We are huge economic engines for cities. Senator Moynihan had a great quote, that “if you want a great city, build a university and wait 200 years.” So if you were to design what will make an economy flourish, it would not just be the infrastructure taxes pay for; it would be great universities.

DUBNER: If we were looking ahead to Fordham, let’s say 20 or maybe even 50 years from now, in what significant ways would you like it to be very different than it is today? You can keep all the good stuff, but what would you like to change? 

TETLOW: I think when I look ahead, deep down, that what I would like us to do is to not chase status. It’s just to do good for the world. And that has become ever more crucial because the problems of the world just seem so urgent and full of despair. And so that we look back on our careers here at Fordham and know that we mattered, and not about silliness that doesn’t matter, but we have hundreds of thousands of living alumni, and they matter every day in ways we’ll never see. And did we have a profound impact on the kind of ethics and empathy and work that they do every day? 

I’d like to thank Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University, for a conversation that was much meatier than many conversations I hear these days with people in positions of authority. I appreciate her forthrightness, and her courage in saying how she really sees things — or at least what I think is how she really sees things; maybe I’ve been the target of a massive con job. But I don’t think so. One reason I wanted you to hear this conversation today is because next week, we’re going to start playing for you an updated version of one of the most important series we’ve ever made — about the economics of higher education. The supply and the demand; the controversies and the hypocrisies; the answers and the questions:

Amalia MILLER: Why are more women going to college than men? 

Zachary BLEEMER: What happens when black and Hispanic students lose admissions advantages? 

Peter BLAIR: How does the marketplace for higher education operate?

Morty SCHAPIRO: I’ll tell you something, it’s a darn good question. 

That’s next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself — and, if you can, someone else, too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski, with help from Dalvin Aboagye. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.