Religion and Higher Education

Jeff it seems as though there are a whole set of religious colleges and universities that are really struggling in America right now. In some cases, that struggle is around making ends meet and sustaining themselves. In other cases, they've been wrestling with thorny questions over whether to maintain that religious identity at all and just what that identity really means for their operations and mission.

Yeah, that's true, Michael. And by the same token, religion and higher education have a deep history together in this country. And our guest this week on Future youe argues that religion actually can be a source of strength for many colleges in the future as well. This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information policy, and institutional transformation. This episode of Future you is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org earn continuing education units this spring with Teaching Practice, an online faculty development program from CourseHero. Over a series of asynchronous courses, you'll uncover new ways to leverage tech in the classroom and build inclusive curriculum, all while supporting your own well being. Plus, you'll get weekly office hours support from leading instructors. Enroll for free today@education.coursehero.com I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn.

As I said at the outset, Michael, religion and higher education in the United States have an intertwined history. The nation's top colleges and universities actually started off as religious institutions, yet most, if not all, have moved beyond those origins over the centuries. But with that said, religious institutions, be it the Jesuit ones we featured last season on Future U, or those who trained clergy members, they remain an important segment of the higher education landscape.

That's true, Jeff. And given the challenges religious institutions have also experienced, we wanted to understand more deeply what the future at the nexus of religion and higher education might look like, and if religion might actually hold the key, in some cases, to creating a more sustainable and valuable higher education experience. So our guest on Future youe to help us think through the role of religion in higher education is Clark Gilbert. Clark has had a fascinating career. He was a doctoral student of Clay Christensen's at the Harvard Business School. He served as the CEO of a newspaper and media company, the Deseret News, which he dramatically turned around. And he served as president of two colleges, BYU Idaho and BYU Pathway Worldwide. He serves currently as the commissioner of the Church educational system for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Clark, it's great to see you again. Thanks for joining us on future you.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be with both of you.

Clark, it's great to see you again. And you know you recently helped produce an entire special issue of the Deseret magazine called Dare to Be different. And the COVID had the headline the Fate of the Religious University. And we'll link to the issue in our show notes. But where I want to start is this. Michael and I talk often on this podcast about what Northeastern University President Joe Un said to us, that higher education is diverse but not differentiated. And in your essay you argue that not only can religion be a source of differentiation, but also of innovation. That holding religion central can help us address some of the most vexing problems in higher ed today. Social mobility and access, completion and affordability, the iron triangle, if you will, of higher ed. And you have plenty of examples from the institutions you oversee. BYU Idaho, BYU Hawaii, BYU Pathway worldwide. And so can you tell us a little bit more about how religion is central to these efforts?

Thank you, Jeff. You know, it's an important time for innovation in higher education and old models aren't working. Student outcomes are under increasing scrutiny and I think there's an imperative out there, regardless of affiliation, for universities to be more innovative and be more student focused. And for us, that that's not just a societal phenomenon, but it comes back to our very purpose as religious schools and our missions as religious schools. And so take affordability as one of the first themes you brought up. We have over 150,000 higher education students in our system. Our flagship is BYU. The average GPA to get admitted into BYU practically makes this a school full of national merit scholars with 3.9 and 4.0 students. Turns out that that's great for people like me and my children who are third, fourth, fifth generation college students, but if you've never been to college, you can't afford college. You don't have peers around you with that experience. Of course, we like all educators, think about that and worry about that. But for a religious institution, we also have a deeper motivation, like, you know, it's kind of hard for us. I say to people all the time, you can't have BYU be your only answer to your system because the church is a lot more complex and diverse than fifth generation college students from upper quartile income families. And you've got to have means and ways for them to get accessible education. And I look at BYU and I love byu. I'm an alum of byu and a lot of my focus goes there. But as a church, the answer can't be we serve the privileged, the wealthy, and people with access. Right? It's problematic for any higher education institution, but it's even more problematic for a church who believes it's founded on the ideals of Jesus Christ and love for man and care for our brothers and sisters. And so when we look at the innovation imperative, we don't even look at it through the academic lens first. We look at it through our religious mission and we say we have a religious imperative to find ways to make education more affordable, more accessible, and help people who are struggling complete. And so on top of all of our academic training, there's another motivation, an off balance sheet metric that's driving us that for us is even more motivating than I want to be an effective and innovative higher education administrator.

So how does the affordability mission kind of manifest itself day to day at any of the BYU campuses? Because I think you're right. I think religious institutions writ large in higher ed have always had access central to their mission. But I would also argue that a lot of them have lost their way on at least that part of the mission. We'll talk later about other parts of the mission. So how does it, how do you focus on affordability in particular?

Let me give you three examples. The first is the church is very generous in its funding of our higher education institutions. And this isn't new to me saying this. Elder David A. Bednar, former president of BYU Idaho, now one of the church's 12 apostles at the National Press Club in D.C. recently said that the church is spending about a billion dollars a year on higher education support. So we are very well supported by the church, but that's not affordability, that's just funding, right? I had a university president once say, we are so committed to affordability, we're gonna raise a $2 billion endowment to fund underprivileged students. And I'm like, well, why don't you just fix your cost structure? And so yes, the church does support, subsidizes our students in generous ways and it shows education is a priority to the church, but we also have to have innovation on the cost model itself. And you know, we're a worldwide church with students with members in 180 plus countries all over the world. And we can't have a high cost, campus heavy, research focused, expensive model to go to everyone. So we have BYU as our flagship school. We do research, we Have a college athletics program and a football team, graduate schools, and many of the trappings of a traditional university. When we created BYU Idaho, we said we're gonna strip everything out of this university other than things that directly focus focus on student learning and student gains. So no college athletics, no graduate schools, no research. BYU Idaho works on a year round calendar where students are admitted fall, summer, summer, spring or spring, fall. And that gives us a 50% increase in the utilization of the faculty and of the campus. And when BYU Idaho was created in 2000 by the church, it was built on top of a community college. All of these constraints were formally written into its constitution. And over the ensuing 20 years, we've tripled enrollment. But the operating costs, again, not the tuition price or the net subsidy costs, but the actual direct cost. Total costs of running that institution have grown below inflation. That means we've tripled the size of BYU Idaho while reducing its inflation adjusted cost of operation. And people are like, how in the world is that possible? And on the one hand, it's very simple. Variable tuition has exceeded variable costs. But the deeper answer to that is year round calendar, teaching, focused contract, no other investments other than teaching. And no graduate programs, no college sports. Everything goes into the student. And even the deeper motivation for that is why would faculty sign up for that? And the answer comes back to religious mission. This is a really central part of BYU Idaho's mission is what we recruit people who unambiguously want to make their careers and their professional focus all around students. And we find that one of the ways we get there is that people identify and come because of the mission of that institution. So religion mission motivated the innovation on cost and it also drew people to the institution who might not have come otherwise. And so religious mission, yes, we have innovative practices, but the motivation and the eventual staffing are strengthened because of the religious imperative.

Clark, that I think helps address where I'm going with this next question. As you know, there are some skeptics out there, some look at folks like yourself and your background, turning around a newspaper and a media enterprise, which not easy these days. You've got Kim Clark, the former dean of hbs, and then the president of BYU Idaho, Steve Wheelwright, another renowned HBS professor and then president of BYU Hawaii. You have Henry Eyring at BYU Idaho, the list goes on. So my apologies to those I'm not mentioning, but skeptics look at you in this group and say something like, well, what they all have in common is they're really good leaders and really good managers. So maybe it's not religion. That's the story here. What's your response?

It's a great question. In fact, someone said, well, you got talented people. And the other argument, Michael, I hear is you have good governance. And so that's an advantage the other schools don't have. And I think my first response is, well, wait a second, why did Kim Clark leave the Harvard Business School in the first place? I was talking to the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman, and he's like, we're going to start using the Kim Clark recruiting strategy. We're going to tell all of our Jewish diaspora your people need you. And he's like, that's what your church did with Kim Clark and your people need you. And I often joke. One of our vice presidents at BYU Pathway was the Chief Innovation Officer of one of the Silicon slopes firms here in the Valley and very well paid. And we said to him when we recruited him, Matt, we will match your salary, all but the seventh digit. So yes, we have great people, talented, well organized, innovative thinkers. But why do they come to these institutions? And that answer can only be explained because of the religious mission. So my first response, Michael, is the reason these people will come give their time and their talents and their energy and their whole life to this. You know, I left the Harvard Business School and my career for a mid level administrative role at BYU Idaho. There was no other reason other than a sense of religious duty and a sense of calling. But that's not the only explanation. So religion, the religious mission draws people in for a deeper sense of purpose. That's part of it, but the other one is governance. When I was asked this question and someone said, you just have good governance, this was a senior editor and he's like, okay, this is good. BYU Idaho is innovative, BYU Pathways reaching people who would never go to college. But the reason that's happening in your system is you have clear governance. And again, my answer is, but why would faculty and staff cede so much control of the mission and strategy and design of the university to the church if they didn't also believe in the religious mission? And so, yeah, I do think we have good governance and I do think we have wonderfully committed, innovative, talented people. But the reason that happens is because of the mission. And of course a secular audience wouldn't agree with this, but I was talking to an administrator in the Department of Education, he was looking at wire retention rate as a BYU Pathway is so high, we have a completion rate of 4 points above the national average serving a student profile that's riskier than a community college. And he's like, how do you do it? And he wanted to know our mentoring programs and our risk algorithm for intervention. And I went through all of that. But at the end of the conversation I said, look, these students have been told their whole life they're not college material, they could never make it. And we come and teach them they are sons and daughters of God with divine potential and they can ask for heaven's help. And so, yeah, we're doing things that you would hope good universities would do, but we're also drawing on retention strategies that teach people their inherent worth. And religion helps with that. It's not a facilitator for us. It's the whole point and purpose of what we do.

So in addition to yourself on this topic, you have articles by or with some really serious thinkers in the magazine about the importance of religion. You've got Jonathan Haidt, you've got David Brooks, Ann Snyder, Pete Wehner, Freeman Hrabowski, many more. And there are several themes that I thought we might explore from those essays, starting with this one, which is the. There's a theme of the gradual secularization of higher ed in this country. And you write about how it wasn't initially, you know, hostility between the secular and the faith based missions that caused that move away, but more just sort of drift. But, but over time I think it's fair to say that in many quarters it has become hostility and there's this sort of tension of faith versus reason in scholarship and teaching. Yet you, John Haid and others in the issue argue that faith is, is actually central to being a good academic researcher. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, I love this question. And by the way, I push our own scholars to think deeply about this. If we just mimic the nation, we're going to be a mid tier university at byu. But if we'll embrace our distinctive identity, we, we'll ask questions no one else is asking. And I think when faith and reason, academic rigor and deep belief come together in powerful ways, it leads to different research questions. It gives us access to proprietary research data that we couldn't get otherwise. And it lets us be a resource to society because of our religious mission. Let me give a couple examples so that doesn't sound so conceptual. The Wheatley Institute at byu. It has a stated purpose to look at core institutions in society that strengthen and build society. The constitution, the family and religious entities. They recently did a study on sexual behavior before marriage. Now the common narrative in society is before you get married, live with your partner, become comfortable with each other, spend an extended period of time not only living together, but having sexual relations, and then you'll know if you're compatible. Well, it turns out empirically, that's the worst thing you can do for the long term preservation of marriage. And the Wheatley Institute asked a question other family science and social science scholars weren't asking. And it's like, could modesty and abstinence actually have other outcomes? And it turns out in the data, not only does it preserve marriage more fully, but people are happier and they find more meaning in their life outside of marriage when this has happened. And that's a question and a data set that people wouldn't gather without a religious mission. I listened to Reverend Jenkins recently talk about Catholic Charities. And other than the federal government, Catholic Charities is the largest charity in the United States. They do more to fund needs in this country than any other entity. But they wouldn't let just any researcher come in and study what they're doing. And the trust they had with Notre Dame University allowed Notre Dame to come in and get proprietary data that a typical scholar might not have access to. We have the same thing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We're one of the largest crisis management entities in the world. When Katrina hit, the church was all over on that effort. When the tornadoes hit, the church was deploying resources there. And I've said to our scholars, we need to use that data to ask questions about crisis management that other people might not have access to. And so I think scholarship can be edified when it asks questions that maybe are being ignored in society generally, and it lets you collect data that might not be looked at by other scholars. And I won't belabor this, Michael, but here's another example. I was once talking to a national, very thoughtful publication, secular publication, and they claim to be committed to poverty. We're looking at issues around alleviating poverty, and that's phenomenal. And I said, we are, too. And then I said, are you looking at the structure of the American family? Because the highest predictor of intergenerational poverty is fatherless homes. And if you're serious about poverty, but you're ignoring the family, I question whether you're really serious about poverty. And religious schools, because they're not afraid to bring in the faith angle to their scholarship or a family angle to their scholarship, sometimes can ask questions that are left undone by other universities and other scholars.

So, Clark, there's another common theme in the issue around Faith being central to the development of character. And you know, it's something that Michael and I talked about with the leaders of some Jesuit institutions on the show last year. But I suspect many listening have in the back of their minds the reality that certainly most parents, but also students do when they go to college, that the outcome that they want is a job. And so if that's true, why is the development of character then so important?

You know, I had this conversation with our dean at the BYU Marriott School, Michael. It's another Harvard sourced leader in our system, Bridget Madrian. And she has this mission to develop Christ like leadership in their graduates. And of course I believe in that because of our religious mission. But I said to her, Bridget, why should Google or Walmart or Boeing care about your religious mission? They need qualified employees who can do their jobs well. And it was interesting as we've had that conversation. Well, all these employers, they want people who are responsible, who are accountable. They want people who have high integrity. They want people who have stable home lives. They find employees do better when they can be relied on. And we believe in our own faith tradition, Jeff, that you have a religious duty to be professional and responsible and accountable to those who you're employed by. And so we find in the Marriott School of Management at BYU and in our university graduates in general, employers value people who are of character and integrity and have a work ethic and have stable and happy home lives. And religion, whether you're a religious scholar or a social scientist, is a strong predictor of all of those factors. We see the same thing, I'm talking here about our MBA graduates going off to Goldman Sachs and Google and Boeing. But we see the same thing with our BYU Pathway program. This is for first generation college students all around the world. They tend to be below the poverty line. We have over 15,000 students in Africa in BYU pathway, and we have multinational employers who come to us to hire those students because they think they have character, they'll arrive to work on time, they have integrity, they're hardworking. And it's become a comparative advantage in the job market, Jeff, that to have religious character strengthen the quality of the people you might hire from our schools.

Well, so this is interesting, Clark, because you've done, I think, a good job painting a picture of the strength and differentiation that faith can provide institutions. But there's also this inconvenient reality which is that as many institutions close or struggle to get by, many of the ones one of your mentors, Clay Christensen predicted would close, they're religious Colleges. So what are your thoughts on why that's happening and what does it mean for the demand for religious colleges and universities if they're the ones that are first closed right now?

I think there's two variables. Any kind of phenomena is predicted by many things. One is its model, its academic operating model. The other one is the quality of what it produces. If you have a high cost, sub scale, low utilization, traditional liberal arts college, you're going to be struggling. Today, students are not looking to pay $50,000 to come to a campus and do this. And there is tremendous pressure to innovate those models. Where there are religious schools who look like that, their answer has been we have to raise tuition to afford the cost of higher education. And being religious does not free you up of the burden of delivering a valuable, affordable, quality experience. And so with many of our religious university friends, we've shared things we're doing around a teaching focused model at BYU Idaho or the online learning programs of BYU Pathway. We've shown how that can lower the cost of the operating model. If you went to a three track system, look what that would do to your physical utilization, to your faculty utilization. Look what online learning can do to lower the cost of delivery. And so we've said, look, tap into your religious identity to innovate. But no, it's gonna be very hard for a subscale, poorly utilized liberal arts entity in an expensive cost structure to be sustainable. On the flip side, if these religious schools will innovate in those ways, the demand for what they provide in the student experience has never been higher. I'm working on an article right now about religious university enrollment. Over the last 20 years, religious schools have grown faster than public universities. And I think that's even more remarkable, Jeff, because there were so many small, traditional liberal arts type model schools in the mix with that. But even with that, religious school enrollment's growing faster than the rest of the academy. It's growing much faster than private universities in general, and it's even growing faster than public universities. And so the question is, right, yeah, there are pressures to run universities well and cost efficiently. But as far as total demand, we believe this is again, back to our colleague Rabbi Ari Berman at Yeshiva. They're at record enrollment, BYU and BYU Idaho's enrollment has grown over 50% in that 20 year period from 2000 to 2020. And Rabbi Berman said the crisis facing America isn't a crisis of faith, it's a crisis of meaning. You know, young adults in this generation want to engage in something meaningful and it turns out a secular answer to that question is not fulfilling and it's not reaching lots of people, young people. And religious schools provide a place where you can preserve your personal religious identity. You can feel some protection from discrimination in society. And we are very confident and very bullish in the long term. Enrollment trends for religious university now, yes, I put an asterisk to say you can't charge $50,000 a year and you've got to innovate on the models. And we're doing that in BYU Idaho and BYU Pathway and BYU Hawaii and all of our schools. But the fundamental need to find meaning in your education, yes, they do want a job, but they also want to leave with a deeper sense of self, a deeper sense of identity and an ability to give back to society. And religious schools do an excellent job at that in a way that often isn't there in many secular universities.

Clark, that takes us to the last question that we have for you, which relevant as I think about meaning and purpose and innovation in one's life. But as Jeff mentioned, we both share a mentor in Clay Christianson in higher ed. He's known for many things from his scholarship to the predictions that Jeff just referenced about colleges closing. But what's one thing that you learned from Clay about higher ed that perhaps is not widely known?

You know, it's interesting. I sat at Clay's feet as a student in the classroom and as a scholar. Then I was a colleague with him on the faculty. I've spent almost all of my career since I left the Harvard Business School trying to find ways to use new models of innovation to reach more people. But in the end, Michael, I'm a classroom teacher. I like looking people in the eyes while we're talking. There's 100,000 students in online courses that I helped create for our system. But in the end, it's still a one on one relationship. My team at BYU Pathway and BYU Pathway has grown and grown and grown and they're like, hey, we could create bigger sections and the outcomes look pretty good even with the larger sections. And I'm like, but there will be no relationship beyond a certain threshold with the faculty member. And I think what I learned from Clay and I experienced from Clay is with all of his insights on innovation and so much of which I've been able to draw on and use in the work of our church's educational system, with all of his insights on education, in the end, Clay was a. Clay was a teacher and individual students mattered. And I always, when I was in Clay's class, found myself inspired to be better, to want to be something more. And Clay was so modest. And yet here was one of the most capable people we'd ever been around. And yet he was the humblest guy in the room. Some people want to be the smartest guy climbing. Clay wanted to be the most modest guy in the room. And that affected me as a student. And I watched him affect, I mean, we both were in his classroom. We felt that. And I love innovation, I love change, I love all the things that are happening in our church's educational system. But in the end, it's gotta affect one person, one at a time and be transformative in their life. And as I think about Clay, he did that, he did that for me, and that still remains an aspirational goal for me. I can talk all day about growth and enrollment and cost models, but in the end, does what we do fundamentally change people's lives for the better? Sometimes that's in earnings, but at the core is, does it change their character? Does it change who they are, who they want to be? And, and people might not know with all of Clay's big thinking, he leaned in one at a time to bless people's lives. And I was the recipient of that kind of ministerial teaching that I got from Clay Christensen.

Terrific. Clark, thanks for joining us on Future youe. And we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Future youe. And there's so much in that conversation with Clark, for whom his work and religion are deep staples of his life and they clearly were intertwined. So where should we start? Michael, what struck you about the conversation?

Yeah, Jeff, I had A few reactions, and one is that I had never actually really thought about this before. The ability to get top talent to work at these institutions for perhaps less money and less prestige than they could get elsewhere. And I'm sort of embarrassed, frankly, that I hadn't thought of this before. But I'm just going to out myself here and some of my classmates with a little story about this. And it goes back to my business school days, second year at the Harvard Business School. And frankly, what I'm about to say, it's a bit offensive on multiple levels, but hopefully I can just land the central point. We did this every year. You do this HBS show where you do this sort of musical that mocks some part of the campus. And second year had started off with a bit of a surprise when Kim Clark, who was our dean at the time, had up and left with frankly, no notice, as far as the students could tell, and taken the presidency at BYU Idaho, which is an institution I think 90% of us had never heard of. And we did this musical number to Jesus Christ Superstar at the beginning where we said, you know, BYU Idaho, U.S. news and World Report ranked 4, 6, 0. And I should note, I didn't write the lyrics. But I also didn't have the deeply held, cynical views I now have on the US News rankings back then, either. I think the astonishment that we had as HBS students, and I say that in full recognition of how spoiled and sort of caught up with ourselves we were, but the astonishment we had that Kim Clark would leave us. I mean, you know, it's the Harvard Business School, right? THC for BYU Idaho, which those of us outside of the church, we had never really heard of. Well, you know, something else. But. But I think it's indicative of one of the advantages that religion can bring to the table, or I suppose, any cause. Right. It doesn't have to just be religion that someone really deeply believes in and permeates who they are. Does make me wonder, though, Jeff, how generalizable is this to other parts of higher ed in terms of can you really use that, you know, maybe to attract people, but can you really use it to reduce costs and make the model more affordable? And I do like, Jeff, how Clark distinguished, you know, between the question of cost and subsidy and the conversation, of course, and what the church underwrites. Right.

For.

For its institutions? But I will say that that was a big aha for me. And I had a couple other thoughts, but I'd be curious. Your reaction first.

Yeah, Michael. I mean, I don't Want to sound like a broken record or either, but. But rather than move away from their religious identity, it seems like they really should lean into it because it really ties back to the two things that I talk about often on the show is belonging and purpose. Right. That students feel like they find their people and they have a sense of purpose for what they're trying to do. A few months ago, I was with, actually with Clark at an ACE event, an American Council on Education event that they hosted in D.C. he said that when students enroll and arrive at religious college, it's really the first time that many of them feel like they fit in. He joked that he stood out in high school and that his friends would kind of tap him as the designated driver when they would drink alcohol. But as soon as he matriculated to a religious campus, he really felt at ease because, again, he had that sense of belonging. And in many ways, religious colleges serve as havens in this increasingly secular country, and they should really capitalize on those niches and not attempt to mimic the rest of the higher education world, in my opinion.

Yeah, that goes back to the differentiation being a source of strength. And I think more broadly, this is the big takeaway, Jeff.

It's.

It's something we talked about last year as well in the episode where we had the presidents of Holy Cross and Fordham on as well. You know, what can they do with their religious missions? And I think that's the big thing is lean into it around purpose and belonging. Two other thoughts for what they're worth. One in affordability. I think leaning into your religious mission and using that lends a huge advantage on cost for another reason, because it has the potential to reduce acquisition cost, like big time. Like if you're a Mormon living anywhere in the world. BYU Pathway worldwide is synonymous for online affordable institution. And you don't need to play the, you know, the Google or Facebook game of finding a good college fit if that's what you're looking for. So you, you frankly, you see it in the numbers for BYU Pathway worldwide is the growth of students without costs increasing at the same rate. And I think that could be true for other affinities, frankly, as well, though to these broader points around purpose and belonging become synonymous for something and stand for it and stand for it always. One other thought is the importance of character education that Clark spoke about. I don't think just religious institutions can do this. I think about something I heard from the former Dartmouth president, former World bank president Jim Kim once said, which was, and I'm sure I'M paraphrasing here, but he basically said, when you look to make a hire, hire an athlete. And his point was that being an athlete really instills in people a deep work ethic, executive function, skills, a desire to do well and win, a sense of fairness, competition, on and on. And so if you could view athletics as a way to develop outstanding graduates in the world, athletics need not be seen as a distraction, but actually as a core part of what the university does. And I think this gets it, you know, character education more broadly, or maybe what Summit Public schools in the K12 world would call habits of success. Jeff, you know, agency, perseverance, self efficacy, metacognition, curiosity.

Yeah, Michael, I really want to dig deeper on that and not only in this episode, but perhaps next year, on future year, we should really focus a little bit more on this idea of character education. I noted this morning, the day we're recording that I noted to my wife that our, our kids, our two kids are really rules followers. And I admit I break them sometimes and my kids call them out, especially when we're in the car and on the road. I don't always follow the speed limit. Right. And things like that. And, and I said to my wife, I, you know, I'm, why are they such rules followers? And she noted that in, in their K through 6 school, they really focus on core values and, and character education and, and it's why they're such rules followers, I think. Now I hope that we're doing a little bit of this at home as well, but I think it does come down to their education. And it's really interesting because there was this recent survey, this populist survey, and maybe again, one day we might have Todd Rose on the show to talk about this because if you. They asked. And again, we'll put this in the show notes, they asked K through 12 parents kind of what they want out of schools. And they thought that there was actually too much focus on preparing students for college and not enough on some of the basic things that they thought schools should do, including character education. And I'm really struck, Michael, by this editorial. And again, something else we'll put in the show notes that was in the Stanford student newspaper after a string of Stanford graduates have gone through essentially being on trial for doing things that weren't exactly ethical. And the headline of the piece was what does Stanford stand For? And as they noted, as the student editors noted, the founders of Juul, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman, Fried Carlos Watson, there's all of these as they Said these high profile fraud cases all share a common denominator and that's namely Stanford. Each trial focuses more scrutiny on the institution that produced these crooked founders. And Stanford's response, as the student editors pointed out over and over again, has been deafening silence. Right. They haven't reacted to any of this and, but more so what can Stanford do? And I think maybe building more character education into an ethics, into the undergraduate curriculum, which I think is kind of the piece of that a religious college is able to do. And I think it's going to require us probably to slow education down a little bit to build more of this in to more secular institutions. But again, I think that this is one thing that religious institutions can really lean in on because it's something it seems, at least from the data, that parents want.

Well, in a world of AI, it's going to become more important, that's for sure as well. Jeff, to be thinking about these questions, but, but last thought, I was also struck by Clark's commitment to serving those with less. And look, he, he obviously talked about the privileges he and his family have, but he also made it clear how central it was for his church to serve those with less. And in hearing that and what it meant to him to be able to tell someone who didn't think they were, quote, college material that in his words, and certainly not my words, you know, Jesus loves them and they can succeed. I, you know, I was just struck by something our friend Paul Friedman often says, which is that success in college can really change not just the lives of the individual, but also lift up their entire family tree. And that struck me as relevant here given how Clark thinks about the centrality, an integration of family and individuals.

Yeah, Michael. It's why the focus, I think now on social mobility of higher education and individual institutions in pushing forward social mobility is so important. It's why a lot of the rankings are now focused much more on social mobility. It's why ACE will likely focus the new Carnegie classifications more on social mobility. I think it's so important because that's at the end of the day, it's not just about what the institution is doing for that single individual, but everyone around that individual. And so really thrilled that we were able to have Clark on the show with us. I think it's an important issue that we probably don't talk enough about, especially as the country does become more secular. And again, thank you all for joining us on this episode of Future you and we'll see you next time.

Sam.