Karl Scholz is the 19th president of the University of Oregon. He’s a professor of economics, with a focus on poverty. He’s also had stints working in two presidential administrations — first at the Council of Economic Advisors and later at the Treasury Department. Scholz has come to Eugene at an interesting time — with the university expanding its presence in Portland and leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. It’s also a challenging time for higher education more broadly, as American confidence in colleges and universities is plummeting.
University of Oregon president Karl Scholz, a well-respected economist, took office in July 2023. He is the father of a UO graduate student.
Courtesy of University of Oregon
Scholz recently joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud.” The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity:
How the value of college should be evaluated
This is hotly contested terrain. I’m an economist by training. I think a lot about these things. I think the research results are overwhelming, about the college wage premium. College graduates earn, over their lifetime, $1 million dollars more than those without a college degree.
Then, someone says, ‘Well, think about wealth rather than earnings’ ... My reading of the evidence still is that the financial return to college is very, very positive, very strong.
Moreover, college isn’t simply about making a good living — although that’s an important part of it — but it’s also about leading a good life. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think there are probably any investments in society that provide a higher rate of return than investing in one’s human capital — that is, going to college.
On debt, I can give you some statistics for the University of Oregon: Nearly 60% of our graduates, at the time of graduation, have $0 debt. Among those with debt, the average debt is $25,000. That’s an investment of $25,000 for, again on average, an increased earnings of $1 million dollars over one’s career, overwhelmingly positive return.
On the new University of Oregon campus in Portland
The University of Oregon has been in Portland for 150 years. ... We have a set of graduate programs in law, business, journalism, design and education that have been in Portland. And now we’re able to move to the former Concordia College campus in Northeast Portland. It is 19 acres. It’s beautiful. We have housing, we have green space, playing fields and we can expand our footprint and make a bigger difference in Portland, both for our students for internships and for other jobs placement.
But one of the most exciting things that’s happening at Portland is the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. Now, for the first time, we have our first class of undergraduates who are coming. They spend their first two years in Eugene and then their junior, senior, third and fourth years, in Portland. And what the Ballmer Institute is doing, it’s an audacious vision, because we have a child and adolescent behavioral health crisis in America. We have it at the University of Oregon.
And what we’re doing at the Ballmer Institute is trying to create an entirely new employment category. Because right now, the specialists who work in this field invariably require master’s degrees or Ph.D.s, and there is simply not the supply of people to intervene in a timely way before they’re full-blown crises. And so what we’re trying to do, with the Ballmer initiative, is create a new employee class of well-trained, evidence-based people who can be embedded in the schools and pediatricians with just a bachelor’s degree to intervene before problems become crises.
Why UO going to the Big Ten matters — academically
The Big Ten, as a conference, has done things academically that no other conference in the country has done. And that is through the auspices of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So let me give you a handful of examples: The Big Ten has something called the Big Collection, where the libraries of the Big Ten share resources in ways that libraries elsewhere don’t. And you can imagine how difficult it is for every university library to have comprehensive collections in every dimension of human inquiry. And so what the Big Collection will do is say: “All right, Michigan, you will specialize in Southeast Asia. Ohio State, you can specialize in South Asia. UCLA, you specialize in Africa collection.” And that way we can share resources whether electronically or by shipping resources. I can get an item held at the University of Michigan on my desk, as an Oregon faculty member, in two days. And that makes us stronger.
We share the teaching of less commonly taught languages. And so not every university can have a full sequence in Swahili, despite the fact that tens and probably hundreds of millions of people in the world, speak Swahili. And so we can have Michigan State teaching Swahili 1. We can have Indiana teaching Swahili 2. Oregon can teach Swahili 3and multiply that across all of the less commonly taken languages across the globe.
The Big Ten Academic Leadership Program has often been tried to replicate and no one has been able to do it. And so for someone who’s interested in being a department chair, a dean or a higher-level administrator, this is the premier program in the country.
You can listen to the whole conversation with UO President Karl Scholz on “Think Out Loud” by pressing the play arrow above.