00:00Gentleman yields back. We now recognize the gentleman from Washington for five minutes.
00:05Well, thank you, Mr. Chair, for holding this important hearing. There is zero doubt that the Ivy League institutions behave in an anti-competitive manner.
00:18In fact, if you look at their pricing and value and marketing model, it looks very similar to some famous jewel companies
00:25and how they control the supply of diamonds and inflate what is a commodity into a precious item of limited scarcity.
00:34But I do believe that American higher education is a gem of American society.
00:39What it does for research, social mobility, and overall aid to our economy is extremely important.
00:47Unfortunately, it's a gem that has been thrust into the mud largely by Democratic leadership.
00:54And Democrats are great if you're a college administrator and want to see your salary increase or your job supply increase.
01:01They're terrible if you're a college student and you don't want to see your debt levels increase.
01:07The right price for college should be the price at which a student can get through with zero debt.
01:14College should be priced at the level you can work a part-time job or a summer job.
01:19And, you know, the problem with an 18-year-old is they don't know the difference between $6,000 in debt or $60,000 in debt.
01:25They've never had a job and had to pay it back.
01:28So what this body should be doing is how do we create an environment where all students can get through school with no debt.
01:35When I was in our state senate, as Republicans, when we took control of the state senate,
01:39we actually dropped the price of college tuition 20% in Washington state under Republican leadership
01:45because we were working for the middle class.
01:48I've had the experience of going to a big state school, Washington State University, where my father's professor.
01:53I spent a year as a teacher at Catholic University in Mozambique teaching war refugees.
01:58I was a teaching fellow at Harvard when I did my master's there.
02:00And I was short-term on the faculty at Sciences Po University in Paris, which is kind of the Harvard of France.
02:07And across all those experiences, what I saw is that the amount of growth in administrators in American universities is simply out of control.
02:21When you go to Sciences Po, there's no diversity deans, student housing deans, student welfare deans.
02:26There is simply this reliance on college students to behave as adults and figure stuff out for themselves.
02:32In doing that, they're able to provide college at a much, much lower level.
02:37So what this body needs to do is to figure out ways to get out all the BS out of higher education,
02:43get back to basics, and create mechanisms to bring costs down.
02:48Now, I do want to touch on this issue of the Ivy Leagues and Harvard specifically, which does have some real problems.
02:54When I went to Harvard, there was a lack of viewpoint diversity.
02:58We used to call the Republican Club the phone booth club because there were so few of us we could fit in a phone booth.
03:02Now I make that joke and a lot of students don't even know what a phone booth is.
03:05But in any event, the solution to this is just to make these universities reflective of American society.
03:13It's like Noah's Ark, just increase access and viewpoint diversity.
03:17This shouldn't be hard, except the fact the far left does not want to give up its stranglehold on America's most elite universities.
03:25But this is going to happen.
03:27Secondly, there is a problem with the Chinese government and foreign institutions utilizing America's most elite universities.
03:34When I went to Harvard, there was sort of a small-scale scandal.
03:38They refused to fly the flag of Taiwan at that time.
03:44And in fact, we have some important legislation here in this body in the Deterrent Act, which we passed out of the House,
03:50that would illuminate how much foreign influence is going on in college campuses from places like China.
03:56And even today, Harvard resists implementing that bill.
04:00I'd like to enter for the record this newspaper article that Harvard has trained so many Chinese communist officials,
04:09they call it their party school.
04:11So there very much is a problem of China, these universities.
04:15If I could enter this in the record, thank you, Mr. Chair.
04:18And finally, I just want to thank all the panelists for fighting this antitrust issue.
04:25But as we think about these issues, we all need to realize that college enrollment is about to go off a cliff due to demographic changes in America.
04:36We have a silver tsunami of older Americans, and we have a dwindling, rapidly, supply of college students
04:43because of demographic factors in terms of birth rates and also the cost.
04:47So this anti-competitive behavior will likely become worse in coming years as the market, total market for college students reduces.
04:57With that, I yield back.
04:58The gentleman yields back.
05:01Mr. Nadler is recognized for unanimous consent request.
05:05Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record an article from New America title.
