RHP Market Talk
Financial market insights from RHP Wealth Management in Houston, Texas.
RHP Market Talk
Markets and Academics
In Episode 38 of RHP Market Talk, Natalie Picha, Chief Experience Officer, interviews Dean Ed Waller, Professor of Finance at the University of Houston – Clear Lake, sharing stories from his extensive career and how institutes of higher learning can work with RIA's to build community.
With a wealth of experience in finance, Dean Ed Waller's journey began in the research department of the Federal Reserve during the Reagan years when he was fresh out of college. Throughout his career, he has witnessed firsthand the transformative impact of technology on financial markets and the evolution of our current monetary policies.
Now, with a storied life and a deep well of knowledge, Dean Waller shares his experiences with financial students right in our backyard at UHCL, enriching their learning and providing invaluable perspectives on the world of finance.
Experience the difference of working with a firm that empowers your life—a firm that focuses on what matters most—you.
Whether you are beginning your financial journey now or have already taken steps toward your ultimate life goals, we are here to guide you.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rhp-market-talk/id1538051530
Welcome to RHP Market Talk , episode number 38, produced by RHP Wealth Management, an Independent financial services and investment advisory firm based in Houston, Texas. I'm Natalie Picha, Partner and CXO, and I am joined today by a very special guest, Dean and professor of finance at the University of Houston, Clear Lake College of Business. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dean Ed Waller . It's great to have you.
Dean Ed Waller:Thank you. Natalie.
Natalie Picha:I want to read a little bit about you. Your bio is quite extensive. You have had an amazing career, and there's so much to talk about today. So I'm just going to put it out there to our listeners is that if this podcast goes a little long, that's okay. Because there are some great stories to be heard here. So, Dr. Ed Waller, an expert on commercial bank management, financial markets, and corporate finance, became Dean of the College of Business on September 1st, 2017. As Dean Waller is the Chief Academic and Budget Officer for the College of Business and is an integral part of the college's AACSB, continuous improvement reaffirmation process for business and separate accounting accreditation. As a member of the Clear Lake faculty since 1993, Waller has published research on financial markets and institutions, financial institution management, corporate financial theory and practice, and international finance. He's a member of the Financial Management Association International and Waller earned his PhD in business administration from Arizona State University and a master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. So, welcome, Dr. Waller. I am so grateful to have you here and I'd love to just kick off this conversation with some stories from your years at the Federal Reserve. It's one of your very first real jobs, as you put it.
Dean Ed Waller:That was a long time ago. I t hink w hat Natalie was telling you in a polite version is I'm old, but I've been at the university for a long time. I should point out that this year is the 50th anniversary of the founding of the University of Houston Clear Lake.
Natalie Picha:Oh, well, that's fantastic.
Dean Ed Waller:I guess I should also point out most of the history I have lived through since I've been there for 31 years. To make it even more interesting, my wife has been a faculty member for quite a while—an administrator, too, at UHCL for 36 of those 50 years .
Natalie Picha:That's amazing .
Dean Ed Waller:So you talk about living history ; we've done a fair amount of that, but in terms of your Federal Reserve, it was quite an interesting time. I grew up in North Georgia. Okay. My brother and I were first-generation college students. If you had asked me when I enrolled at Georgia Tech, Hey, in three years, you'll be working at the Atlanta Fed downtown. I would've laughed at you because that wasn't on , you know, I just wanted to finish my degree. And get a job. But I think the listeners or any student that listens could think of it as the value of networking. Because I made sure to talk with my professors and professors would talk with you, get in that era and get a feel for your interest. And two of my professors basically routed me toward this opportunity at the Atlanta Fed. This is how long ago this was. That was Ronald Reagan had just been elected the prior year President of the United States. And so the Federal Reserve was doing things differently in terms of policy.
Natalie Picha:What an amazing time to be there. Right. During the middle of the Reaganomics time, you were there.
Dean Ed Waller:Right. And in the research department. And it was particularly, you know, because literally, I was in between undergraduate and graduate studies. It was one of those jobs where my formal responsibilities, I could do in a New York minute. It didn't take me very long at all. Because it was rather perfunctory. So the rest of the time, you got to work, or I had the opportunity to work on research projects with the economist on staff doing things, you know , trying to figure out how the fed's policies were given our charge impacting the businesses in the Sixth Federal Reserve District. Which, at that time, basically encompassed the Southeastern United States. For those who look at a map of the Federal Reserve Districts and think, those look rather strange. They were basically weighed out, at least originally, according to where the railroad tracks were. Because that's how t he communications...that w as commerce, that was commerce, that was commerce back when the Fed was created, if you get into financial market history prior to the Fed in the boom bus cycles in the late, 19th and early 20th century, those largely happened because J P Morgan and Company was basically the Central Bank of the United States. And that then led to the creation of the federal resources. But it was a really interesting time, and I think we were chatting before we started about how with the Fed deciding to control or set interest rates Yes in a prior period. And then they s witched to basically a m onetarist model. to control the money supply. Right. But being originally trained as an economist, something has to adjust to equilibrate. The system always t o, markets are never an equilibrium, but they have a tendency to try to move towards equilibrium. So, if the Fed is controlling interest rates, then the money supply has to bounce around. To e quate the market. Right. If the Fed decides to control the money supply, you would see interest rates swing from 21.5% to less than 1% on a single trading day. And to make things more interesting, the Fed periodically, at least in that era, would experiment with reserve accounting where there was contemporaneous reserve accounting. So you'd roll into settlement day and have to figure out, Hey, wait, we're short of reserves that we have to hold for regulatory requirements. We need to go to the federal fu nds m arket and borrow those. And if everyone else is doing it th e s ame day, right? Then, you wo uld g et those incredible spikes. Lots of, so i t was the dawn, if you will, of the information age because, you know, as a kid from North Georgia, I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Oh , it 's, I m e an, even as a real-time t erminal. So you could see the interest rates on the trading desk in New York.
Natalie Picha:Wow. And that back then you were...you were living the dream. And it's interesting even to hear you talk about it because I don't think sometimes the general public understands how far we've come in markets in that period of time.
Dean Ed Waller:Well, not just markets, but technology. Oh, technology. Here is a trivial example that might amuse the listeners. You know, again, the era of writing term papers on manual typewriters,
Natalie Picha:Okay. Right.
Dean Ed Waller:...and the phone is on the wall in your house. It was really cool that I would get to take the research department's terminal home to do work after hours. Right? Yeah. This was a terminal, it was like a CPA's calculator. There was no electronic display. It printed out on a roll that came out of the terminal, and you dialed in by picking up your phone, dialing a phone number, and plugging the receiver into the back of the unit. To establish a connection.
Natalie Picha:So it could get a connection. Isn't that crazy? I mean, today, we have high school students literally trading on their cell phones.
Dean Ed Waller:Indeed!
Natalie Picha:That is where we've come to!
Dean Ed Waller:Or taking in terms of their coursework, taking high school courses online, or finishing degree requirements. That's, that's Because with undergraduates, by the time they enroll or taking courses in the College of Business at UHCL , many of them have already taken online courses. So it's nothing new to them. And all of the things that, at least AP Priori a few years ago, we would worry about how will students react to this? Or, you know, having this course online or some of the requirements for online courses. They've already done it.
Natalie Picha:They've already done it. Yeah. So, I want to jump back real quick to the Reaganomics years. I hear this from our listeners sometimes. How do you think about where you were then and the research that you did then? And in terms of where we are today, how do you compare having lived through that period of time and the changes to how the Fed operates now versus then? What do you think? I'd love to just hear you talk about that.
Dean Ed Waller:Oh, this sounds like my dissertation. I'll try to keep it shorter than that. Okay.
Natalie Picha:Try to . Yeah.
Dean Ed Waller:But back in the seventies, here's the brief history , uh, monetary history. Back in the seventies, the Fed would try to get a handle just like today, on inflationary pressures that we're building by using the housing market as an on-off switch, an on-off switch for the real economy. They were able to do that because prior to 1980 and the depository institutions and Deregulation Monetary Control Act of 1980, we had Regulation Q interest rate ceilings. The first time you walked into a bank in the seventies, banks paid this much on savings accounts. It was set by regulation, or the maximum was set and paid nothing on checking accounts. And there were not things like the money market—interest accounts. And so what the Federal Reserve would do if inflation, for example, in the seventies when Nixon was president and then Ford and Carter. What the Fed would do if inflationary pressures were building was basically drive interest rates above Regulation Q ceilings. And that would result in what we call disintermediation. That is, savers would withdraw their savings from banks and try to invest it in products such as buying treasury bills directly. Right. It required more of an investment back then, which would then reduce , uh, the savings available for banks and savings and loans to lend. And back then, at least the housing market worked. I think residential real estate and the housing market worked by step one. If you were a developer, you went to a bank and obtained mortgage commitments, which was the bank's promise. To make promissory note loans on mortgages when construction was complete. And a qualified buyer was available. So now banks, because the supply of Loanable funds has decreased because of disintermediation, they will basically stop providing mortgage commitments. Or at least the way it worked. They would turn them off, which would then stop residential construction in its tracks. Right. When interest rates were regulated, the Fed could have a direct effect on economic activity more quickly than after deregulation. Because now, in a deregulated environment, what happens is there's a lag from when the price increases, if you will, or, uh, the reward for deferred consumption—interest rates. We ll, when that increases, you have to wait for the price effect to produce an impact on th e economy on t h e m a rket. So, the control is less direct and takes longer to achieve the same re sult. Now, you know, obviously, in economics, you talk to a thousand economists, and you're going to get a thousand different opinions.
Natalie Picha:Absolutely. Absolutely.
Dean Ed Waller:But there are those that would argue because of that, the Fed has to raise interest rates higher and hold them there longer than they had to in a different era.
Natalie Picha:Right. It's interesting because so many of, like I said, our listeners will talk about, well, I just want to go back to the good old days, if you will. I want to go back to the Reagan years or , you know, I wanna, when we had that inflation. So, in your personal opinion, what are your thoughts about the efficiencies of markets, given that we have so much data and information on a constant basis in real time to give to everyone, knowing that the Fed doesn't operate the way it did back then? What are your thoughts about the efficiencies of markets at this point here?
Dean Ed Waller:I had a student once that said, your favorite answer is, it depends. It depends on what you mean by efficiency. Transactional efficiency markets are more efficient than they've ever been. That will only as information , uh, and computing power continues to increase., they will continue to be even more efficient. So, transactional efficiency is given. Yeah. What your driving at, however, is more along the lines of what in finance theory and literature would be called the efficient markets . hypothesis. And so now the question really boils down to, okay, if I observe a firm's price today, right? What type of information is incorporated in that? Right.
Natalie Picha:At that price? It's all information. The market is already priced in everything the market knows. And that comes , there is anything unknown.
Dean Ed Waller:And that comes in a variety of flavors. I mean, there's a weak form of this view that would say the market knows everything that's happened before. So, you can't trade based on trends. There's an intermediate case often called the semis strong form, but an intermediate case that says the market's already priced in all publicly available relevant information. It gives rise to the question of what's relevant information.
Natalie Picha:Well, especially today, where there's so much noise.
Dean Ed Waller:And then , I'm not sure if you call them true believers or not, but the strongest possible form is the market knows everything. But I'll go back to the very beginning of modern finance theory in the 1950s. That really started with one author at the University of Chicago and the other at MIT, who basically applied to corporate finance, wrote a paper in which they argued that capital structure is irrelevant. How much debt financing a firm uses is irrelevant if markets are perfect and there are no transaction costs . And they went through a mathematical proof of this. But everyone knows, and this is the real point of their paper, and it's what, well , I used to have a debate with my fellow students back in the 1980s about this because my view is okay, what that really means is not that capital structure is irrelevant. What they're driving towards is clearly firms spend a prodigious amount of time and effort worried about how much debt financing to use. Right. When you look at how they operate. So the real question is, why do they do that? It has to be because of some type of market imperfection and market imperfection. What keeps markets from knowing all our transactions, costs, and expertise? Because there are people who have more information than I do. Right. I'll freely admit, because professional investors in New York, or anywhere for that matter, who spend their day gathering and processing information about specific firms or specific industries, there are transactions costs to trading on the basis of that information. And then there is the development of expertise in being able to interpret that information and separate out what is really extraneous information or noise. From real underlying information. So you c an make a case that markets by their very definition. In fact, in 1 980, the things you remember, right? In 1982 authors, their names were Grossman an d S tig, wrote a paper and published it that basically said it is impossible for markets to be perfectly informationally efficient. Because if they were, there wouldn't be any information on the price. Because if you and I both know, well, we don't have to do an y thing ri g ht, th e n th e price nev er, t hat information's going to be in the price. Right. Then there's no incentive in terms of beating the market for you and me to try to get better information than others. Right. So if there's no incentive for anyone to get better information or to act more quickly on it, then it'll never get in th e pr i ce. And the n, a nd you'll never be at equilibrium.
Natalie Picha:And what you're talking about really plays into what we saw, you know, in recent years with some of the meme stops like GameStop, right? Where information being given out by other people. That then precludes where that stock may go. Right. Because now we have social media. And we have online forums. And we have all of this information, and we have the ability to gather large groups of people from all over the world that can...
Dean Ed Waller:...communicate instantly!
Natalie Picha:That can communicate instantly an effect that has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying structure of the actual stock.
Dean Ed Waller:Well, that's the benefit and cost of the information age. Right? For at least in my own opinion that the benefit is every person has, I'll use a seemingly strange analogy. If you remember the era when you were trying to figure out how much to offer for a new car, you would go to the bookstore or the library and get the latest copy of Edmonds. I don't know if I can say that might be a product plug . And then try to calculate, all right , so once the dealer's cost for a car with this package or whatever, now you can look it up online in Consumer Reports. So there's instantaneous information available , not necessarily for free with paywalls these days, but at very low cost almost instantaneously. On the other hand, the cost of that is you have to avoid a finance author. The first edition was published in 70 or 74. Burton Malkiel, in a book titled A Random Walk Down Wall Street, would say that you have to avoid the tendency to chase the madness of crowds Because you don't jump in and won't try to remember the timeline. But there was a time in the distant past when the IT investment was basically two bulbs in Holland where people would buy, you know, spend their year's salary buying a tulip bowl . Why? Because it was the thing to do. Interesting. And so I think you and I, in various meetings, have chatted about this, although I'd be the last person to ever proffer, or I tell my student free financial advice is worth exactly what you for it.
Natalie Picha:You know what? That's a plug for RHP right there.
Dean Ed Waller:Well, I can't do that. Remember, anything I say is just my own opinion and not an official position of the university...
Natalie Picha:You're not representing...
Dean Ed Waller:...student or the college. But it's true in the sense of the best advice I ever got. One thing was good advice, solid advice. And the other was matter of shear luck was when I was a 21, 22-year-old master student at Georgia Tech, a couple of my profs told me, look, here's what you should do. Take every dime you've saved and put it in the equity market. It doesn't matter what, just buy, don't trade it. Just buy it and find something. Like, this part wouldn't be music to your years. You're a student; you don't want to spend your time trying to change your position or whatever. Just go find a low-cost index fund and keep buying. Put it in there. And so I did that and kept doing it for, I don't know, 30-something years . And the lucky part of it, given where we're located every now and then, you have to pack everything up and leave town briefly because of a storm.
Natalie Picha:Oh. For a hurricane.
Dean Ed Waller:So, when the information age came to us in full force and all of these various investment companies created online platforms, I had carefully created login information for all of these things. Right. So, if you can think back to the.com bust in 2001, and one of those times we left town, we came back, and it was about a decade before I could find where I had placed that login for information. One of those, when you're not looking for it a decade later, there, that stuff is. Now, that was a different era where, basically, it took an act of the Almighty to get an investment company to reset your user ID and password. You had to do a tremendous amount of paperwork. So in a time when people were, i f y ou pardon my expression, freaking out and making a lot of trades that eventually might be regarded as not very good trades, it just sat...
Natalie Picha:You just let it on . You let it ride.
Dean Ed Waller:...doing nothing . And it's like, yeah, I'll get around to doing that. Sometimes, you end up on the other side of that, and that ended up doing very, very well. Because I did nothing but the same thing consistently. For a really long time.
Natalie Picha:Right. And so what I would say to that, as we talk about the history of the markets, and I love your intellectual perspective on economics, you know, all of your experience, what we know to be true, and a lot of what we do here at RHP is we do a lot of planning for clients because we have to clearly understand where they are. Their timelines, their goals, their values. All of those things are so important because once we understand where their position is, then we can begin to help them consistently utilize the market to reach their goals. But it has to be consistent. And so there's this level of consistency. And truly balance, kind of like you talked about. Because the markets are, the markets are, they're going to, they're going to go up, they're going to go down, they're going to change markets move around, you know, and...
Dean Ed Waller:It's a tool.
Natalie Picha:It is. It's a tool. Exactly.
Dean Ed Waller:It's a tool. And each one of your clients, I mean, it sounds amazingly similar to what I would tell students, like in a more academic way. And, of course, each one of you will have a different tolerance for risk. So first you have to figure out what's your tolerance for risk. Because if you're lying awake at night worried about it, you have your risk exposure in your portfolio, whatever it is. It's too high. You don't want to lay awake at night worrying about it. Peter Magellan, if you remember him, when he ran , uh, what was the name of the Fidelity Magellan fund, he used to always say, look, put your money in whatever, you know, you're , establish your position, do it consistently, and go live your life because you don't want to be thinking about it 24/7. And if you are, that may lead you to make a decision that later you might regard as being rash but could work out really well. But I mean, if you think even more recently, at the beginning of the pandemic, when equity prices declined dramatically very quickly, people who liquidated some or all of their position of equity during that downturn very quickly prices recovered to a more normal level, not necessarily to the same level. But it was more about bounce Than a long-term effect. Right. So, I mean, I've always wanted to go back to your original question and preach the gospel. Now we get into opinion statistics, empirical studies don't prove, ever prove anything. They either prove or produce evidence that is consistent or inconsistent with a hypothesis. But 50 years of financial market studies, ever since asset pricing models were developed, suggest that markets are informationally efficient in the semi strong form. Which is basically, if I wanted to colloquially it, which I found works best in terms of talking with students, it means nothing more than, look , I can't sit at home and watch CNBC or the Financial News Network and get information that's going to allow me to beat the market, adjusting for transactions cost . Because if it's important enough to move the market price, it's already moved the market price. Every time we're in earnings announcement season. If there's an unexpected surprise, the price moves, and it moves more quickly than it's ever moved. But it would be, on the other hand, an overstatement. I think i t personal opinion, it's an overreach to think someone can't ever gather information, including insider information that would allow you to outperform the market. There's clearly a reason some people actually end up in a little trouble for insider trading. Yeah. And public investors watch what insiders are doing. Intuitively, there's a reason they do that.
Natalie Picha:Right. Well, I am, again, so appreciative of the intellectual capital that you've brought to the table today. And again, I'll just remind our listeners that this is all your personal opinion. You're not here representing the views of the university. I will say I'm a very proud first-generation college student, myself, and an alumni of UHCL . So I'm very proud of that being that UHCL is in our community. I've seen the growth of the university over the years from a two-year college to a four-year college, too, and it was certainly, for me, being local, such a big deal to have that resource in that area. And now, being a business owner in our community, I fully support what UHCL is doing. And so just having the intellectual capital here today is a big deal. But I want a kind of just switch as we close out our time together, talk a little bit about what firms like RHP and even other business owners in our area, what it means to have that relationship with UHCL, what you see finance students coming out of the university career-wise. What are they looking at? Where do you think we're going from here?
Dean Ed Waller:Oh, wow...we could spend another hour on that.
Natalie Picha:I know. We could talk forever.
Dean Ed Waller:I'll be brief. Number one, there's a two-way street between firms such as RHP and the university. O kay. And by that, I mean, number one, registered investment advisors, in general, can help us out a lot in a variety of different ways. Number one is providing experiential learning opportunities for students. Now, that's about as general a statement as I can make because that covers the gamut from something as a very brief job shadowing opportunity. Like in the morning or an afternoon for an hour. a couple of hours. Even a full afternoon, for example, for an all day or a couple of days. Just so that students can see what do firms do? This is what a typical day looks like to the other extreme of full-blown internship opportunities. But thes e, wh at's interesting, given how long I've worked in academia, 38 years, is that term has also, um, morp hed into more general usage. Because it used to be internships meant you did this: somebody came here, worked as an intern, they didn't get paid anything, and they got academic course credit for doing it. But now that's more towards; we still do that. But now these are more like part-time jobs. And those types of opportunities also give firms an opportunity to bring students in after some type of interview process. And the ones that do well and that they think would be a good fit end up with whatever employment opportunities may exist when they're postgraduate. So those types of opportunities for students are really important for us. Even something, e ven things like ad hoc events, like in all of our disciplines, we w ill have events like career nights or meet the firms or employer mixers, which are basically receptions w here not recruiting events, but employers show up, give the students an opportunity to interact with professionals with extensive, uh, expertise such as yourself. Okay. That's important for our students because it shows them what it means to be in this industry and i n this type of environment.
Natalie Picha:Well, and I'll say in our industry right now, what you've seen with universities with the introduction of say, CFP career tracks, and that's certified financial planning tracks, our industry needs talent, really needs talent. And I'm lucky enough, obviously our custodian is Schwab. And so I've gotten to know some of the Schwab staff that work directly with the universities to make sure there are some really good relationships there because we know we need this talent. And I think even in speaking to some of the colleges that, you know, in the finance departments, they don't know that RIAs exist. They don't know that there are financial planning type careers out there. And so getting that information into the hands of the students gives us an opportunity to have a better pipeline of talent coming into the industry.
Dean Ed Waller:Exactly. And the thing, it's also, everything changed , right? And trite , but true , but including academia. Uh, there was a time where universities, colleges at universities would at least in business emphasize having one overarching advisory group, advisory board type of activity. Now, we're moving towards having these at the program discipline level. How can RIAs or firms like RHP help? It's basically participating, whether it's a focus group, all the way to the other extreme, a formal advisory board where you interact with the faculty and tell them, look, this is where we think the needed job skills will be in five years, and we need to work together to make sure we are preparing the students for the skills they will to successful. When they finish their degree, That helps us tremendously because it allows us to emphasize student success while also helping, not just RIAs, but any firm in any discipline helps us do , uh, do a better job or have continuous improvement in preparing of the people that will be your workforce in five work , five in 10 years. So, it becomes a value-for-value transaction. Unless there's an ongoing dialogue between the community and the faculty teaching those courses, then it's very difficult to actually make sure we're doing the best possible job in giving students the skills they'll need. Because, as you well know, I used the four fun example off mic up . Heck, when I started working at the Fed, personal computers didn't exist. Okay. Now, we don't know how AI is going to change how work is done five years from now. We know it will; we just don't know how . Right. So we need to be thinking about how can we prepare students? It will be something they'll have to be able to use as part of their daily activities. We're just not sure. And now I'm going to go back and combine topics on you because I would argue back in the nineties, the.com bubble, there were those that would argue the other side of the fence and say, well, you know, markets can't be efficient because look at all these internet firms like tieclasp .com that have these very high values for no reason whatsoever. Yeah. But I would argue the other side of that and say, well, think about it in a world of you don't know where this technology is going to take us. , the rational response to this is to throw money against the wall and invest in everything because you only need one winner. You only need to own the next Apple. And that will more than compensate you for the 999 other firms that don't exist anymore. Do you remember when everyone was selling everything on the Internet? Now, who survived that? Amazon, right? Yeah. But you didn't know that at the time. Yeah . So, of course, everyone's going to throw money@toyshop.com because you don't know who's going to be the winner. Same thing with AI, I think. So, this could result in another set of opportunities, not just for investors but for students. Those who will do really well will be those who are preparing with those skills right now. Can I plug our university right in just a moment? Absolutely. I will point out, and you know this because you are a first-generation graduate of the University of Houston Clear Lake , I think. So this will be, this won't be news to you. It's already included in your price for the university. But see t oday our population university a nd college of business, overwhelmingly it's a majority first g eneration student. Many are from historically underrepresented populations. They're at the University of Houston Clear L ake because they're trying to make a better life for themselves a nd their families. Yeah. And I would say, uh, going back, because I've lived through most of the history there, the university w as founded in 1974, but if memory serves, in 1981, the business programs received undergraduate accreditation from AACSB international back then you could do undergraduate and m aster separately. And i n 86, the m aster's programs received business accreditation. I would make two points today, one, a reference to that historical information at the time, that was the fastest time in AACSB from a university start to having accredited business programs. Wo w. So, it w as done faster than anyone else's testament to the faculty, students, and staff. tha t we re at the university at that time. Today, we have both business and supplemental accounting accreditation. Now, AACSB estimates that there are approximately 16,000 entities in the world awarding business degrees of some type of university equivalent business degrees, not just in the US but in Europe, South America, et ce t era. 1 90 of them have business and supplemental accounting accreditation. So, being in that set is a testament to the faculty, students, and staff in the college and at the university, as well as the university's executive leadership. And
Natalie Picha:How wonderful is it that resource is right here in our backyard?
Dean Ed Waller:It's in our backyard. And I would point out most of those that have it are much larger research-oriented universities. For example, like University of Houston and Texas Tech and UT Austin and Texas A&M. So somewhat unusual. Number two, I would say, and this is what we tell prospective students when we're having recruiting events, our students that our business graduates earn salaries immediately after graduation. They're consistent with what you would see at much larger universities. More well-known universities, if you will, at a lower cost than what students would pay to attend those. So we turned that into a return on investment story. Right. You come to UHCL ; it's not and never will be a nationally prominent football team university that you're going to see playing football on Saturday afternoon. But our students earn a more than competitive return on investment for their educational expenses. In fact, for almost all of our business degree programs, our students place, if you produce a one through 38 ranking of where the students in these degree programs rank in terms of earnings, in all of the public universities in Texas, we're invariably in the top 10. That's excellent. What all of these degree programs, I mean, I'm not going to take credit for that. The students are doing that. And back when we kicked off the 50th at the beginning of the year, a reporter asked me, so you wrote a little bit about my bio. What are you most proud of? And I told her, I've been here a really long time. If you ask me a short answer to that question, what I'm most proud of are our students, our faculty, our staff, and their success. And the accreditation we talked about is external validation of their efforts towards continuous improvement.
Natalie Picha:Right . The word gives me to , well, I think that is a wonderful way to wrap up our conversation. I'm so grateful for you joining us today. And I'm also very grateful for, like I said, the intellectual capital that you shared with us during our show. But that commitment that you have to those students in our area I'm, I'm very grateful for that.
Dean Ed Waller:So, are you sure that's not an intellectual capital deficit?
Natalie Picha:No . I am quite certain. It is not. It is not. So, thank you , Dean Waller, for joining us today. Thank you to our listeners. I certainly hope that you'll take a moment to take a look at UHCL's website and and see what an amazing resource it is to our community. Like I said earlier, I'm a first-generation college student and a very proud alumni of UHCL . So, to our listeners, thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to RHP Market Talk and leave us a rating and review. You may also find us on LinkedIn and Facebook for additional content, which I would like to say now includes our monthly Market Minute, which is hosted by our CIO, Glenn Royal . And so if you'd like to take a listen to that, please find us on Facebook or LinkedIn. Those come out on a monthly basis. Updates , what we're thinking about markets, what we're seeing in the economy. And if you have any questions or wanna discuss today's topics, please get in touch with us through our website at www.royalharborpartners.com. Whether you are beginning your financial journey now or have already taken steps towards your ultimate life goals, we are here to guide you. Experience the difference of working with a firm that empowers your life. A firm that focuses on what matters most to you.
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