Who Should Pay for College?

Lecture: Who Should Pay for College?

Lecture| Tuesday, January 10 | 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. PT | Livestream

Who should be responsible for the cost of college? Students? Their parents? The government? Should tuition at public universities be free? Should student loans be forgiven? Is college worth the costs? These are among the questions that Natasha Quadlin, Brian Powell and their research team asked thousands of Americans for more than a decade. This webinar discusses how Americans responded to these questions and how their views on higher education have changed in a short period of time. With the high cost of college, the loans students are taking, and the current controversies related to loan forgiveness, this discussion will be informative and provocative.

Natasha Quadlin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines social inequality in the contemporary United States, with an emphasis on inequality in access and returns to education. She is particularly interested in using large-scale experiments and surveys to examine the mechanisms behind inequalities in schools, families, and labor markets. Other projects use experimental methods to examine public attitudes, and how these attitudes are linked with inequalities on account of gender, social class, race, and other characteristics.

Brian Powell is James H. Rudy professor and co-director of the Preparing Future Faculty program in the department of Sociology at Indiana University. He also is affiliated faculty in the Department of Gender Studies and the Kinsey Institute. He served as department chair and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.