2022-05-05
44 分钟Enrollment is down for the first time in memory, and critics complain college is too expensive, too elitist, and too politicized. The economist Chris Paxson — who happens to be the president of Brown University — does not agree. (Part 3 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)
So, professor, doctor, president, Boston Fed Reserve Chair Paxson, what the heck do we call you?
You can call me Chris.
That's fine.
Chris Paxson is an economist first and foremost.
She does also sit on a few important boards, the Boston Federal Reserve and the association of American Universities.
And in her spare time, she is president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode island, one of the eight schools in the Ivy League.
But again, she is also an economist.
Being an economist in this role is really useful because, you know, what am I trying to do?
I'm trying to build an organization in collaboration with lots of other people.
Resource allocation is everything you're thinking on the margin.
You're thinking about alternatives, you're trying to figure out how you're going to get the biggest impact for every dollar that you spend.
Those are kind of economicsy type questions.
We wanted to speak with Paxson because we thought she could answer a lot of our questions about college generally.
This is the third episode in a series we're calling free economics radio goes back to school.
We have learned quite a bit so far.
We've learned that american higher education is particularly market driven and therefore has many of the best universities in the world, but that these top schools, including Brown, are better at producing research than they are at moving students up the income ladder.
That's because they admit most of their students from families that are already fairly well off.
They also keep their admission rates very low in order to preserve their exclusivity and prestige.
The schools that are likely to move students up the income ladder are the so called mid tier universities, public and private, as well as historically black colleges.
But we've learned that many of these schools, as well as community colleges, have been struggling for attention, for funding, and lately for students.