California Universities Face a $17 Billion Growth Ponzi Scheme

(Photo by Tyler Zhang on Unsplash.)

As of the 2023-24 academic year, the University of California faces $9.1 billion in deferred maintenance, while California State University faces $8.3 billion. In today’s episode, Chuck and Abby explore how this problem arose, how it mirrors the challenges cities are facing, and what it'll take to manage this decline.

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  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zoned.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hey, everyone, welcome back to up zoned podcast, where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the strong towns conversation and we up zone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, an urban planner in Kansas City, and I'm joined once again, by my friend Chuck Marone, founder of strong towns. Hello, Chuck. Welcome back.

  Chuck Marohn 0:41

  Hello, Abby. It's nice to Nice to see you again, and nice to talk and catch up. People don't know this, but we spend, like, the bulk of our time talking before we go.

  Abby Newsham 0:53

  So I had a whole conversation. I know

  Chuck Marohn 0:55

  we spent a lot of time today because we haven't talked for a while. So it's nice to catch up with you.

  Abby Newsham 0:59

  Yeah, it's great catching up with you, and then we go

  Chuck Marohn 1:02

  to talk about the weather when we turn on weather,

  Abby Newsham 1:05

  right? Hopefully we don't have to, well, I was actually about to tell you that I have allergies, so hopefully that isn't noticeable in the recording. But yeah, because of you know the weather well,

  Chuck Marohn 1:18

  you and I have been passing back and forth because we're friends on Instagram too, a series of maps about where people will if climate apocalypse happens, where you would want to be living, and essentially you would want to be living where I am, which I've been trying to get you to move to, where I am for years now. And I said, this is all part of the strategy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna burn more fossil fuels just to get you to move to Minnesota someday,

  Abby Newsham 1:47

  maybe one day, I'm a climate refugee moving from Missouri because of, I think it said heat waves are the thing here. Well, it is,

  Chuck Marohn 1:58

  yeah, it's true. I did a summer in the army there, and it was, I'm like, Oh my gosh, does anybody live in this place? It's just crazy.

  Abby Newsham 2:05

  Unfortunately, yes, just kidding, it is nice. It's nice right now, but, yeah, it's incredibly hot in the summer.

  Chuck Marohn 2:13

  Well, I said I would vouch for you when the time comes, and I will, I will do that. I will vouch for you and say, you know, this person has Minnesota ish tendencies in them so she can live among us.

  Abby Newsham 2:25

  All right? I appreciate, I appreciate that description, Minnesota ish tendencies. I can Yeah, sounds good. Okay, so this week, we are focusing on a recent article that was published in calmatters, titled inside a billion dollar maintenance backlog plaguing California's University. So the piece sheds light on the growing crisis of deferred maintenance across the university systems. As of the 2023 2024 academic year, the UC University of California system faces an estimated $9.1 billion in deferred maintenance in the California State University system, CSU has approximately 8.3 billion these figures really underscore the challenges that are posed by aging facilities and infrastructure, as well as escalating costs for things like labor and materials, despite the pressing need for repairs. Governor Gavin Newsom proposed 2025 2026 budget that does not allocate funds for deferred maintenance or other infrastructure projects. This emission kind of highlights the unpredictable nature of state funding, which has varied significantly over the years and has left many, many repairs unaddressed, even though they're very necessary, the state's legislative and analyst office has previously urged lawmakers and university leaders to develop a long term funding strategy that tackles this issue. So Chuck, I want to delve a little bit more into the implications of this maintenance backlog and talk about how the situation really aligns with the strong towns movement. Obviously, we're talking about universities here, but I feel like the theme of this current era of the world seems to be deferred maintenance across many, many different systems, and universities being no exception to that. I feel

  Chuck Marohn 4:43

  like there's, you know, this question of like, how many more examples do we need right to to, like, demonstrate that we're just not good at this. You know, you you mentioned, you mentioned in your in your intro to this. Because that Governor, Newsom in California, did not include anything in his budget request. And I think that kind of makes it sound like, oh, the governor doesn't care, or he's being stingy. It really means that the state of California has its own $45 billion budget deficit, not including this other, like, billions of dollars of backlog of deferred maintenance, and also not including, like, all the deferred maintenance that you know Caltrans has, etc, etc, all the way down the line I did so I'm reading this article, and I'm thinking about how to talk about this with you. I did an interview with a college student this morning, some project. I get a lot of these requests where it's like, hey, could I just ask you a few questions? I can't remember what the the writing assignment that the student had, but the the student asked me about, you know, just deferred maintenance and, like, what do we need to do to solve this problem. And my answer to him was, I, I think this is just culture. Now. You know when, when you go through, I think of like my grandfather, who grew up during the Great Depression. He was a Marine in World War Two. This was a guy who, when we would go for walks together, would pick up cans on the side of the road and bring them home, and then, you know, crush them and make a pile out of them, and then when it got to be enough, take them to the recycling place and get, like, $3.20 or whatever it was. This is a guy who would get mad if you didn't clean your plate. You know, if you serve food and you didn't eat it all, he would get mad at you and my wife, you know, we have two daughters, and my wife's ethic with my daughters has always been the like, don't you don't have to clean your plate. Like, if you're full stop eating. That's fine. I think about just the cultural difference between my grandfather and my wife and I my grandparents. You know, they grew up in a time of want. They grew up in a time of scarcity. They grew up in a time when it wasn't uncommon for people to not have food and not have and not as a result of mental illness or drug abuse or what have you as a result of, like, a bad crop, or like, you know, losing your job or a dust storm, or like, you know, what, whatever things happen. These are just like part of human existence. We live today in this, you know, post post World War boom, where we have used whether it's civil engineering my profession, or whether it's financial engineering, or whether it's cultural engineering, or like, however you want to look at it, to in a sense, live in this time of intense abundance, and one of the things that passes away in a time of intense abundance is just a recognition of, in a sense, constraints. When I was a young engineer and we were building roads, everybody sitting around the table, you know, sewer systems, water systems, what have you everybody sitting around the table knew that these things needed to be maintained. Like there was. We're not dumb in that way. We was not like no one at no one thought about had to be maintained. But there was such abundance around us that we didn't spend a lot of time wrestling with the notion, could this be maintained? What kind of tax base would we need to actually maintain this? How expensive would this be to maintain? Is this like a good use of our resources? Will our kids and grandkids want to maintain this because we're giving it to them like they're gonna have to live with it forever? Are they gonna actually value it as much as other things? These were not things we had to struggle with, and we largely didn't have to struggle with them, because the underlying assumption was kind of endless abundance. And I feel like there's a, you know, there's a cure for that type of thing, and that is a lack of abundance. I mean, that makes you very sensitive to other things, like, How expensive is this to maintain, and do we really value it? You wish there was a more. You Wish there was an easier way to gain that cultural knowledge than to go through times of scarcity and despair.

  Abby Newsham 9:43

  It does make me kind of curious about how universities were structured during times where people didn't have much, and it makes me curious because now today we have a university system. Um, across many across the country, that is based on state subsidy, and then there are a bunch of private universities as well. And you probably have your head in this more than I do, because your daughter has been looking at colleges and applying at colleges. But you know, universities, despite their growing backlog of deferred maintenance, they continue to have this, this, you know, growth for growth sake, mindset, a lot of the times, because there's so much pressure to grow and have more enrollment, more prestige, more buildings, new buildings, and that comes at an expense of fiscal responsibility, and it makes me wonder what a strong campus approach looks like, because we keep building new new university buildings, even though there are so many facilities, not just in California, but in In probably all of our states that are in desperate need of reinvestment.

  Chuck Marohn 11:07

  I think this is a hard question, because it's so intertwined with how we think of ourselves. I'm a Minnesotan, and if you ask the typical Minnesotan cause or effect, does affluence? Does education create affluence, or does affluence create education? They would argue, education creates affluence. Education makes us smarter. It makes us more productive. It allows us to get better jobs, it allows us to have higher affluence. And the thing is, when you examine that and pull that apart, and then you look across different cultures and different societies and even different times in American history, you actually it's almost inescapable that you come to the opposite conclusion, which is that the more affluent you become, the more you spend on, in a sense, the luxury good of education. That's not to say that education isn't valuable and worthy. I mean, I'm I am not one to criticize the value of education. I have a not only an undergrad degree in a technical field, but I have a master's degree in urban planning that I think was transformative in my life. Like, I think this is, this is really, really important stuff. But higher education in particular is not an elite activity. And I say that in not an elite in terms of money terms, but in terms of, like, Alexander Hamilton terms, right? Like, here's the smartest guy in our village. We're all going to raise money and put him on a boat and send him to New England so that he can attend a university, because this dude's super smart. That is an elite type of undertaking. And if you looked at universities at that time, they were incredibly elite and prestigious in terms of like, what it took to get in and what it took to go, but they were also relatively small in size and focus as part of taking my daughter to UV a bunch of campuses. And by the way, she's going to the University of Arizona. She wants to study astrophysics. She's a really smart kid. I'm very, very proud of her. But we toured all of the, you know, a lot of the UC schools, because California is really great for astrophysics. We toured San Diego, we toured toured Berkeley, we toured UCLA. These are places where they let in one out of every 10 students that apply. She didn't get into UCLA. She did get, like, a deferred acceptance to San Diego. But even there, it was like they they reject five out of six students, or something like that, that apply to their program if you wanted to solve this problem, like, if you said, we're gonna, we're gonna deal with this, you could increase emissions by 25% you could charge 50% more, and, you know, reduce the number of applicants, but have more money to do it. You could, I mean, there's a whole bunch of like, functional ways to make this happen that they're all like, unwilling or unable to do. I I don't, I don't think that there's any way to solve this problem using, like, the current tools and the current structures. Because the reality is, is that we've over built like we've over built in many parts of society. We've over built secondary education systems. And you know, with with the demographic, you know, the millennials were a big generation, Gen Z Gen, a much smaller generation, just by. Year numbers, we are going to have fewer higher ed institutions a decade from now than we have today, and that's not counting any like economic shifts or Trump administration pulling your research funding, or any like weird craziness like that. That's just like math. Now add in all the buildings we built during times of abundance. Man, I was on the UC San Diego campus, and they're built like, there's cranes everywhere they're building. I know what they're building like, I look at it and I'm like, a this building's gonna cost a hellacious amount to maintain. It is like, full of windows and weird angles and all this stuff. You know, did I say a or one? I can't remember two, A, two. You know, when it does reach the end of its life, which it will happen or it needs major renovations, this is gonna be really, really expensive to renovate. But, you know, three, it's probably the cheapest building you could build quickly today and get up, and that's kind of what you're most interested in. And so here it is. And this is, I feel like this is a microcosm of what we have done across society to ourselves. And I, I mean, I've spent the last 15 years trying to explain this to people. I you see it everywhere you look, and I don't really think there's a way to like paper over this tendency that we've had during this time of abundance, to just think that it will never end Right

  Abby Newsham 16:34

  exactly. And you know, you, you made a statement a few minutes ago that there's this tension around the idea that that universities or education creates affluence, and the reality is that people create affluence, and universities provide education, which is one of many inputs that contribute to A person creating affluence. So just having universities and building universities doesn't necessarily create that if it's not scaled properly to the market for that education, which is what the people who are creating that and can and benefiting from that public investment in education. So there is a tipping point, essentially, where the costs are going to outweigh the benefits. And it seems that universities really have a lot of pressure to engage in this race to the bottom, where they continue to build and improve, to to attract a lessening market of people who are going to be participating in in college and essentially paying to go to university. And the problem with that is that deferred maintenance is essentially hidden debt, and most of our liabilities are not necessarily in budgets, but they're packed into infrastructure and facilities. So a $17 billion maintenance backlog in California isn't just this physical problem, but it is a form of invisible debt, essentially. And I don't know if I have a good answer for how institutions and governments could rethink financial health so when so much of their obligation is essentially hidden under leaking roofs and aging HVAC systems in buildings that they can't afford to maintain.

  Chuck Marohn 18:34

  Well, already committed, like pot committed, right? You don't have the flexibility to say, hey, you know, education has changed. We have a new business model. We've got a new way of doing things. And so, you know, we're gonna, like, retool this building to do something, no, like you're pot committed to, like, all of this.

  Abby Newsham 18:56

  Well, what have public schools done? Though, I think of schools. I mean specifically the Kansas City Public School where where I am, but a lot of other schools that had too many buildings, and now they are selling them and getting rid of those facilities. It does make me wonder if, if we will see universities start to shrink their footprint as enrollment goes down in mass

  Chuck Marohn 19:21

  so, so you said race to the bottom, and I think I know what you meant, but I would actually say it slightly differently. I think what we've done is we've created business strategies where there will be a handful of of winners, or let's just call them survivors, and then a whole bunch of losers, like catastrophic collapses. So I look like, here in Minnesota, we have the University of Minnesota system. We have the main campus in Minneapolis, St Paul. See I'm wearing my Minnesota gopher shirt, like this is where, this is where I went. And my wife. And this is where my daughter's going. And they have this like advantage statewide in that they are, like the prestige University. They, you know, can turn people away. They could let more people in. They have this like prestige thing, but they also have like a scale thing. So their thing is, like, go big and suck up all the all the best students in the state and all the best students in the region. You have a bunch of other University of Minnesota campuses that each have their own niche, like we're gonna do Ag, and like, a lot of our money will come from research associated with AG. When you go to the state college system, they're the ones in the middle that right now today, are getting completely squeezed out because the University of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota system, is sucking up a lot of what students would have normally gone to. Those state schools are either ending up there or they're going the next lower tier down, which is a community college to get their generals in or do that kind of thing. And so we see a place like St Cloud State, which is a place where both of my parents went to become teachers. They are having massive enrollment declines, and they can't they just can't fill their classrooms. They can't compete on prestige. They can't compete on price. And so in a sense, they're the ones left without a chair as this, you know, series of like musical chairs takes place. I feel like there's an analog here. When it comes to the public realm and cities and the development our country. You have these, let's just call them winter cities. You know, a New York, a San Francisco, where there's so many people that want to be there, they can't possibly ever like there's no strategy of building that could build enough housing to actually meet the people's demand to be there. And so you have very high prices, you have very high services, you have a huge demand, and you're turning people away the same way if you were a really high class university or, you know, a big state school, and then you have smaller towns, and I would point to, like the place I live, or even like a smaller city, like where you live, where I think there's enough dynamism and enough stuff going on, where there's people who want to be there, but there is kind of like an equilibrium. I mean, we don't have, there's enough housing around where you can get into something, but the market's tight enough where the prices are going up. But you have a whole swath of this country, and I think this is what's often lost in our, you know, yimby housing arguments and our infrastructure growth arguments and our economic kind of Keynesian float all boats. Arguments is that there's a whole huge swath of the country that are losing population, are struggling, have overbuilt systems, have no chance of ever, like, fully utilizing them. You know, even a place like Chicago, which is a great city, is experiencing like, continued population loss, these systems don't work when they're not at in a sense, not just capacity, but like growing, because growth was built into the underlying assumptions of everything. And you know when you have a period of stasis and you assumed optimistically endless growth and abundance, that stasis starts to look really quickly like a disaster when it really is just should be stability,

  Abby Newsham 23:32

  right? And so the question, I think, not just for universities, but cities, is like, how do you manage how do you manage decline or stagnation? I think we talked about this maybe a couple of months ago when we were talking about a town out east. But it's like, how do you how do you manage that little town, that little town? Yeah, we were talking about managing decline and stagnation, because a lot of you know, I think as humans, we're kind of wired for progress and optimism and things growing. And as modern humans, sure, I

  Chuck Marohn 24:15

  don't think, I don't think that my grandparents were wired that way, really. Yeah, that's

  Abby Newsham 24:18

  probably true.

  Chuck Marohn 24:21

  And I do think this is the okay in my first book, I talk about this, and I realized I was maybe too subtle in how I talked about it in that book. Because to me, this is like the fundamental difference between the pre Great Depression development pattern and what we have experienced post World War Two, and that is this assumption of growth and abundance. If you look at the traditional development pattern, there was always an opportunity to grow, but never an obligation. So you could grow to a certain point, but you would not. It was almost like a plateau where you would grow to a certain plateau, and then you could. Hang out there for a long time, maybe a decade, maybe 100 years, and it wouldn't fall back. It wouldn't fall apart, because there was enough going on. There was enough there to sustain it. Post World War Two. I mean, I think we have to appreciate the people at the time. They had lived through the Great Depression, they had lived through the stock market crash and this huge like tumult in their economy. They had lived through the Great Depression, real 25% unemployment, massive dislocation. I mean, and then that ended in the great in World War Two, which you know, is the most horrific war that's ever been fought. I mean, even exempting the Holocaust, which, you know, how do you even process that you have 10s of millions dead on every you know, Asia and Europe? I mean, it was, this was a deep, deep, deep trauma that ends with atomic weapons being dropped. These were people who were deeply traumatized, and it is very easy to look and see how the idea of an economy that grows really quickly solves a lot of their problems. We can grow, grow, grow, we can provide a middle class. I mean, think of this as like a business conservative, right? If we grow, we'll expand markets, we'll build a middle class. Everybody can buy a car, everybody can buy a house. Think of this as, like, a progressive, you know, liberal. Hey, if we grow the economy, we'll have more money for programs like Social Security and Medicare. We can help poor people. We can invest in education. This was a solution to, like, everybody's problem, and so you create instantly, this, in a sense, well, I'm using the word abundance, and I just realized, like, that's the new buzzword that is around with a new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I'm not doing that intentionally. I'm maybe, maybe they've gotten into my brain somehow. I've not read the book yet, but I mean, you create this economy that does produce this abundance, and it makes us forget all the lessons Tomas Sedlacek, and this is who I quote in my book. Tomas Sedlacek, talks about it between a trade off between growth and stability. And he said, what we did is we gave up stability in order to have growth. And then when we became unstable, instead of slowing down growth in order to build stability, what we did is we accelerated growth in order to overcome the instability, right? And we just grow more, if we could just add more, if we could just do more. And now we are so far into that growth part that we have given up kind of all semblance of stability. And that's to me, that's the defining crisis of our time?

  Abby Newsham 28:00

  Yeah, I feel like this totally aligns with the conversation we were having before we started recording about having a low burn lifestyle. Yeah, right. Like, maintaining a low burn.

  Chuck Marohn 28:13

  It's funny to me. It's always been interesting to me, because I'm not a Dave Ramsey person, like, I couldn't tell you, like, five lessons from Dave Ramsey. Like, I don't, I don't know, but, you know, you run across people who are Dave Ramsey people, and they will say, you know, I'm on a budget. I've got little cups I put money in. Like, I don't know how it works. I'm not trying to be insulting, but it's amazing to me, especially early on in strong towns, how many Dave Ramsey as people would come to me and say, like I do Dave Ramsey, I also love strong towns. I see a lot of overlap. My take on Dave Ramsey has always been, how do you create stability in an unstable world, in a world that's kind of pushing you to have a credit card, yeah? How do you not get a credit card debt? Yeah? In a world where, like, it's easy to buy on margin, how do you not do that? Yeah, buy

  Abby Newsham 29:05

  everything cash. Yeah, I don't know enough about Dave Ramsey that I, like, I wouldn't be able to tell you specific lessons from him or what that program is. But, I mean, I remember coming out of the recession, I was like, you know, 1819, in my early 20s, and I used to turn on the radio and listen to that, and it did influence me, like the idea of not having credit card debt and, you know, having a low burn lifestyle. So I really do think there is some alignment there, you know, in terms of timber men, of people who would be interested in that and in strong talents. I think that's

  Chuck Marohn 29:49

  I feel that too, and I don't know enough about it to really speak authentically about it. For me, it has always been my grandfather. Parents, particularly my grandpa, and, you know, to a degree the church. I mean, I think there just is in Catholic teaching, there is a lot of, you know, materialism is is de emphasized, and prudence is kind of over emphasized. And I'm not pretending like I'm a perfect Catholic or I'm even a good Catholic, but I think you know this idea that you live within your means as a central Minnesotan in a small town, growing up on a farm, living up the road from your grandparents and going to church every week, you're kind of just like bombarded with that continuously, right? Like that just is the way that things are. So,

  Abby Newsham 30:43

  yeah, cultural temperament, for sure, it

  Chuck Marohn 30:46

  is. But I'll say this, I there's times when I feel like, oh, wow, I'm just getting old. Because I do look around and I'm like, That is that is evaporating even here, right? I'm, you know, I feel like Minnesota culture has changed to where we are very much like what I would consider everybody else in terms of how we use debt, how we go about our lives, how we, you know, leverage things. And I'll go back to the question that I was asked today by this college student, you know, how do you how do you fix this? How do you address this? And I don't think being Jeremiah and standing up and saying, you know, bad times they are coming unless we repent. I don't think that that is a viable strategy culturally, you know, across our country. I think what actually fixes this is you go through times of want and not want created from over abundance. I mean, the kind of want we see today in society is generally people who are marginalized out of our over abundance. I usually talk about, you know, want from, like, literally not having things. And I don't know, I mean, I It's hard to, it's hard to tour Detroit of a decade ago and not feel that deep pain of what this, what this experience is like. And even in Detroit, you know, I think that, I think that lesson has been learned to some degree, but, but you also look at some of the crazy things that Detroit still does, and you're like, yeah, maybe not so much,

  Abby Newsham 32:29

  yeah. And in the context of universities, there's probably a lot of pressure to kind of have your cake and eat it too, because you can have an incremental maintenance strategy. I'm sure, you know, state systems, probably all around the country, have strategies for how they're going to manage the maintenance and the stagnation or even decline. And I think the strong towns principle for that would be to have small bets and iterate. And, you know, rather than waiting for large infusions of capital to come from the state or major projects, it's really about adopting a more ongoing maintenance approach that has to make some hard choices about what facilities they're going to maintain. But at the same time, I can't see universities walking away from the need to keep up with enrollment pressures, right? I mean, to just say, Hey, we are going to manage the stagnation, and we are not going to build anything new or update anything. I mean, I think from their perspective, they may sit, they may feel that that would lead to even greater decline and a bigger problem for them, right? Like it's a really difficult situation. So

  Chuck Marohn 33:52

  Stella, I said, is going to University of Arizona. She's going to be a Wildcat. Super excited. We were there on campus a couple weeks ago for admitted students day. And one of the things that they're very proud of, and one of the things that my both because I, my oldest daughter came with and she's like, Oh, this is really great, is they have two or three rec centers, and one of them is, like, the size of a block. I mean, it's massive. I've never seen I've never seen so many like treadmills and bikes and like facility all in one place. I mean, it is like whatever you think of your local YMCA or specialty gym. This is like that on like Mega steroids. It's just crazy. You realize that, like, St Cloud state cannot do that like they they they are starved of cash, and they can't compete in that way. And so, yeah, you see this, like race to build these high end amenities as a way to keep your enrollment up and keep you know interest in your school and and it becomes. Becomes like the ante that the next one can't meet,

  Abby Newsham 35:03

  right? Especially when you're marketing this, by the way, to 18 year olds, and the trends of what they're looking for in a university probably changes over time, right? Like, right now, maybe it's Wellness and Recreation and rock climbing and having all the cool facilities. I mean, I think that's, that's another challenge that they, they face. I may,

  Chuck Marohn 35:27

  I may, live in a bubble of very smart women, so this might not be representative of, like, the population as a whole, but I, you know, my daughter's friends come over, and they've been talking for months now about where they're going to school, and they have to decide this month because, like, May, something is the deadline, and they've all pretty much decided. And the ones that were on the bubble decided to go to schools where they were going to graduate with less debt. And I don't think it's lost on them that, you know, we're about to all the COVID suspensions of student loan debt are now coming to an end, and we're actually like, have federal policies where we're gonna go seize people's wages and do like, really harsh things to collect student loan debt that 24 months ago, or 18 months ago, or maybe even Six months ago, there was a possibility would be completely forgiven, right,

  Abby Newsham 36:24

  exactly? And by the way, I think it's pretty ridiculous that we're making major life decisions based on like, what the federal government may or may not do. Like that, to me, is really, really risky, really

  Chuck Marohn 36:41

  fragile. Yeah, totally, no, I know. But you've seen the charts we've published of cities reliance on, you know, federal aid. I mean, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 36:51

  I know, in this position, you look

  Chuck Marohn 36:54

  at it part of the, part of the tension here, I think, for universities, is that for my whole life, the two areas of society that have never been touched, really in any dramatic way by budget constraints have been universities, like secondary education, universities and medical system. You are seeing boomers kind of completely out now of the the education realm, their their kids are no longer in it. They're out. And so to me, this, this Gen X bubble, you know, echo the the smaller demographic group, is now kind of forcing all these changes. And I think that it's very astute of people in that age group to say, I don't know as I want the debt so I can have a nicer rec center. Or I don't know as I want the debt, you know, I will accept this school over this school, because when I graduate, I'll have $40,000 less debt. I think the interesting thing is the healthcare part, because boomers are deep in that, in terms of, like, the amount of money they require now today, but when they are done with that, will the millennials prop that up, or will that go away too? Like, will that end in terms of that, being outside of the realm of reform. And when I say they haven't been touched, I don't mean that they haven't had budget cuts or haven't experienced things. I mean universities have always had budget shortfalls and always had problems, but what they have always done is they've been kind of a favored class in society where they have gotten money to resolve their problems, they've not had to restructure or reconsider their business model or redo the way they are doing things, because they just couldn't continue on. And it's pretty clear that that is happening now at the university level, in a way that it has never happened in my lifetime.

  Abby Newsham 38:58

  Well, it does give me some hope that there are young people that are considering not taking on lots of student debt. I mean, that's something that was important to me personally. I mean, I didn't live in dorms. I moved to Kansas City intentionally, and was arrest, became a resident intentionally of Kansas City, so that I would not have to live in dorms because of how expensive they were, and just made a lot of strategic decisions to not have very much student loan debt. And it it meant that I didn't do a lot of things that a lot of other people did that costed a lot of money, and I don't regret that, but I think that they're for college students, at least in back in my day, and for other people's day. I'm now at that age, or I can say that, I guess, but there's a lot of pressure for people to have the college experience, the university experience. And people take on a lot of debt to achieve that. And I couldn't tell you if it's worth it or not, because I didn't do it, but I know a lot of people who have substantial debt from from going to university,

  Chuck Marohn 40:17

  yeah, Stella. I mean, my, my, my youngest got accepted to UC Santa Cruz, which is a really very good school, and they have a great astrophysics program, and she seriously considered it. They gave her a very nice scholarship to go there. But ultimately, end of the day, there were two things that kept her that took it off the list. And the number one, one was she would almost certainly have 10s of 1000s of dollars of debt when she got done where, you know, we're hopeful she won't have that in you at Arizona. And then the second thing was there, it was very unclear where you would live after the first year, because the campus is not, you know, has limited housing. It's kind of reserved for freshmen, and after that, you're kind of on your own in a state not only with a housing crisis, but, uh, an actual city that is not well connected to the university and itself has a housing crisis. So, you know, the these things are affecting how people live their lives. And while it works, you know, slower than, say, like a market for technology, or in a market for, you know, what have you, it does affect the decisions that people make, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 41:37

  yeah, at least if they're thinking strategically about these things and past five years into the future, which not everyone does when they're 18 years old. You know.

  Chuck Marohn 41:50

  No, I do think, though, I mean, you and I have joked now, like, you know, back when I was that age. I mean, maybe it's the fact that I have kids in this age group, but I mean, there's a lot to be worried about with my generation when they were that age. And I don't think there's more to be worried about with this group. I actually,

  Abby Newsham 42:14

  I feel probably less they've seen some of us,

  Chuck Marohn 42:19

  yeah, but you know, you I mean, are there things there that, yeah, but from a macro sense, I mean, I think that the when the history books look at what we're going through right now, what we are going through is the readjustment phase after The post war boom. You have this post war boom and the Cold War and this whole kind of, like realignment. I was, I was talking to someone about this the other day. You know, at the end of World War Two, Germany was not a country. Japan was not a country. Russia had 40 million people die. I mean, like you're talking about a England was the world's superpower. Had the biggest empire in the world, and they all of it was gone. India is a free country, Palestine, the Middle East, like, like, everything changes at the end of World War Two. And we as a country are not only at like, the top of the hill, but we are like, the unrivaled, you know, atomic superpower, with the entire economy and the world's reserve currency and everybody's gold and all this land and all this oil, and you we just don't live in that world today. We live in a world where there's the power is much more diffused. We are not, I mean, we are still the biggest military and the biggest economy and all that, but not by 3x you know, it's a very different system, and we also just, you know, now live with the legacy of whether it's university buildings we can't maintain, or whether it's highways and bridges and dams and irrigation systems and storm water drains and sewer systems and water systems that we can't maintain. We live with this legacy of what growth at all costs, growth without stability has wrought

  Abby Newsham 44:19

  and it takes a generational shift, I think, for a culture to realize that we're not in the same world that we were in before.

  Chuck Marohn 44:28

  Yeah, I think I know I said this in a prior episode, but we used to have this thing called the Weekly Reader when I was a kid. Did you have this? No, okay, we had this thing called the Weekly Reader. It was like an insert in the newspaper, and it was like news for kids, right? You'd fill out the crossword puzzle and all this, but it was new. It was news for kids. And I mean time and time, and this is the 80s, and you're like, the budget deficits out of control. The military is out of control, the weather, the climate's out of control. Like it was, it was all these things. Things. And I remember seeing like, if we don't do these things with Social Security, by the time you're ready to retire, there won't be any money left, it will be out of money. And I'm like, you know the Highway Trust Fund is running out of money. Like this

  Abby Newsham 45:12

  was in the child newspaper in the 80s. Well, no wonder you started this organization.

  Chuck Marohn 45:20

  Well, I'm saying in the 80s, it's not like these demographic things were unknowable. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 45:28

  no, totally, yeah. I think Joe, I think Joe Mina cozy, in one of his presentations, pulls up like a report, yeah, like a report that was just from a very, very long time ago, the

  Chuck Marohn 45:42

  mid 70s. Yeah, I was born in 73 that's become a long time ago now. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 45:49

  yeah, a very, very long time ago. Very, very,

  Chuck Marohn 45:53

  I mean, you keep doing that to me, ancient, ancient times, no, but you, you look and like, it's not like we haven't known about these things, but they've never been there was a there was a book I I read years ago when money, when money dies. It was called, and it was a just studied the Weimar Republic and like, what, what happened with their currency? And the quote was something along the lines of everybody knew that there had to be a reckoning between growth and employment, you know, or between the currency the inflation and employment, like one of them had to give to solve the other one. And it continued on until they had both. They had high inflation and high unemployment, and then that was the thing that, like, struck, like, okay, we can no longer pretend we can continue on this path. Now, everything is collapsed, and we have to do something different. You hope that society can change before that, but there's really no indications and that there's, there's, there's actually few models of it throughout history. I mean, if you read Jared Diamond collapse, you'll get some models of this. But it is, it is not the default, and it generally, the larger the system, the harder it is to course correct. So we are living in interesting times

  Abby Newsham 47:19

  Indeed, indeed we are well, let's leave it there today on this Happy Friday. But before we wrap, we're going to do the down zone, which is part of the show, where we can share anything that we have been up to these days, music, books, activities, whatever. Chuck I am going to put you on the spot. What's your down zone today? I

  Chuck Marohn 47:46

  was thinking about this because I still haven't finished my the book I talked about last time, but I'm getting very close. I was going to tell you I during COVID, we created a garden out at my parents house, and I've talked about it here a few times. It was a very nice thing to go and spend time with them, help them with their garden. They would help us with ours. We'd bring the kids out, sit on the porch, all that kind of stuff. The social dynamics of that have changed a little bit, because the kids are now older and diffused. And you know, we they still go over to grandparents house, but not maybe to tend to the garden like they would have when they were in their teens during COVID. And so my wife and I enjoy the garden, and so we have created next to our house right like in the 15 feet between the side of our house and the property line. We created a raised garden bed, and I've been working on getting it filled and getting the right soil and getting everything and I actually got a seed starter for Christmas, and have a bunch of stuff ready to plant in our garden when I get to the point where I don't think it's going to freeze anymore, which we're not quite there yet. It's still getting below freezing at night here sometimes. But yeah, I'm kind of excited to see what having, you know, this is, it's 48 square feet, so not like massive, it's small, but having vegetables right outside the door, as opposed to, you know, a car ride, an intentional car ride away, having them, like, literally right outside the steps. I'm kind of anxious to see how that changes

  Abby Newsham 49:26

  what we do. Well, Chuck, that's really ironic. I'll have to send you a picture of my raised garden beds. Ooh, yeah, they're in my front yard. I'm slowly killing my grass. I was going to put them in my backyard, but I don't have a lot of sun back there. I can't even grow grass in the backyard, but I'm starting to farm my front yard and kind of add more landscaping. And so that's exactly what I've been doing. That wasn't going to be my. Down zone. But that's kind of exciting,

  Chuck Marohn 50:04

  your down zone. Well,

  Abby Newsham 50:05

  what I was going to share is that. So I don't know if, if I I probably have mentioned before that I used to mountain bike a lot, and I finally decided to trade in my mountain bike for an E bike. So I have this really cool yellow e bike that I got last week, and I've been using it to get to work every day. And okay, pictures, I'll send you pictures. It's sad, and I mean, it makes biking way easier. You still gonna work out, but it just you can actually commute without feeling, oh, I'm gonna be totally sweaty at work. So I've been using it to get around. And it's it. It not only is like a good workout and a good way to start the day, but it just makes my day so much more fun. And it has made you it has reminded me how much stress that driving in a car kind of creates when you're trying to get to work and you're I mean, I live 10 minutes from my work. I'm not far away, but, but there is still this stress that you have in your body when you're driving a car that you don't have when you're biking. So I've been having a ton of fun with that, and just exploring the city and enjoying the nice weather. You know, we're not freezing anymore. It's really nice out, and beyond the allergies, it's like the best time of the year. So I'm, I'm in a good place, Chuck, it is no longer winter, and I'm having so much fun on the bike.

  Chuck Marohn 51:44

  I'm so happy for you. There was, there's, there's that, oh, there's that quote about the efficiency of a bicycle, like, you know, like the idea that it just massively expands your radius. And I think about that quote sometimes in the E bike realm, because, you know, that was a quote that was made back when bikes were, like, the big wheel in front and the little wheel in back, and like, Oh, wow. This, this transformed cities. It's like, the original thing that, like, this is absolutely transformative. And E bikes are insane. I mean, they are just so cool. They're so cool. Yeah, yeah.

  Abby Newsham 52:21

  I don't know why I didn't do this three years ago. Seriously, if anyone is listening to this and you're thinking of getting an E bike, just get an E bike. Yeah, do it today. It will change your life. It's

  Chuck Marohn 52:35

  transformative. And I I feel bad. I don't think I can justify it, because I actually don't ever have anywhere far I have to go. I mean, my home is like, five blocks from my office, and like, churches right across the street, and the grocery stores, like, I usually use Instacart now and so, like, I don't even, I don't even drive anywhere. I used to bike to work, but I would get here too fast, like, I couldn't even listen to a book or anything so, but, yeah, it's

  Abby Newsham 53:03

  not enough time to know, have a do, like, feel like it's a fun activity,

  Chuck Marohn 53:09

  yeah, but I've thought in my mind, like, Could I start, like, maybe, maybe if I wanted to go to, like, the big box store in the next city, or some, you know, like, what? What would I do with an E bike, because I kind of COVID it now more than, more than I would find it like useful for my particular life. But, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 53:28

  yeah, you could, I mean, you could just tool around the city.

  Chuck Marohn 53:32

  I could, which would be super cool, especially about a yellow bike while,

  Abby Newsham 53:36

  yeah, I mean, just for fun, you just ride around, I don't know. I mean, brainer, it isn't very big, but maybe you could go to the next town and, well, right? I'm going back to DC. You can get an electric mountain bike. I know some people have those, and those look really fun,

  Chuck Marohn 53:52

  they do. I'm really gonna go back to DC in a couple weeks. And the last time I was in DC, I rented a scooter and use that like excessively. In fact, I wore the battery out of it completely, and had to rent another one riding around at night, at at like, midnight to 130 in the morning, you can pretty much be like a maniac on a scooter, even in a city like DC and like, Yeah, it's crazy because there's nobody, you know, there's nobody around, and there's all these monuments, and I just, I mean, I went everything in like, you'll have two hours still

  Abby Newsham 54:28

  to let me know when you're going to DC, because I'm going to DC in a few weeks. Okay,

  Chuck Marohn 54:32

  we'll, uh, offline, compare notes. Yeah, I'm just going for going for a day, just for, okay, that would be fun. We could have a good time. Yeah, totally. And maybe we could find a war museum to go to. I'm sure there's

  Abby Newsham 54:50

  plenty of war museums you can tell everyone everything you know about inside

  Chuck Marohn 54:56

  that's a bad inside joke for, yeah. Long time. Listeners,

  Abby Newsham 55:01

  yeah, don't bring chuck to a war museum. He will no become part of the staff,

  Chuck Marohn 55:10

  drawing a salary before you get seriously.

  Abby Newsham 55:13

  All right. Well, thanks, Chuck. Great to talk to you, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of up. Sound All right, see you, Chuck, bye.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Inside a $17 billion maintenance backlog plaguing California’s universities” by Victoria Mejicanos, Matthew Reagan and Mercy Sosa, CalMatters (April 2025).

• Learn more about the Growth Ponzi Scheme and how to evaluate your own city’s financial position.

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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