David Skorton talks to Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi: For all the ills in society and the economy, education, when done well in America, is done really, really well. And at universities like yours you are seeing applicants each year more and more from other places who want to come to America because America does higher education the best. What's your take on it?

David Skorton: Well, first of all, I like to think about education as a spectrum from early childhood education to the K-through-12 system, to secondary education, then professional and graduate school. Now, there's over 4,000 colleges in the United States. And one of the things that's very important to think about is that not everybody is suited to the same kind of institution, no more than everybody is suited to the same kind of anything. And so we want to think about the community colleges, we want to think about the four-year colleges that don't emphasize research too much. And those like Cornell that do emphasize research. The importance of that type is that it leads to innovation. And innovation is what drives our economy. And higher education helps innovation in two ways. One, it educates and trains people to think. And it's a cliché, Ali, but to think outside the box. The individual gets a big benefit. Unemployment rate is lower, salaries are higher, opportunities are broader. But society gets an advantage as well because of innovation. And because of having a more educated citizenry.

Is there a point at which this equation starts to change? Can education be too expensive?

I'm very worried about that. I'm extremely worried about that. A couple of recent studies have come out that have shown this very, very substantial change in lifelong — not only employability, but the amount of money made. So it's definitely worth going through the trip. That doesn't mean that the trip has not become too expensive. It has become too expensive. Now, for schools that have substantial resources, like Cornell and many other schools that have endowments, it's possible for us to help a lot of the families in America because of very substantial financial aid. And that's the so-called high-price, high-aid model. Or high-tuition, high-aid model. So for those families, we can actually help them to get through. But the price tag is so scary to look at that a lot of people don't even think they want to take a chance on doing it. At the other end of the spectrum are people who make enough money. People like me, who can afford to pay cash for their students' education. I think it's definitely worth it. In between those two parts of the socioeconomic spectrum there's a lot of people being squeezed. You would know more and better than I would how to define that. It's the upper middle class, a certain income range where you make too much to be considered "needy." But you don't make enough to pay cash for an education that costs $60,000 a year with room and board and other things.

And this choice, this choice to go to the university or the college that is best suited to you, is possibly one of the most important choices in your life. There’s a popular feeling that it's becoming out of reach for the middle class, or at least parts of it.

And that popular feeling itself is a very important impetus for us doing something about it. One is that we have to run the school in a more efficient way. We have to look for areas where we have overlapping work at the university. We have to look for those areas and reduce redundancies. But that's not going to be the whole answer. Every school cannot do everything for everybody. And maybe one way toward efficiency is for us to think more collaboratively among higher education. That perhaps we can share some resources. And it would eventually be reflected in the price tag. So that's one aspect of it.

Can universities play a role in making the high school — public high school system better?

Well, they can in multiple ways. Those universities that have big teacher training orientation can sure do that. And by interacting a lot with their fellow faculty in the K-through-12 system, and with the leadership of local school districts, I think we can get that done. One of the bigger controversies right now, and I don't mind talking a little bit about it if you do, is about the Common Core standards. And right now we have the ultimate definition of local control. It's done locally. People have all kinds of choices in both higher education and K through 12. And I, for one, think it's reasonable to find a way to do the Common Core standards or something like the Common Core standards the right way so that people feel good about it. And so that we have some more common standard of measurement. We want to make sure that where our child is born, the neighborhood that he or she grows up in, doesn't determine what the outcome of that child's education is.

But the truth is it does.

It does. Absolutely. Demographically and geographically, both.

How do you manage that at a university like Cornell?

I wish I knew the answer to that. I wish I had better answers. We do some remedial education at all universities of all types. We have programs before the freshman matriculates to give them a little bit of a chance to get used to the system. Back in the day, I was the first one in my family to complete a college education. Neither one of my parents had done any college. And students move from different climates, let alone different countries. So I think that we have to think especially about groups like first-generation college students, where we want to focus a little more attention. And in fact, people like me are always talking about diversity on college campuses, which I think is one of the most important things that we should stress. But the more diverse the population of students that we serve, the more robust has to be the support services to make sure that they can get a leg up and get the work done.

You know, I think a university president's probably a hard job. But when I speak to people like you, it does seem to be a fulfilling job. But one of the struggles in the last few years that many university presidents have had is suicides on campus. You've had to deal with that at Cornell. Tell me a bit about this.

Well, if you look at the 15-to-24-year age group, which is predominantly the group we're talking about, in the general American society, the three causes of death in that age group were — happily, things have changed with childhood cancer — well, No. 1 is accidents, especially automobile accidents. No. 2 in the general society is homicides. And No. 3 is suicides. On college campuses, homicides are rare. A lot of that is because of gun control on campuses. Maybe it's an unpopular statement, but I believe it to be true. So on college campuses the No. 1 cause of death in that population, college students 15 to 24, is still accidents. And the second is suicide. So suicide is not a common occurrence. But it's the second most common cause of exit in that age group. And so the idea that you lose a young life, even a very occasional suicide is just too much. But let's talk a tiny bit about suicide just as a general topic at any age group. Part of it is an underlying mental disorder. Could be depression, could be something else. And so recognizing that disorder being present is a huge, huge step in preventing suicides. Even if we can recognize it, the health care reimbursement system has to have what people call mental health parity to allow reimbursement and coverage for mental health issues just like other kinds of health issues. And we've had a sort of a crazy quilt of a situation there, as you're well aware. 

So we treat mental illness from a reimbursement perspective in many cases as a separate thing. Not the same way that if you had a flu or a broken limb, you would go to a doctor, emergency. You'd get proper treatment and nobody would ask anything more about it.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And we're moving in the right direction as a country, but in my view we're not there yet. So the first thing is you have to recognize there's a problem. The second is you have to have access, coverage to treat it.  And the third is even if you recognize it, and even if you have access to the medical system and can treat it, people will still slip through and have an impulsive desire to take their own life. So you have to have what we call means restriction. Like gun control. Like netting or barriers on bridges ...

You had some suicides that involved bridges over deep gorges. And so you installed fencing on those bridges, initially. And you got a lot of pushback for that.

We did. But I think it was the right thing to do. And most of us thought it was. And eventually we had netting. Over the years Cornell's rate of suicide is not out of line with other colleges. As I said, even one is a tragedy. A real serious tragedy. But over time, we didn't have it. But one year we had what we call a cluster. A suicide contagion. And I thought it was very, very important to do that third step in prevention. And that is put up this barrier. 

And David, you're doing some work on competitiveness. I talk so much about the middle class on my shows — the conversation is about a nation that is competitive. And about the innovation that we just talked about. You said that our universities are sort of one of the greatest places where this innovation that is the backbone of American prosperity begins. Are we are doing a good job? 

I think there's two basic ingredients for competitiveness that I hope we can all agree upon. One is opportunity to participate in the economy. And the other one is new ideas. And it is true that education is one of the areas, not the only one, that brings these two things together. So if you think about opportunity and new ideas, I think it's a context in which you can think about the education issue. And not everybody has to have the same skills. If we look at the way the job market, and the way we manufacture things, and the way that we create new things has been going, I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation where there’ll be sort of three general categories of workers in the United States. One is that there’ll be people working in the service sector of a wide variety of skills. Skills that are hard to learn. Some of these skills require college education, some don't.

So many of my viewers, maybe they're getting ready to go to college. Or maybe they're thinking about their kids going to college. What is your advice for a parent of a student who wants to go to college?

Well, that was me not too long ago. As tough as it is to do this, especially in an economy that's still very challenging, think for the long run. And students and parents, I encourage you to dream broadly. In this world that we're in now, and the world that I think will increasingly become this way, we don't know now what we're going to be doing 10 or 15 and 20 years from now. Some of us have had changes in careers, let alone changes in jobs within a career. And so I think it's very important not to get too narrow too soon. And once again, it's easy to say in a down economy. I have a terrific job. When you're on the other end of the life cycle, you know, it's very daunting right now — underemployment in recent college graduates. But those broad skills that you get from a liberal arts education, by which I mean you study the humanities, the arts, the social sciences. And not just the vocationally oriented courses, which, of course, are very important. Think broadly. Think about the long run. And students, allow yourself to dream. It's very, very important.

What do you university presidents do when you stop being university presidents? You were a jazz musician, were you not?

Well, I wanted to be. Now, you can imagine what a fabulous jazz musician I was if I'm here with you today. But I had the chance to sit in for one number with Wynton Marsalis' Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra. And I had a chance to sit in one number with Billy Joel.  

You're a cardiologist.

Yeah, took care of — still do a little teenagers and young adults with congenital heart disease.

And then the other option was tae kwon do. You're a black belt, I believe?

Yeah. I was best in tae kwon at hitting things that don't hit back.

[So] you eliminated jazz and tae kwon do. You decided not to go back into your medical practice. The Smithsonian, what an interesting job. The head of the Smithsonian is the secretary.  Tell me about this. How did this come about? 

Well, the Smithsonian, just to remind you, is a very interesting and various organization that encompasses 19 museums or galleries, the National Zoo, nine research centers literally around the world. So it's a research and education entity. And that was one thing that was very, very attractive to me. Another thing that was very attractive to me is the idea of working at the intersection of the sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities and culture, on the other. Because I think those are very important to bring together. I'm a doc. I'm a scientist. And I believe science is very, very important. But we have never and are not going to solve society's thorniest problems by science alone. We are not. We have to understand the cultural context. The human context of problems that come up and solutions that we propose. And so it's very, very important that we have this breadth. And the Smithsonian has enormous, enormous breadth. A third thing that was very attractive to me and is very attractive is that my dad was an immigrant from what is now Belarus. And he was a patriot. He became a naturalized citizen. When I was young, he would tell me things like "I don't want to ever hear that you missed a chance to vote. And if you ever have a chance to do something for the United States, however small, however modest, I want you to do it. Because the country gave opportunities to people like me." That's my dad talking. So as corny as it may sound, the chance to do something for the United States and to work in an Americana kind of setting [was] very, very attractive to me. 

Tell me if I get the story wrong. But I've read about you, and I heard a story. Your dad had a shoe shop in L.A., is that correct?

He was a gentleman who was not able to go on very far in education. Very smart man. And he did a lot of different things in his life. He had a used car lot in Milwaukee, where I was born. And before that he recapped tires … But what he did best was sales. We moved to Los Angeles, he opened up — we opened up — sort of a family shoe store. My mom, my dad and me, a couple of employees. He was a very effective salesman. My mom used to say to me, "How do you think he caught me? He was a very, very good salesman." 

I heard that he said to you two rules, basically, in the shop. "Don't force anything on anybody. And nobody leaves without buying a pair of shoes."

He used to say that. He said, "Don't go telling people what they want. Listen to what they want. And if you don't have what they want, don't push it on 'em." And the second rule is, yeah, "Nobody leaves here without a pair of shoes." And I would say, "Dad, how can you reconcile those?" And he'd say, "Listen, you're a big shot. You're going to school. You figure it out." 

How will that help you in your job at the Smithsonian? What does the secretary of the Smithsonian do?

Well, the secretary is — I guess what you might call the CEO. I have to give a big disclaimer here. I'm a year out from this job. I've been focusing on Cornell University, which I continue to do. I don't really know enough of the details to speak authoritatively about it. But I will tell you that the current secretary, Wayne Clough — someone who I greatly admire, who in a previous career was the president of Georgia Tech University — is doing a fantastic job. A fantastic job in making the Smithsonian's treasures available broadly around the world. Among many other things, he's launched a project to digitize a lot of the 137 million things that the Smithsonian preserves. I'm going to get ready to lead that organization in large part by watching Wayne Clough at work.

And this happens in 2015? I know topics have come up about free admission to the Smithsonian. And I know you've said you're not far enough into this to discuss business models. But you are going to leave the panda cam.

Well, we're definitely going to leave the panda cam, because I spend a lot of time on the panda cam. If you would let me have my cellphone on, which you won't in the studio, I'd show you what Bao Bao is doing right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed.