December 30, 2019 • 43 mins
If there’s a defining feature of upper income life for people with children, it’s school stress. How do you get your kids into the right preschool so they can get into the right high school so they can go to the best college? Paul Tough’s new book THE YEARS THAT MATTER MOST: How College Makes or Breaks Us, reveals why college, which is supposed to be the great equalizer, has become something that depends on and reinforces class and privilege. This is a huge deal for the business world. If we’re losing access to talent, we’re losing more than words can say. It also, of course, is a huge deal for our society. It’s not too grandiose to say that education determines the shape of the society in which we live. So…what shape is that?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood and finding the
lessons we can all learn from them. Already in this series,
I've spoken with Sahil Patel about Netflix, Mike Isaac about Uber,
and Peter Robeson about Boeing. I'm at Bethany mac twelve
on Twitter. If there's a difining commonality to upper income
(00:24):
life in America for people with children, it's school stress.
How do you get your kids into the right preschool
such that they can get into the right high school
such that they can go to the very best college?
And what sports should they play in order to improve
those very difficult odds, because, oh my goodness, everything hinges
on whether or not they attend the right college. So
(00:46):
for anyone who is already worried, the title of Pultov's
new book, The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes
or Breaks Us, is not exactly reassuring. He writes, it
sometimes felt as though the country was splitting into two
separate and unequal nations, with a college diploma the boundary
that divided them. As that quote shows, the issues this
(01:08):
book raises are so much greater than the stress it
causes the elite. And while we're all fixated on the
varsity blues scandal, that really is just the proverbial canary
in the coal mine. College, which was supposed to be
the great equalizer in America, has become something that both
depends on and reinforces class and privilege. This is a
(01:29):
huge deal for the business world, and not even mostly
because the impending student loan bomb threatens our economy. If
we're losing talent, we're losing more than mere words can say.
This is, also, of course, a huge deal for our society.
It's not too grandiose to say that education determines the
shape of the society in which we live, So what
(01:52):
shape do we want that to take. Tuff's book was
fascinating to me for another reason. I'm obsessed with how
data can be manipulated, as Mark Twain famously said, lies
damn lies and statistics, How apparent facts can be not
factual at all upon closer examination. How words on the
surface can mask the reality underneath. This is a major
(02:14):
underlying theme of his book. What colleges tell the world
they want in their student body is not actually what
they want. The business of standardized testing is not only
more ruthless than you ever would have imagined, it's disingenuous
as well. The famed News and World Report survey of
the best colleges, well, what does best mean? Ohen, we'll
(02:34):
get into the pervasive idea that low income Americans should
skip college and become welders. I am so delighted to
be here with Paul, who has written three previous books,
including the best selling How Children Succeed, Grit, Curiosity in
the Hidden Power of Character. He's also a contributing writer
to The New York Times magazine, among many other things,
(02:55):
and he's here in Chicago on his book tour, so
we get to record this episode in my home city.
So welcome Paul. Thank you great to be here. I'm
delighted to have you here. So before we get into
some of the numbers and the societal cost, let's start
with the individual human cost of this. I was so
struck by some of your characters. And you begin with
a girl named Shannon who realizes that this institution that
(03:16):
she's poured so much of herself into has decided she's unworthy.
What was this like to talk to these young students yeah, so,
I mean, it was an amazing opportunity to do this reporting.
I mean, so it took me all over the place.
It took me six years to report it. But the
reporting that really sticks out in my mind is the
individual conversations with students who were making their way through
(03:36):
high school and then into college. And Shannon Shannon was
certainly one of the ones who stuck with me the most.
The thing that really drew me to her, and the
reason that I opened the book with her is that
I think she was the most idealistic of the high
school students that I met. That she really believed in
this idea of a meritocracy, really really believed in this
idea that college was this ticket to social mobility for her.
(03:58):
She was growing up in low income, single parent home
in the South Bronx, an incredible student in high school
and wanted to believe that that was going to get
her to a college that was going to change her
life and change her family's life. But she felt an
enormous amount of stress on her to jump through all
the hoops and overcome all the hurdles in order to
(04:19):
get there. And she also as time went on, and
especially on the day that I was with her the
day that she was waiting to hear the results that idea,
that there was some logic to the whole thing, that
there was some sense that hard work paid off. That
idea was really under threat for her in her mind,
and it turns out to be under threat. Right. She
realizes there's a lot more luck in this than there
(04:40):
is necessarily any kind of meritocratic methodology. Yeah, I mean
it really felt kind of capricious. So she gets in
one place, doesn't get into others, and she realizes that
there is some way that it is just kind of random.
And part of what I tried to do in that
first chapter is use her story as this microcosm of
how the whole system can often feel random to students,
(05:03):
whether they're affluent or low income like her, about how
there's also these deep inequities and unfairnesses that for a
student like her who doesn't have family connections, doesn't have
family money, the obstacles for her are just so much
bigger than for anybody else. One of the fascinating things
to me was that the inequities you lay there continue
through someone's college career. There's a really emotional anecdote of
(05:25):
a young woman named Kiki Gilbert who's in her seminar
at Princeton, and you watch how she is playing a
different game, as you put it, than the other students.
Explain that, Yeah, Key was another student I felt really
lucky to get to know. So she came from a
low income, really sort of chaotic family that moved around
a lot during her childhood, ended up in Charlotte, North
(05:45):
Carolina for the last few years of high school. An
amazing student got into Princeton, and then so I watched
her as she was making her way through her freshman year.
And academically she did great. I mean, a few hiccups
and bumps at the beginning, but mostly really did well
in her freshman year. But socially, emotionally, psychologically, the experience
(06:06):
of being thrust into this this world of Princeton that
mostly for her just felt very affluent, very white, very privileged.
It was jarring for her. Partly, it was just jarring
in the way that social mobility is always darring. When
you're a low income student. You're suddenly leaving behind your family,
your home, your culture, learning the new habits and customs
of this new world. But what really struck me for her,
(06:28):
and sitting there in that Humanity seminar with her and
all of these mostly affluent, mostly white students, was how
she was kind of playing this different game. She was
very focused on reading the book extremely carefully and arguing
very precise way making her point about this ancient Roman text,
and all of the other students had this kind of ease.
(06:49):
They were sort of relaxed and laid back and sort
of ostentatiously laid back. Exactly what it felt like to
me was that she was playing this different game than them.
She was very sort of uptight and on getting everything
exactly right. And there are a number of sociologists who's
work I write about in this book that says that
this other sort of affluent affect, this laid back approach,
(07:10):
is actually how like how you make the system work
for you, Like that's that's what you're rewarded for at
a place, like it's what employers are looking for, and
so it becomes this very defining aspect. And I thought
it was so interesting that you point out that college
success isn't just about academic success the way low income
students who aren't raised in this world may think it is.
There's this other game you have to know how to
(07:31):
play too. I found that fascinating and frightening. How did
the way you thought about upward mobility change? It's a
great question. I mean, so I've been drawn to the
question of upward mobility, I think my whole life, certainly
my whole writing career. It is just this phenomenon that
for me is important in two ways. One is that's
important in terms of the politics and the sociology of
(07:52):
the country itself, Like if you don't have upward mobility,
so many of the American ideas just start to fall apart.
But it's also fascinating to me just on a personal level,
like I just love hearing stories inspirational. Yeah, and and
and complicated too. I mean it's never smooth, it's never easy,
I think, especially when you're going through that mobility in
your late teenage early adult years, which are complicated enough.
(08:15):
So that's a lot of what drew me to that idea.
And you know, some of what drew me to writing
this book about higher education was this understanding that it's
those years, as those years right after high school that
now in American life have become so crucial in terms
of social mobility. You know, I've written a lot about
early childhood, about K twelve education in previous books, and
(08:37):
certainly what happens in those years is important, But it
is those college years or whatever happens to you after
high school that the signs in the economy are that
that now is the period that most defines what's going
to happen in terms of your mobility after them, which
is probably really frightening to any parent listening to this podcast.
But before we get into that, I want to come
back to a little bit this human cost and this
(08:58):
societal cost, because if system is broken, there's an awful
lot of waste, right, waste of human potential. Yeah, I mean,
I feel like that is definitely one of the big
conclusions that there are all of these young people, especially
from modest and low incomes, who have the potential to
be great students and great graduates and to contribute to
(09:18):
society in all sorts of ways. But the way that
we are doing college admissions, and then the way that
we are helping or failing to help students succeed and
persist and graduate from college, it's wasting a whole lot
of that potential, right, And I was thinking as I
as I read your book, how every business leader should
be taking an active role in thinking about this because
this is the future of their companies as well. So
I'm embarrassed to admit I actually didn't know about the
(09:39):
fate of the American Graduation Initiative until I read your book.
Tell us a little bit about that. You set it
up in a fascinating contrast to the GI Bill from
so many years ago. So explain that. Sure, yeah, I
didn't know about either. That makes me feel better. So
the President Obama when he was elected back in two
thousand and eight, early in his presidency, he may this
(10:00):
big promise, this big commitment. He pointed out that the
United States had fallen from being number one for decades
in terms of the percentage of its young people who
graduated from college, that we had fallen by two thousand
and nine to number twelve. There were eleven other countries
that were graduating more of their young people, and he said,
this is strong. We're going to change it. We're going
to get back to being number one within ten years.
(10:23):
So he put the deadline at the end of twenty nineteen.
So it's time to check and see if we've succeeded,
and in fact we haven't. We are still number twelve
ten years later. So in this final chapter of the book,
I contrast that with the gi Bill era, where we
actually did commit as a country to changing our whole
approach to higher education, to educating a whole generation millions
(10:44):
of returning gis, and that had a huge effect not
only on those gis and their families, but on the
country a lot of what created the great post war
economic boom in the great American middle class of that era.
But by contrast, when President Obama in two thousand and
nine this pledge, this commitment, the country did not come together,
and he and his administration and Congress did not put
(11:06):
the kind of resources behind it that happened in the
gi Bill era. And so the American Graduation Initiative was
one key factor in the sort of collapse of that dream,
of that commitment. This was a pledge to spend twelve
billion dollars on community colleges, which is really where I
mean all of the data suggest that is where investments
(11:26):
are most needed. That is, those are the institutions that
are most underserved, Those are the institutions that can help,
especially not the Keky Gilberts and the Shannon tauris Is.
But the young people who are not superior students, who
don't have other options, community colleges can get them to
a good sort of middle class living if we run
those institutions right. But we haven't been. We've been underfunding
(11:47):
them for years, and so this was going to try
and reverse that, and it all got mixed up with
the healthcare bill and at the last minute, Congress just
sliced those twelve billion dollars from the budget. The White
House did not put up much of a fuss, and
it just got dropped. And what really struck me, I
mean the fact that you didn't really know about it.
I didn't really know about it. I don't think anyone
really paid attention to it. It was this, you know,
(12:09):
here was the President making this huge commitment and it
just sort of sank without a trace. And I think
that's indicative of the way that we as a country
have failed to coalesce, to motivate, to connect over this
goal of improving higher education to provide more social mobility.
It's a really striking marker when you think back to
the GI build. The contrast you set up is so
(12:30):
striking because you think back to how the country came
together over around that. I mean, of course there was
skepticism from the elites about whether we wanted this massive
you know, uneducated people descending on colleges, but the country
came together around that. And when you think of the
contrast to this just fading without even a whimper, it
made me worried that maybe education is a sign of
(12:50):
art decline as a cleerent society, rather than both causing
it and a sign of it. Right, yeah, you know,
there's these two sort of competing traditions in American history, right,
one is this tradition of mobility. So I went back
and read Democracy in America and what was so striking about?
So here's this, you know, French aristocrat Alexis Totokfille writing
in the early years of the United States about what
(13:11):
seems new and important and different about the United States,
and it was social mobility that he kept coming back to,
and he found it sort of horrifying. He was like,
why can't the United States just have a nice aristocracy
like France does, so everyone knows their place in society.
But it was such a marker of sort of what
we believed in. But there I think at the same time,
there has been this long skepticism in the United States
about elites about education, about the idea that you need
(13:35):
to go to one of these elite institutions in order
to succeed. And I feel like right now those two
American traditions are coming together, are sort of colliding, yep,
betting heads with each other in a very interesting way.
And so that's also what's striking to me about the
Gibill era that what succeeded about it was sort of
an accident. You know that so many of the representatives
in Congress who passed this bill didn't really think that
(13:56):
many of these gis would take them up on it.
They thought, you know, these are working class kids, children
of farmers and factory workers. They're not going to go
to college. They're not going to succeed if they do.
And then they do, right, so then they all come back.
They all the American undergraduate population doubles in just a
few years, and this whole generation changes. And so I
feel like we're in another moment where Americans, and especially
(14:19):
American elites, are really skeptical that there is this potential
for many more working class and low income people to
succeed at college, except the need for it is even
greater now because the opportunities without a college degree are
so much less than they were in the nineteen forties.
Well maybe that's actually, in a weird way, a more
optimistic way to think about this, that societal change transformational
(14:39):
societal change has been an accidental surprise in many cases,
and the mere fact that so many people aren't on
board with it now actually as thus it ever was
right and we just need to get something done anyway.
If that's true, though, then there's the question of so
how is it going to happen? Like, how do you
get that moment where suddenly Americans are able to say, hey,
actually know people can succeed in college who we might
(15:00):
not expect to. So one of the things that struck
me in your book was all the data and the
way data has been appropriated and misappropriated and misused. You
came out pretty clearly, despite some data implying that good
students who went to Penn State were as likely to
do well as if they went to Princeton, you came
out pretty convinced that it does matter where you go. Yeah,
(15:21):
this is something that economists have debated for a long time.
I am persuaded by the work of two economists. One
is Carolyn Huxby, who is at Stanford. The other is
Ross Chetti, who's now at Harvard, and he works with
a whole collection of economists, a whole group of economists
who are studying social mobility, and they both in their
data have what I consider to be really strong indications that,
(15:44):
even if we would like it not to be the case,
that it matters a lot where people go to college.
If you look at it from an individual point of view,
if you're a parent worried about your child, or if
you're a student. I don't want people to interpret this
as saying, like, you, individual student, it really matters whether
you go to Princeton or Penn State, because I do
think that it's true that for individuals there's a lot
(16:04):
of variation. Especially affluent students, they tend to do well
no matter where they graduate from. But on a societal level,
it matters a whole lot. And it matters that the
institutions that are doing the most to produce high income graduates,
which are the most selective institutions, It matters that there
are very few low income students who are going to
(16:26):
those institutions, and a lot of high income students. And
because the low income students are the ones whose life
has the most potential to change, right, I thought was
a very telling quote in your book that it actually
the elite college campuses are almost entirely populated by the
students who benefit the least from the education they receive.
So explain that. Yeah, so this is something that ros
Jetty and his colleagues found that when low income students
(16:49):
go to these super selective institutions what he calls the
IVY plus institutions, which are the Ivy League colleges plus
a few other highly selective institutions, their lives change a toime,
their potential, their income, how much they make as adults,
is just transformed. Whereas for affluent students, there is an
advantage to going to more selective institutions, but it's a
(17:09):
much smaller one. And so these institutions have this ability
to change the lives of young people like Shanatais and
Kekey Gilbert, and there are very few Shannonturis and Keky
Gilberts at these institutions. What raj Chetti and his colleagues
found is that I like at Princeton, for instance, I
think two point two percent of the student body came
from families in the bottom economic quintile, and almost three
(17:31):
quarters of the student body came from families in the
top income quentile. So talk about that issue a little bit,
because it's one of the most striking acts of disingenuousness,
for lack of a better way of putting it, in
your book, that colleges say, we want these low income students.
This is a student population we want, but you point
out that actually the student population they want is precisely
(17:51):
the opposite of that. It's a complicated situation, and it's
difficult for me to know exactly what is going on
at these at these institutions, like I mean, I think
there is I think there are a few things. I mean,
I think one thing is that raj Jetty's data is
a few years old, so it's from about twenty thirteen.
So some of these institutions say that things have changed
a lot since then, and that's possible that there have
been some changes, but there's a lot of what I saw,
(18:13):
especially looking at Princeton through the eyes of the student
Kiki Gilbert. That showed me that institutions like Princeton, there
are all these ways that they can nudge the numbers
and game the numbers to make them seem more economically
diverse than they really are. So my suspicion is that
that continues to be what is going on at those institutions. Right,
and colleges have a huge incentive to get people in
(18:35):
the door who can pay, and even the colleges who
don't need people who can pay have an incentive to
get high test scoring students in the door. Right, is
that the right way to summarize it. It's a great
way to summarize it. And so there are these two
different types of incentives that push different sorts of institutions
in the same way. And the sort of the algorithm
that comes out of it is admit more rich kids
(18:55):
for wherever, whatever kind of institution you're in, but it
is slightly different. So I some time in the admissions
office of a college in Hartford, Trinity College, which is
highly selective institution, but not as selective as those IVY pluses.
I just want to go there. After reading your book,
I must say, so, Trinity like a lot of four
year private institutions is losing money. So a quarter of
(19:18):
four year institutions are losing money each year. They're losing
about eight million dollars a year. So they, like many
other institutions that aren't the very wealthiest institutions, they need
to admit more wealthy students just because they need to
stay afloat. Most of their income comes from student tuition
and fees, and so they need to look at their
(19:39):
applicants as potential customers. But that top echelon of schools,
the ones with the huge endowments, they don't really need
tuition dollars at all, and yet they are the ones
who are admitting the most affluent freshman classes. And there
I think it's much more to do with culture, you know.
I think there are all these reasons. Whether it's legacy students,
(19:59):
whether it's the kind of athletes that they care about,
whether it's students who have especially high test scores. All
of these what they consider markers of eliteness, exclusivity, excellence.
They all correlate with family income. And it's partly a
US News and World Report ranking issue to write at
all these schools, and that part of the ranking is
(20:19):
the kids test scores. So if test scores are biased
in favor of family income, then that's what you're going
to end up with if you want to keep your
US News ranking high. Yeah, I think there are all
of these incentives that all correlate, right. So it's family income,
it's legacies, it's test scores, it's just being able to
pay tuition. All of those pressures on admissions people push
(20:41):
them toward students who already have a lot of one.
On that note of legacies, I was struck by another
statistic in your book. I think it was that Harvard
admits a third of legacy of children of parents who
have gone to Harvard versus five percent for the overall
population average. It's just a fascinating statistic in this age
of debates about affirmative action. Right, what does affirmative action constitute?
(21:02):
How did you come to think about the Varsity blue
scandal that happened at the tail end of your reporting
on this book or as you were finishing writing, and
what did you think about it? So? I think, first
of all, it was is just this kind of amazing story, right.
The details of it are so kind of scandalous, ridiculous,
The lengths to which families were willing to go, and
(21:23):
so in some ways it felt like it was completely
different than anything that I was reporting on. I was
reporting on stone families that were spending thousands of dollars
to send their kids to expensive tutors, getting all, you know,
finding other ways to get legal advantages in the system.
But what really changed my thinking was reading back through
the transcripts of the FBI wire taps of these affluent
(21:43):
parents who ended up being arrested and charged in the
Varsity Blue scandal as they were talking to Rick sing Or,
the corrupt college coach at the heart of that scandal,
and the way the parents sounded in these wire taps,
they didn't sound like they were part of a criminal conspiracy.
They sounded just like all of the affluent parents who
I had met in my reporting. They sounded like they
(22:04):
just couldn't believe all the hoops that they had to
jump through in order to get their kid into college,
and this was just one more thing that they had
to do. And of course what they were doing was
illegal and kind of crazy. They were, you know, sending
in photos of their kids to have rixing or photoshop
the heads onto place kickers or rowers or divers, and
(22:25):
yet to them it just felt like, Okay, it's a
crazy system. I get that it's unfair, so therefore there
must be no rules. Anything I do is what I
need to do for my kid. And so I ended
up feeling like it was this right, you said, Canary
and Nicole Mine, this more extreme example of what has
infected I think affluent parents all over the country as
(22:45):
they deal with the anxiety of college applications. I thought that,
as I read your book, what's really the difference? I mean,
perhaps illegality, but in moral terms, what's really the difference
between paying a four hundred dollars an hour test coach
to help your kid boost their scores on their SAT
by two hundred points and faking their SAT scores? Or
what's really the difference between bribing a school to let
(23:06):
your daughter in and donating two million to Harvard in
order to get your child in. So it's all on
a continuum that betrays how incredibly really corrupt the system
has become. Yeah. Well, the other thing that I read
after finishing the book was Felicity Huffman's letter to the
judge who was sentencing her, and again she broke the law.
She deserves the punishment that she got. But it was
(23:27):
really hard not to sympathize with her reading that letter,
because what she described was not sort of this like ambition,
I want more and more for my daughter. It was
this sense of trying to avoid failure. She's just right,
Rick Slinger was able to commitce her. If you don't
do these things for your kid, you are letting your
child Dan, You're betraying your child. And I think that
is such a deep fear for parents, and I think
(23:50):
that's behind so many of the perfectly legal, crazy behaviors
that especially affluent parents do. This sense that if every
other parent is hiring these tutors and these coaches and
slipping your kid to soccer games and squash practices, I
need to be doing the same thing where I'm letting
my child down. This incredible sense of insecurity that pervades
(24:11):
modern American life. Right. So I was also stunned to
realize just how much of education really is big business.
And I had not realized the College Board. Were you
shocked to realize what, in many ways ruthless big business
it is? Yeah, I mean I started reporting on the
College Board back in twenty thirteen, and when I first
(24:32):
connected with them, I thought I was going to be
writing something really positive about the efforts that they were
taking to make college admissions fairer. But as the years
went on, then I continued to report on them. First
of all, I found they were increasingly elusive about letting
me see the data of these various experiments and interventions
that they were doing. And as time went on, it
started to feel like each of those moments of elusiveness
(24:55):
connected to this bigger way that they were trying to
shape the story about the role of standardized tests and admissions.
What I kind of concluded about the College Board is
that they are, in some ways this sort of schizophrenic
institution that has these two personalities. On the one hand,
they are, you know, they're a nonprofit and they genuinely
are trying to address issues of inequity and higher education.
(25:18):
On the other hand, they are a business that brings
in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue,
that has some very highly paid executives, and they depend
on selling a product, the SAT, which is basically a
sort of coke and pepsi way more or less indistinguishable
from this competing product the act. And when you get
two companies that are competing for market share, they tend
(25:40):
to behave pretty ruthlessly. And so that revenue enhancing side
of the personality I think is really at war with
the more idealistic side. And during the years that I
was reporting on the College Board, it was the revenue
enhancing side that was definitely winning. Let's pause on one
of those elusive things about the College Board, which is
this idea that they argued for a long time that
test prep didn't work, and yet there's a whole industry
(26:02):
of test prep. How did you come to think about that?
Test prep has for decades been the sort of existential
threat to the SAT into the College Board. It started
with Stanley Kaplan, this young guy from Brooklyn who started
tutoring students in New York and his parents' basement and
was able to help them get much better scores on
(26:24):
the SAT. And this was during an era where the
A definitely did stand for aptitude. The idea behind the
SAT was that you couldn't study for it, and so
the idea that by hanging out with Stanley Kaplan you
could increase your score was really threatening, and so they
tried to discredit him. They tried to get them arrested,
run him out of business, and it didn't work. And
students who saw there was an advantage, first with Stanley Kaplan,
(26:45):
then later with Princeton Review, and then with lots of
individual tutoring services, realized there was this real advantage. And
so for many years the College Board continued to say,
there's not much of an advantage that you can get.
They had this one study that said you only get
a small advantage from having any kind tutoring. That did
nothing to dissuade affluent on parents from continuing to send
their kids to tutoring centers. And I spent a lot
(27:07):
of time with this one tutor in Washington, DC whose
students were just making incredible gains in their scores. And
then I think during the years that I was reporting
on the College Board, the College Board decided that they
couldn't keep this argument up any longer, and they changed
their tune and decided to offer free test practice through
this organization, this learning online learning system con Academy, and
(27:30):
in lots of ways, the product that they came up with,
official SAT Practice is great. I mean, it is a
good idea to have free SAT practice out there. But
when it came time for them to analyze how well
official SAT practice had done, who was practicing on con academy,
and what kind of benefit they were getting from it,
they chose to spend the data, spend the results of
(27:52):
that study in ways that I felt didn't really reflect
what was really good and why. What was their incentive
to spend the results. Everything that they were doing these
years was to try to make the case that in reality,
the SAT made college admissions more equitable, more fair, that
it was a friend of low income students, and it
just isn't it. So you know, every study of admissions
(28:15):
makes it clear that SAT scores and family income correlate
a whole lot. If you just look at high school GPA,
you get a more socioeconomically diverse picture of who's succeeding.
And so that's a problem I think for an institution.
They could just do what they had done for years
and just ignore that fact and say, like, that's the
way it goes in America. Rich kids get better scores
(28:37):
and that's because they're smarter, And so that became harder
for them to say, and so they try to make
this alternate argument that In fact, there were things they
were doing that were leveling the playing field that we're
giving low income students this advantage, this opportunity through the
SAT to get into the school of their choice and
achieve social mobility. And so I think that the kon
(28:59):
Academy collaboration was a big part of that. They wanted
it to show that the expensive test prep that rich
families were paying so much for was actually not giving
them an advantage, that low income students were getting the
same advantage from the kN Academy program that affluent students
were getting from high priced test prep. David Coleman, the
head of the College Board, when he announced this con
(29:21):
Academy collaboration, said that this was basically going to put
expensive test prep out of business. This was a bad
day for them. He said, it was basically the best
thing he'd ever been part of in his life. Right,
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was
something along those lines. No, I mean, the quote he
said he I'm paraphrasing too, was that it was he
had never seen the launch of a technology at this
scale that didn't more to solve problems of racial inequity
(29:42):
in the country than this and data just did not
bear that out. The main finding was that high income
white male students with college educated parents, they were using
con Academy more for longer periods of time than more
disadvantaged groups. And so, I mean, the news was that
it was if a low income student used it, if
(30:02):
a high income student used it, their scores were going
up in an equivalent amount. So it was potentially providing
this opportunity for low income students, first generation students, but
in reality they were not using it as much as
those wealthy students. And that was the part of the
story that the college were really left out of their
public presentation of the data when they released it, And
(30:23):
it seemed to me that they took it one step
further into perhaps I'm being too harsh, but outright misment
representation with this more recent argument that actually the SAT
is this equalizer and grades are a form of discrimination
when the data shows the opposite, right according to your work, Yeah,
I had the same feeling that they made this case
(30:44):
publicly in two seventeen that because of grade inflation, which
is a genuine thing, grades really are inflating, that rich
kids were getting this advantage from high school grades. That
only the SAT could level the playing field and save
low income students from the advance, which is that rich
kids were getting from their great inflation, and the data
(31:04):
just doesn't bear that out. I mean, there has been
great inflation, and there's some data that says that private
school students, at private schools grades are inflating more than
at public schools. But when you look at it by race,
by family income, there is no indication that more advantaged
groups are experiencing more great inflation than less advantaged groups.
And there remains a whole lot of evidence that SAT
(31:26):
and ACT scores give lots of advantages to the most privileged,
most affluent families in our society. You had a fascinating
concept in your book as well as in the New
York Times magazine cover story about this that was really interesting.
SAT discrepant, So talk about what that means and what
you saw. Yeah, this was the study that College Board
did and did not spend a lot of time getting
(31:47):
this out to the public, but I think it's a
really important It helped me understand what was going on
with SAT scores and admissions. The way they divided the
population up in the study, about two thirds of high
school senior have test scores and high school GPAs that
are more or less correlate. So that's true for most
students that basically, your your SAT score is what your
(32:09):
dying up there there is. It actually is a measurement
at least of high school achievement, right, And so for
those students, your SAT score doesn't really matter. If the
college just looked at your GPA, they would admit the
same students as if they looked at both. But then
there are these two groups, each about a sixth of
the population that have discrepancies. Either they have test scores
that are higher than what their GPA would predict, or
(32:32):
they have GPAs that are higher than what their test
score would predict. And when the college board looked at
these groups, they found there were real demographic differences. And
so the group that tended to have higher test scores
than their GPA would predict were more likely to be male,
more likely to be white and Asian, more likely to
have affluent, well educated parents. And what educators also tell
(32:54):
you is these students, the students who with higher SAT
scores than their GPAs, tend not to be the most
motivated ones. Because your GPA is a reflection not only
of intellectual capability, but also of your work ethic, how
hard you actually work at school. Then there's this other group,
the group that has higher GPAs than their SAT score
would predict. And those students are more likely to be female,
(33:16):
more likely to be black and Latino or Latina, more
likely to have less affluent, less educated parents. And so
those are the students statistically who are most disadvantaged by
a system of admissions that puts a lot of emphasis
on test scores. These are students who often have really
high GPAs. They are like Shannon TOAs the student I
(33:38):
met from the Bronx. They work incredibly hard at school,
They are right at the top of their classes, but
their test scores can keep up. And certainly in my reporting,
the indications are when those students get to a good college,
and especially if they get a little extra support from
that institution, they do great. But a system that focuses
on test scores as the main metric of admissions is
(33:59):
going to ignore those students, is not going to give
them a chance. It's one group of students that we
are for sure failing, which are those students whose GPA
would say you can do something at a highly selective college,
you can succeed here, and then their test score is
saying something different, and we're letting the test score influence
the outcome, but increasingly we're not. Do you think this
test score blind philosophy that's spreading with the University of
(34:20):
Chicago embracing it more recently, does that fix the issue
or is it part of affix? I think it might
be part of effex Yeah, I think it's easy to
overestimate what a difference it will make. So the U
of Chicago is now the most selective institution to have
gone what admissions people call test optional, meaning there's still
lots of students who apply it to University of Chicago
and submit their test scores, but if they want to
(34:43):
not submit their test scores, they can and Chicago will
still consider them. And an increasing number of schools, especially
small liberal arts colleges, have test optional admissions, and I
think it does give an opportunity to students like those
discrepant students to get admission to the kind of institution
they wouldn't be considered at otherwise. But it is not
Test optional emissions is not a magic bullet, because there
(35:05):
are still so many other pressures on these institutions. I mean,
like Trinity, the college in Connecticut where I did so
much of my reporting. They went test optional, but they
still their big pressure was the fact that they needed
tuition dollars, and so it wasn't easy for them to
admit low income students, whatever their grades, whatever their test scores,
they needed tuition dollars. Talk about the myth of the
wealthy welder. So one of the students who I followed
(35:30):
was one of these students who didn't particularly like high school.
His name was Or. He was in a white, working
class rural family in western North Carolina, and he after
he got out of high school, he went to work.
He didn't get any kind of post secondary credential, worked
in factories were changing oil, and after about five or
six years he was making more than minimum wage. But
(35:53):
he was basically still broke and had come to believe
that there were no great opportunities in the economy for
people without anything more than a high school degree. And
so he enrolled in community college to study welding. And
so I was following him through that path. And at
the same time, there was this new rhetoric in the
United States about welding as this perfect alternative to college,
(36:16):
and especially among certain politicians and certain media outlets, there
was this push that college was a waste of money,
it was a waste of time. In fact, there were
all these opportunities through the skilled trades for which you
did not need a college degree. And so as I followed,
or partly I just wanted to see what happened to
him and understand what it was like to be in
his shoes, But partly I wanted to understand this debate
(36:38):
and this rhetoric about welding and about the skilled trades
through his eyes. And what I found was that there
were two big, big problems with this argument that welding
is the perfect alternative college. One is that you need
to go to college in order to become a welder.
So Ori was enrolled in community college. He was completing
a two year degree. Welding is really complicated. He think
(37:00):
he had to do thirteen different technical classes, plus metallurgy
and English and math and how to read blueprints. It's
a complicated career and he needed college in order to
get there. And at the same time, part of the
rhetoric that was being thrown around during those years was
that there was this huge opportunity for people in skilled
trades to make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars All
(37:21):
Street Journal. There is a Wall Street Journal outfit that
made that case, and then that sort of turned into
this meme that made its way through the media. And
there are certain welders who are able to make that much,
But the average salary, the median salary for a welder
right now is forty one thousand dollars, which is well
below the national median salary. So there's a way that
(37:42):
the argument just focuses on those high earning welders to
make the case against college. And so part of the
argument is right that we should be doing a better
job to help students like or get credential to help
them become welders. It is a good job for him,
even if it's not paying one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year. But the kind of the irony of
that argument. The argument is used to undercut funding for
(38:05):
colleges because the argument is not we should be spending
more on colleges so that people can become welders. The
argument is we don't need to spend money on colleges
because people can become welders. And so that argument is
part of why over the last ten years or so,
North Carolina, where Ori lives, cut it's funding to community colleges,
including the one that he was going to buy millions
(38:28):
of dollars, and so his tuition went up, the resources
that his college has went down, and it became harder
and harder for him to get this degree. So at
this moment where the rhetoric is all about how there
are these fantastic opportunities in the skilled trades for people
without college credentials, in the actual colleges where actual students
(38:48):
like Oria are trying to learn to be welders, we
are cutting funding to those institutions and making it harder
and harder for students like Ori to succeed. That's stunning
and incredibly disheartening. Why do you why do you think
that is? Do you think it's a matter of ideology
that again, it's more convenient to believe that it's up
to people to succeed and we've given them all the tools,
(39:09):
and the tools are there in society and if they
can't take advantage of it, well it's their fault. Is
it just convenience or is there something deeper going on.
It's a good question. I think there is some partisan
skew too, and I think it's partly that people want
to pay less taxes and so we don't want to
pay for public higher education the way we used to.
But I do think that, yeah, it's sort of the
flip side of the status quo case that we've made before.
(39:31):
If we force ourselves to look realistically at the opportunities
that a studentlike Ori has, it means we have to
do a whole lot more work. And that is the reality,
right We need to do a much better job of
creating a system of community colleges, technical colleges, public universities
that can help students who are not at the top
of their class from low income communities find their way
to a decent, middle class life. We have not created
(39:54):
that system right now. But if we tell ourselves that,
in fact, there are a lot of opportunities that if
a studentlike Ori is not succeed it's his fault, it's
his problem, it's something unusual about him, it lets us
off the hook. It lets us say we've given these
kids all the chances they need. But the reality is
there are millions of students like or who are not
(40:14):
able to make their way through the system, and a
big reason for that is that we are not providing
enough support for them. Like so many things, it's a
convenient argument in the short term and utterly devastating in
the long term. Right, did all this research make you
change your mind or think differently, or think about what
decisions you would try to encourage your children to make?
So my kids, I have two boys, they're four and ten,
(40:35):
so college is still a little ways off, but I
think I actually did go through with my older son,
who's ten. I did go through sort of two cycles
as I did my reporting, And the first was it
made me more anxious and so as I would read
these sociology texts about how, like the sports that you
play in middle school are this great predictor of whether
(40:57):
you're going to get hired by Goldman Sachs, I'll have
to college. All of the advantages that it's clear the
students who go to the most selective institutions have. It
made me anxious and I just started feeling like, Yeah,
what sports should I enroll him in? What extra tutoring
should he be doing now? And it made me, I think,
a less pleasant father to be around. But then the
experience of reporting at the University of Texas, I think
(41:19):
changed my mind again and made me feel like going
to one of those super selective institutions means going right
now anyway, means going to an institution where almost every
student is from a really affluent, privileged background, and there
is not There might be sort of token diversity, but
there is not sort of real diversity. And I think
that diversity is you know, it's not just something you
(41:41):
pay lip service to. It really does matter in terms
of the education of a student. And so the feeling
that I had at big public institutions, including UT, was
just much more what I would want for my kids.
It's a place where there's an excellent education going on,
but there's also an education in sort of being an
American or at UT being a Texan. There's this sense,
to my mind, a much more sort of equitable and
(42:03):
much more fair idea of sort of how the meritocracy works,
how social mobility works, and that I think is as
important a part of education as what's actually happening in
the classroom. This says the world in all its messy
glory right and human potential, and I thought that too. Wow,
University of Texas, here we come maybe anyway, Thank you
so much for being here. This was really illuminating and
(42:25):
I enjoyed it very much. Thanks me too. In this conversation,
I was struck by how our beliefs, whether they be
beliefs of convenience or of ideology, can override the clear
evidence in front of us. It's so much easier to
believe in the wealthy wilder, to believe that colleges are
admitting the most qualified candidates, and to believe that kids
who fail in college just moren't supposed to be there
(42:47):
in the first place. But oh, the waste of human
potential that those beliefs entail. There's a huge long term
cost to that. So what can we do well. I'm
all for the Texas approach, but I also think that,
especially in these times of budget shortfalls, business leaders need
to take a more proactive approach to education. If you
aren't finding the skills and the diversity that you want,
(43:10):
help build them. As for politicians, well, I think the
best we can hope for is more happy accidents. Makia
killing is a co production of pushkin industries and chalkin Blade.
It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive
producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in making Casey. The
(43:30):
executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski.
Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain.
Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at
Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've
most enjoyed.
I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood and finding the
lessons we can all learn from them. Already in this series,
I've spoken with Sahil Patel about Netflix, Mike Isaac about Uber,
and Peter Robeson about Boeing. I'm at Bethany mac twelve
on Twitter. If there's a difining commonality to upper income
(00:24):
life in America for people with children, it's school stress.
How do you get your kids into the right preschool
such that they can get into the right high school
such that they can go to the very best college?
And what sports should they play in order to improve
those very difficult odds, because, oh my goodness, everything hinges
on whether or not they attend the right college. So
(00:46):
for anyone who is already worried, the title of Pultov's
new book, The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes
or Breaks Us, is not exactly reassuring. He writes, it
sometimes felt as though the country was splitting into two
separate and unequal nations, with a college diploma the boundary
that divided them. As that quote shows, the issues this
(01:08):
book raises are so much greater than the stress it
causes the elite. And while we're all fixated on the
varsity blues scandal, that really is just the proverbial canary
in the coal mine. College, which was supposed to be
the great equalizer in America, has become something that both
depends on and reinforces class and privilege. This is a
(01:29):
huge deal for the business world, and not even mostly
because the impending student loan bomb threatens our economy. If
we're losing talent, we're losing more than mere words can say.
This is, also, of course, a huge deal for our society.
It's not too grandiose to say that education determines the
shape of the society in which we live, So what
(01:52):
shape do we want that to take. Tuff's book was
fascinating to me for another reason. I'm obsessed with how
data can be manipulated, as Mark Twain famously said, lies
damn lies and statistics, How apparent facts can be not
factual at all upon closer examination. How words on the
surface can mask the reality underneath. This is a major
(02:14):
underlying theme of his book. What colleges tell the world
they want in their student body is not actually what
they want. The business of standardized testing is not only
more ruthless than you ever would have imagined, it's disingenuous
as well. The famed News and World Report survey of
the best colleges, well, what does best mean? Ohen, we'll
(02:34):
get into the pervasive idea that low income Americans should
skip college and become welders. I am so delighted to
be here with Paul, who has written three previous books,
including the best selling How Children Succeed, Grit, Curiosity in
the Hidden Power of Character. He's also a contributing writer
to The New York Times magazine, among many other things,
(02:55):
and he's here in Chicago on his book tour, so
we get to record this episode in my home city.
So welcome Paul. Thank you great to be here. I'm
delighted to have you here. So before we get into
some of the numbers and the societal cost, let's start
with the individual human cost of this. I was so
struck by some of your characters. And you begin with
a girl named Shannon who realizes that this institution that
(03:16):
she's poured so much of herself into has decided she's unworthy.
What was this like to talk to these young students yeah, so,
I mean, it was an amazing opportunity to do this reporting.
I mean, so it took me all over the place.
It took me six years to report it. But the
reporting that really sticks out in my mind is the
individual conversations with students who were making their way through
(03:36):
high school and then into college. And Shannon Shannon was
certainly one of the ones who stuck with me the most.
The thing that really drew me to her, and the
reason that I opened the book with her is that
I think she was the most idealistic of the high
school students that I met. That she really believed in
this idea of a meritocracy, really really believed in this
idea that college was this ticket to social mobility for her.
(03:58):
She was growing up in low income, single parent home
in the South Bronx, an incredible student in high school
and wanted to believe that that was going to get
her to a college that was going to change her
life and change her family's life. But she felt an
enormous amount of stress on her to jump through all
the hoops and overcome all the hurdles in order to
(04:19):
get there. And she also as time went on, and
especially on the day that I was with her the
day that she was waiting to hear the results that idea,
that there was some logic to the whole thing, that
there was some sense that hard work paid off. That
idea was really under threat for her in her mind,
and it turns out to be under threat. Right. She
realizes there's a lot more luck in this than there
(04:40):
is necessarily any kind of meritocratic methodology. Yeah, I mean
it really felt kind of capricious. So she gets in
one place, doesn't get into others, and she realizes that
there is some way that it is just kind of random.
And part of what I tried to do in that
first chapter is use her story as this microcosm of
how the whole system can often feel random to students,
(05:03):
whether they're affluent or low income like her, about how
there's also these deep inequities and unfairnesses that for a
student like her who doesn't have family connections, doesn't have
family money, the obstacles for her are just so much
bigger than for anybody else. One of the fascinating things
to me was that the inequities you lay there continue
through someone's college career. There's a really emotional anecdote of
(05:25):
a young woman named Kiki Gilbert who's in her seminar
at Princeton, and you watch how she is playing a
different game, as you put it, than the other students.
Explain that, Yeah, Key was another student I felt really
lucky to get to know. So she came from a
low income, really sort of chaotic family that moved around
a lot during her childhood, ended up in Charlotte, North
(05:45):
Carolina for the last few years of high school. An
amazing student got into Princeton, and then so I watched
her as she was making her way through her freshman year.
And academically she did great. I mean, a few hiccups
and bumps at the beginning, but mostly really did well
in her freshman year. But socially, emotionally, psychologically, the experience
(06:06):
of being thrust into this this world of Princeton that
mostly for her just felt very affluent, very white, very privileged.
It was jarring for her. Partly, it was just jarring
in the way that social mobility is always darring. When
you're a low income student. You're suddenly leaving behind your family,
your home, your culture, learning the new habits and customs
of this new world. But what really struck me for her,
(06:28):
and sitting there in that Humanity seminar with her and
all of these mostly affluent, mostly white students, was how
she was kind of playing this different game. She was
very focused on reading the book extremely carefully and arguing
very precise way making her point about this ancient Roman text,
and all of the other students had this kind of ease.
(06:49):
They were sort of relaxed and laid back and sort
of ostentatiously laid back. Exactly what it felt like to
me was that she was playing this different game than them.
She was very sort of uptight and on getting everything
exactly right. And there are a number of sociologists who's
work I write about in this book that says that
this other sort of affluent affect, this laid back approach,
(07:10):
is actually how like how you make the system work
for you, Like that's that's what you're rewarded for at
a place, like it's what employers are looking for, and
so it becomes this very defining aspect. And I thought
it was so interesting that you point out that college
success isn't just about academic success the way low income
students who aren't raised in this world may think it is.
There's this other game you have to know how to
(07:31):
play too. I found that fascinating and frightening. How did
the way you thought about upward mobility change? It's a
great question. I mean, so I've been drawn to the
question of upward mobility, I think my whole life, certainly
my whole writing career. It is just this phenomenon that
for me is important in two ways. One is that's
important in terms of the politics and the sociology of
(07:52):
the country itself, Like if you don't have upward mobility,
so many of the American ideas just start to fall apart.
But it's also fascinating to me just on a personal level,
like I just love hearing stories inspirational. Yeah, and and
and complicated too. I mean it's never smooth, it's never easy,
I think, especially when you're going through that mobility in
your late teenage early adult years, which are complicated enough.
(08:15):
So that's a lot of what drew me to that idea.
And you know, some of what drew me to writing
this book about higher education was this understanding that it's
those years, as those years right after high school that
now in American life have become so crucial in terms
of social mobility. You know, I've written a lot about
early childhood, about K twelve education in previous books, and
(08:37):
certainly what happens in those years is important, But it
is those college years or whatever happens to you after
high school that the signs in the economy are that
that now is the period that most defines what's going
to happen in terms of your mobility after them, which
is probably really frightening to any parent listening to this podcast.
But before we get into that, I want to come
back to a little bit this human cost and this
(08:58):
societal cost, because if system is broken, there's an awful
lot of waste, right, waste of human potential. Yeah, I mean,
I feel like that is definitely one of the big
conclusions that there are all of these young people, especially
from modest and low incomes, who have the potential to
be great students and great graduates and to contribute to
(09:18):
society in all sorts of ways. But the way that
we are doing college admissions, and then the way that
we are helping or failing to help students succeed and
persist and graduate from college, it's wasting a whole lot
of that potential, right, And I was thinking as I
as I read your book, how every business leader should
be taking an active role in thinking about this because
this is the future of their companies as well. So
I'm embarrassed to admit I actually didn't know about the
(09:39):
fate of the American Graduation Initiative until I read your book.
Tell us a little bit about that. You set it
up in a fascinating contrast to the GI Bill from
so many years ago. So explain that. Sure, yeah, I
didn't know about either. That makes me feel better. So
the President Obama when he was elected back in two
thousand and eight, early in his presidency, he may this
(10:00):
big promise, this big commitment. He pointed out that the
United States had fallen from being number one for decades
in terms of the percentage of its young people who
graduated from college, that we had fallen by two thousand
and nine to number twelve. There were eleven other countries
that were graduating more of their young people, and he said,
this is strong. We're going to change it. We're going
to get back to being number one within ten years.
(10:23):
So he put the deadline at the end of twenty nineteen.
So it's time to check and see if we've succeeded,
and in fact we haven't. We are still number twelve
ten years later. So in this final chapter of the book,
I contrast that with the gi Bill era, where we
actually did commit as a country to changing our whole
approach to higher education, to educating a whole generation millions
(10:44):
of returning gis, and that had a huge effect not
only on those gis and their families, but on the
country a lot of what created the great post war
economic boom in the great American middle class of that era.
But by contrast, when President Obama in two thousand and
nine this pledge, this commitment, the country did not come together,
and he and his administration and Congress did not put
(11:06):
the kind of resources behind it that happened in the
gi Bill era. And so the American Graduation Initiative was
one key factor in the sort of collapse of that dream,
of that commitment. This was a pledge to spend twelve
billion dollars on community colleges, which is really where I
mean all of the data suggest that is where investments
(11:26):
are most needed. That is, those are the institutions that
are most underserved, Those are the institutions that can help,
especially not the Keky Gilberts and the Shannon tauris Is.
But the young people who are not superior students, who
don't have other options, community colleges can get them to
a good sort of middle class living if we run
those institutions right. But we haven't been. We've been underfunding
(11:47):
them for years, and so this was going to try
and reverse that, and it all got mixed up with
the healthcare bill and at the last minute, Congress just
sliced those twelve billion dollars from the budget. The White
House did not put up much of a fuss, and
it just got dropped. And what really struck me, I
mean the fact that you didn't really know about it.
I didn't really know about it. I don't think anyone
really paid attention to it. It was this, you know,
(12:09):
here was the President making this huge commitment and it
just sort of sank without a trace. And I think
that's indicative of the way that we as a country
have failed to coalesce, to motivate, to connect over this
goal of improving higher education to provide more social mobility.
It's a really striking marker when you think back to
the GI build. The contrast you set up is so
(12:30):
striking because you think back to how the country came
together over around that. I mean, of course there was
skepticism from the elites about whether we wanted this massive
you know, uneducated people descending on colleges, but the country
came together around that. And when you think of the
contrast to this just fading without even a whimper, it
made me worried that maybe education is a sign of
(12:50):
art decline as a cleerent society, rather than both causing
it and a sign of it. Right, yeah, you know,
there's these two sort of competing traditions in American history, right,
one is this tradition of mobility. So I went back
and read Democracy in America and what was so striking about?
So here's this, you know, French aristocrat Alexis Totokfille writing
in the early years of the United States about what
(13:11):
seems new and important and different about the United States,
and it was social mobility that he kept coming back to,
and he found it sort of horrifying. He was like,
why can't the United States just have a nice aristocracy
like France does, so everyone knows their place in society.
But it was such a marker of sort of what
we believed in. But there I think at the same time,
there has been this long skepticism in the United States
about elites about education, about the idea that you need
(13:35):
to go to one of these elite institutions in order
to succeed. And I feel like right now those two
American traditions are coming together, are sort of colliding, yep,
betting heads with each other in a very interesting way.
And so that's also what's striking to me about the
Gibill era that what succeeded about it was sort of
an accident. You know that so many of the representatives
in Congress who passed this bill didn't really think that
(13:56):
many of these gis would take them up on it.
They thought, you know, these are working class kids, children
of farmers and factory workers. They're not going to go
to college. They're not going to succeed if they do.
And then they do, right, so then they all come back.
They all the American undergraduate population doubles in just a
few years, and this whole generation changes. And so I
feel like we're in another moment where Americans, and especially
(14:19):
American elites, are really skeptical that there is this potential
for many more working class and low income people to
succeed at college, except the need for it is even
greater now because the opportunities without a college degree are
so much less than they were in the nineteen forties.
Well maybe that's actually, in a weird way, a more
optimistic way to think about this, that societal change transformational
(14:39):
societal change has been an accidental surprise in many cases,
and the mere fact that so many people aren't on
board with it now actually as thus it ever was
right and we just need to get something done anyway.
If that's true, though, then there's the question of so
how is it going to happen? Like, how do you
get that moment where suddenly Americans are able to say, hey,
actually know people can succeed in college who we might
(15:00):
not expect to. So one of the things that struck
me in your book was all the data and the
way data has been appropriated and misappropriated and misused. You
came out pretty clearly, despite some data implying that good
students who went to Penn State were as likely to
do well as if they went to Princeton, you came
out pretty convinced that it does matter where you go. Yeah,
(15:21):
this is something that economists have debated for a long time.
I am persuaded by the work of two economists. One
is Carolyn Huxby, who is at Stanford. The other is
Ross Chetti, who's now at Harvard, and he works with
a whole collection of economists, a whole group of economists
who are studying social mobility, and they both in their
data have what I consider to be really strong indications that,
(15:44):
even if we would like it not to be the case,
that it matters a lot where people go to college.
If you look at it from an individual point of view,
if you're a parent worried about your child, or if
you're a student. I don't want people to interpret this
as saying, like, you, individual student, it really matters whether
you go to Princeton or Penn State, because I do
think that it's true that for individuals there's a lot
(16:04):
of variation. Especially affluent students, they tend to do well
no matter where they graduate from. But on a societal level,
it matters a whole lot. And it matters that the
institutions that are doing the most to produce high income graduates,
which are the most selective institutions, It matters that there
are very few low income students who are going to
(16:26):
those institutions, and a lot of high income students. And
because the low income students are the ones whose life
has the most potential to change, right, I thought was
a very telling quote in your book that it actually
the elite college campuses are almost entirely populated by the
students who benefit the least from the education they receive.
So explain that. Yeah, so this is something that ros
Jetty and his colleagues found that when low income students
(16:49):
go to these super selective institutions what he calls the
IVY plus institutions, which are the Ivy League colleges plus
a few other highly selective institutions, their lives change a toime,
their potential, their income, how much they make as adults,
is just transformed. Whereas for affluent students, there is an
advantage to going to more selective institutions, but it's a
(17:09):
much smaller one. And so these institutions have this ability
to change the lives of young people like Shanatais and
Kekey Gilbert, and there are very few Shannonturis and Keky
Gilberts at these institutions. What raj Chetti and his colleagues
found is that I like at Princeton, for instance, I
think two point two percent of the student body came
from families in the bottom economic quintile, and almost three
(17:31):
quarters of the student body came from families in the
top income quentile. So talk about that issue a little bit,
because it's one of the most striking acts of disingenuousness,
for lack of a better way of putting it, in
your book, that colleges say, we want these low income students.
This is a student population we want, but you point
out that actually the student population they want is precisely
(17:51):
the opposite of that. It's a complicated situation, and it's
difficult for me to know exactly what is going on
at these at these institutions, like I mean, I think
there is I think there are a few things. I mean,
I think one thing is that raj Jetty's data is
a few years old, so it's from about twenty thirteen.
So some of these institutions say that things have changed
a lot since then, and that's possible that there have
been some changes, but there's a lot of what I saw,
(18:13):
especially looking at Princeton through the eyes of the student
Kiki Gilbert. That showed me that institutions like Princeton, there
are all these ways that they can nudge the numbers
and game the numbers to make them seem more economically
diverse than they really are. So my suspicion is that
that continues to be what is going on at those institutions. Right,
and colleges have a huge incentive to get people in
(18:35):
the door who can pay, and even the colleges who
don't need people who can pay have an incentive to
get high test scoring students in the door. Right, is
that the right way to summarize it. It's a great
way to summarize it. And so there are these two
different types of incentives that push different sorts of institutions
in the same way. And the sort of the algorithm
that comes out of it is admit more rich kids
(18:55):
for wherever, whatever kind of institution you're in, but it
is slightly different. So I some time in the admissions
office of a college in Hartford, Trinity College, which is
highly selective institution, but not as selective as those IVY pluses.
I just want to go there. After reading your book,
I must say, so, Trinity like a lot of four
year private institutions is losing money. So a quarter of
(19:18):
four year institutions are losing money each year. They're losing
about eight million dollars a year. So they, like many
other institutions that aren't the very wealthiest institutions, they need
to admit more wealthy students just because they need to
stay afloat. Most of their income comes from student tuition
and fees, and so they need to look at their
(19:39):
applicants as potential customers. But that top echelon of schools,
the ones with the huge endowments, they don't really need
tuition dollars at all, and yet they are the ones
who are admitting the most affluent freshman classes. And there
I think it's much more to do with culture, you know.
I think there are all these reasons. Whether it's legacy students,
(19:59):
whether it's the kind of athletes that they care about,
whether it's students who have especially high test scores. All
of these what they consider markers of eliteness, exclusivity, excellence.
They all correlate with family income. And it's partly a
US News and World Report ranking issue to write at
all these schools, and that part of the ranking is
(20:19):
the kids test scores. So if test scores are biased
in favor of family income, then that's what you're going
to end up with if you want to keep your
US News ranking high. Yeah, I think there are all
of these incentives that all correlate, right. So it's family income,
it's legacies, it's test scores, it's just being able to
pay tuition. All of those pressures on admissions people push
(20:41):
them toward students who already have a lot of one.
On that note of legacies, I was struck by another
statistic in your book. I think it was that Harvard
admits a third of legacy of children of parents who
have gone to Harvard versus five percent for the overall
population average. It's just a fascinating statistic in this age
of debates about affirmative action. Right, what does affirmative action constitute?
(21:02):
How did you come to think about the Varsity blue
scandal that happened at the tail end of your reporting
on this book or as you were finishing writing, and
what did you think about it? So? I think, first
of all, it was is just this kind of amazing story, right.
The details of it are so kind of scandalous, ridiculous,
The lengths to which families were willing to go, and
(21:23):
so in some ways it felt like it was completely
different than anything that I was reporting on. I was
reporting on stone families that were spending thousands of dollars
to send their kids to expensive tutors, getting all, you know,
finding other ways to get legal advantages in the system.
But what really changed my thinking was reading back through
the transcripts of the FBI wire taps of these affluent
(21:43):
parents who ended up being arrested and charged in the
Varsity Blue scandal as they were talking to Rick sing Or,
the corrupt college coach at the heart of that scandal,
and the way the parents sounded in these wire taps,
they didn't sound like they were part of a criminal conspiracy.
They sounded just like all of the affluent parents who
I had met in my reporting. They sounded like they
(22:04):
just couldn't believe all the hoops that they had to
jump through in order to get their kid into college,
and this was just one more thing that they had
to do. And of course what they were doing was
illegal and kind of crazy. They were, you know, sending
in photos of their kids to have rixing or photoshop
the heads onto place kickers or rowers or divers, and
(22:25):
yet to them it just felt like, Okay, it's a
crazy system. I get that it's unfair, so therefore there
must be no rules. Anything I do is what I
need to do for my kid. And so I ended
up feeling like it was this right, you said, Canary
and Nicole Mine, this more extreme example of what has
infected I think affluent parents all over the country as
(22:45):
they deal with the anxiety of college applications. I thought that,
as I read your book, what's really the difference? I mean,
perhaps illegality, but in moral terms, what's really the difference
between paying a four hundred dollars an hour test coach
to help your kid boost their scores on their SAT
by two hundred points and faking their SAT scores? Or
what's really the difference between bribing a school to let
(23:06):
your daughter in and donating two million to Harvard in
order to get your child in. So it's all on
a continuum that betrays how incredibly really corrupt the system
has become. Yeah. Well, the other thing that I read
after finishing the book was Felicity Huffman's letter to the
judge who was sentencing her, and again she broke the law.
She deserves the punishment that she got. But it was
(23:27):
really hard not to sympathize with her reading that letter,
because what she described was not sort of this like ambition,
I want more and more for my daughter. It was
this sense of trying to avoid failure. She's just right,
Rick Slinger was able to commitce her. If you don't
do these things for your kid, you are letting your
child Dan, You're betraying your child. And I think that
is such a deep fear for parents, and I think
(23:50):
that's behind so many of the perfectly legal, crazy behaviors
that especially affluent parents do. This sense that if every
other parent is hiring these tutors and these coaches and
slipping your kid to soccer games and squash practices, I
need to be doing the same thing where I'm letting
my child down. This incredible sense of insecurity that pervades
(24:11):
modern American life. Right. So I was also stunned to
realize just how much of education really is big business.
And I had not realized the College Board. Were you
shocked to realize what, in many ways ruthless big business
it is? Yeah, I mean I started reporting on the
College Board back in twenty thirteen, and when I first
(24:32):
connected with them, I thought I was going to be
writing something really positive about the efforts that they were
taking to make college admissions fairer. But as the years
went on, then I continued to report on them. First
of all, I found they were increasingly elusive about letting
me see the data of these various experiments and interventions
that they were doing. And as time went on, it
started to feel like each of those moments of elusiveness
(24:55):
connected to this bigger way that they were trying to
shape the story about the role of standardized tests and admissions.
What I kind of concluded about the College Board is
that they are, in some ways this sort of schizophrenic
institution that has these two personalities. On the one hand,
they are, you know, they're a nonprofit and they genuinely
are trying to address issues of inequity and higher education.
(25:18):
On the other hand, they are a business that brings
in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue,
that has some very highly paid executives, and they depend
on selling a product, the SAT, which is basically a
sort of coke and pepsi way more or less indistinguishable
from this competing product the act. And when you get
two companies that are competing for market share, they tend
(25:40):
to behave pretty ruthlessly. And so that revenue enhancing side
of the personality I think is really at war with
the more idealistic side. And during the years that I
was reporting on the College Board, it was the revenue
enhancing side that was definitely winning. Let's pause on one
of those elusive things about the College Board, which is
this idea that they argued for a long time that
test prep didn't work, and yet there's a whole industry
(26:02):
of test prep. How did you come to think about that?
Test prep has for decades been the sort of existential
threat to the SAT into the College Board. It started
with Stanley Kaplan, this young guy from Brooklyn who started
tutoring students in New York and his parents' basement and
was able to help them get much better scores on
(26:24):
the SAT. And this was during an era where the
A definitely did stand for aptitude. The idea behind the
SAT was that you couldn't study for it, and so
the idea that by hanging out with Stanley Kaplan you
could increase your score was really threatening, and so they
tried to discredit him. They tried to get them arrested,
run him out of business, and it didn't work. And
students who saw there was an advantage, first with Stanley Kaplan,
(26:45):
then later with Princeton Review, and then with lots of
individual tutoring services, realized there was this real advantage. And
so for many years the College Board continued to say,
there's not much of an advantage that you can get.
They had this one study that said you only get
a small advantage from having any kind tutoring. That did
nothing to dissuade affluent on parents from continuing to send
their kids to tutoring centers. And I spent a lot
(27:07):
of time with this one tutor in Washington, DC whose
students were just making incredible gains in their scores. And
then I think during the years that I was reporting
on the College Board, the College Board decided that they
couldn't keep this argument up any longer, and they changed
their tune and decided to offer free test practice through
this organization, this learning online learning system con Academy, and
(27:30):
in lots of ways, the product that they came up with,
official SAT Practice is great. I mean, it is a
good idea to have free SAT practice out there. But
when it came time for them to analyze how well
official SAT practice had done, who was practicing on con academy,
and what kind of benefit they were getting from it,
they chose to spend the data, spend the results of
(27:52):
that study in ways that I felt didn't really reflect
what was really good and why. What was their incentive
to spend the results. Everything that they were doing these
years was to try to make the case that in reality,
the SAT made college admissions more equitable, more fair, that
it was a friend of low income students, and it
just isn't it. So you know, every study of admissions
(28:15):
makes it clear that SAT scores and family income correlate
a whole lot. If you just look at high school GPA,
you get a more socioeconomically diverse picture of who's succeeding.
And so that's a problem I think for an institution.
They could just do what they had done for years
and just ignore that fact and say, like, that's the
way it goes in America. Rich kids get better scores
(28:37):
and that's because they're smarter, And so that became harder
for them to say, and so they try to make
this alternate argument that In fact, there were things they
were doing that were leveling the playing field that we're
giving low income students this advantage, this opportunity through the
SAT to get into the school of their choice and
achieve social mobility. And so I think that the kon
(28:59):
Academy collaboration was a big part of that. They wanted
it to show that the expensive test prep that rich
families were paying so much for was actually not giving
them an advantage, that low income students were getting the
same advantage from the kN Academy program that affluent students
were getting from high priced test prep. David Coleman, the
head of the College Board, when he announced this con
(29:21):
Academy collaboration, said that this was basically going to put
expensive test prep out of business. This was a bad
day for them. He said, it was basically the best
thing he'd ever been part of in his life. Right,
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was
something along those lines. No, I mean, the quote he
said he I'm paraphrasing too, was that it was he
had never seen the launch of a technology at this
scale that didn't more to solve problems of racial inequity
(29:42):
in the country than this and data just did not
bear that out. The main finding was that high income
white male students with college educated parents, they were using
con Academy more for longer periods of time than more
disadvantaged groups. And so, I mean, the news was that
it was if a low income student used it, if
(30:02):
a high income student used it, their scores were going
up in an equivalent amount. So it was potentially providing
this opportunity for low income students, first generation students, but
in reality they were not using it as much as
those wealthy students. And that was the part of the
story that the college were really left out of their
public presentation of the data when they released it, And
(30:23):
it seemed to me that they took it one step
further into perhaps I'm being too harsh, but outright misment
representation with this more recent argument that actually the SAT
is this equalizer and grades are a form of discrimination
when the data shows the opposite, right according to your work, Yeah,
I had the same feeling that they made this case
(30:44):
publicly in two seventeen that because of grade inflation, which
is a genuine thing, grades really are inflating, that rich
kids were getting this advantage from high school grades. That
only the SAT could level the playing field and save
low income students from the advance, which is that rich
kids were getting from their great inflation, and the data
(31:04):
just doesn't bear that out. I mean, there has been
great inflation, and there's some data that says that private
school students, at private schools grades are inflating more than
at public schools. But when you look at it by race,
by family income, there is no indication that more advantaged
groups are experiencing more great inflation than less advantaged groups.
And there remains a whole lot of evidence that SAT
(31:26):
and ACT scores give lots of advantages to the most privileged,
most affluent families in our society. You had a fascinating
concept in your book as well as in the New
York Times magazine cover story about this that was really interesting.
SAT discrepant, So talk about what that means and what
you saw. Yeah, this was the study that College Board
did and did not spend a lot of time getting
(31:47):
this out to the public, but I think it's a
really important It helped me understand what was going on
with SAT scores and admissions. The way they divided the
population up in the study, about two thirds of high
school senior have test scores and high school GPAs that
are more or less correlate. So that's true for most
students that basically, your your SAT score is what your
(32:09):
dying up there there is. It actually is a measurement
at least of high school achievement, right, And so for
those students, your SAT score doesn't really matter. If the
college just looked at your GPA, they would admit the
same students as if they looked at both. But then
there are these two groups, each about a sixth of
the population that have discrepancies. Either they have test scores
that are higher than what their GPA would predict, or
(32:32):
they have GPAs that are higher than what their test
score would predict. And when the college board looked at
these groups, they found there were real demographic differences. And
so the group that tended to have higher test scores
than their GPA would predict were more likely to be male,
more likely to be white and Asian, more likely to
have affluent, well educated parents. And what educators also tell
(32:54):
you is these students, the students who with higher SAT
scores than their GPAs, tend not to be the most
motivated ones. Because your GPA is a reflection not only
of intellectual capability, but also of your work ethic, how
hard you actually work at school. Then there's this other group,
the group that has higher GPAs than their SAT score
would predict. And those students are more likely to be female,
(33:16):
more likely to be black and Latino or Latina, more
likely to have less affluent, less educated parents. And so
those are the students statistically who are most disadvantaged by
a system of admissions that puts a lot of emphasis
on test scores. These are students who often have really
high GPAs. They are like Shannon TOAs the student I
(33:38):
met from the Bronx. They work incredibly hard at school,
They are right at the top of their classes, but
their test scores can keep up. And certainly in my reporting,
the indications are when those students get to a good college,
and especially if they get a little extra support from
that institution, they do great. But a system that focuses
on test scores as the main metric of admissions is
(33:59):
going to ignore those students, is not going to give
them a chance. It's one group of students that we
are for sure failing, which are those students whose GPA
would say you can do something at a highly selective college,
you can succeed here, and then their test score is
saying something different, and we're letting the test score influence
the outcome, but increasingly we're not. Do you think this
test score blind philosophy that's spreading with the University of
(34:20):
Chicago embracing it more recently, does that fix the issue
or is it part of affix? I think it might
be part of effex Yeah, I think it's easy to
overestimate what a difference it will make. So the U
of Chicago is now the most selective institution to have
gone what admissions people call test optional, meaning there's still
lots of students who apply it to University of Chicago
and submit their test scores, but if they want to
(34:43):
not submit their test scores, they can and Chicago will
still consider them. And an increasing number of schools, especially
small liberal arts colleges, have test optional admissions, and I
think it does give an opportunity to students like those
discrepant students to get admission to the kind of institution
they wouldn't be considered at otherwise. But it is not
Test optional emissions is not a magic bullet, because there
(35:05):
are still so many other pressures on these institutions. I mean,
like Trinity, the college in Connecticut where I did so
much of my reporting. They went test optional, but they
still their big pressure was the fact that they needed
tuition dollars, and so it wasn't easy for them to
admit low income students, whatever their grades, whatever their test scores,
they needed tuition dollars. Talk about the myth of the
wealthy welder. So one of the students who I followed
(35:30):
was one of these students who didn't particularly like high school.
His name was Or. He was in a white, working
class rural family in western North Carolina, and he after
he got out of high school, he went to work.
He didn't get any kind of post secondary credential, worked
in factories were changing oil, and after about five or
six years he was making more than minimum wage. But
(35:53):
he was basically still broke and had come to believe
that there were no great opportunities in the economy for
people without anything more than a high school degree. And
so he enrolled in community college to study welding. And
so I was following him through that path. And at
the same time, there was this new rhetoric in the
United States about welding as this perfect alternative to college,
(36:16):
and especially among certain politicians and certain media outlets, there
was this push that college was a waste of money,
it was a waste of time. In fact, there were
all these opportunities through the skilled trades for which you
did not need a college degree. And so as I followed,
or partly I just wanted to see what happened to
him and understand what it was like to be in
his shoes, But partly I wanted to understand this debate
(36:38):
and this rhetoric about welding and about the skilled trades
through his eyes. And what I found was that there
were two big, big problems with this argument that welding
is the perfect alternative college. One is that you need
to go to college in order to become a welder.
So Ori was enrolled in community college. He was completing
a two year degree. Welding is really complicated. He think
(37:00):
he had to do thirteen different technical classes, plus metallurgy
and English and math and how to read blueprints. It's
a complicated career and he needed college in order to
get there. And at the same time, part of the
rhetoric that was being thrown around during those years was
that there was this huge opportunity for people in skilled
trades to make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars All
(37:21):
Street Journal. There is a Wall Street Journal outfit that
made that case, and then that sort of turned into
this meme that made its way through the media. And
there are certain welders who are able to make that much,
But the average salary, the median salary for a welder
right now is forty one thousand dollars, which is well
below the national median salary. So there's a way that
(37:42):
the argument just focuses on those high earning welders to
make the case against college. And so part of the
argument is right that we should be doing a better
job to help students like or get credential to help
them become welders. It is a good job for him,
even if it's not paying one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year. But the kind of the irony of
that argument. The argument is used to undercut funding for
(38:05):
colleges because the argument is not we should be spending
more on colleges so that people can become welders. The
argument is we don't need to spend money on colleges
because people can become welders. And so that argument is
part of why over the last ten years or so,
North Carolina, where Ori lives, cut it's funding to community colleges,
including the one that he was going to buy millions
(38:28):
of dollars, and so his tuition went up, the resources
that his college has went down, and it became harder
and harder for him to get this degree. So at
this moment where the rhetoric is all about how there
are these fantastic opportunities in the skilled trades for people
without college credentials, in the actual colleges where actual students
(38:48):
like Oria are trying to learn to be welders, we
are cutting funding to those institutions and making it harder
and harder for students like Ori to succeed. That's stunning
and incredibly disheartening. Why do you why do you think
that is? Do you think it's a matter of ideology
that again, it's more convenient to believe that it's up
to people to succeed and we've given them all the tools,
(39:09):
and the tools are there in society and if they
can't take advantage of it, well it's their fault. Is
it just convenience or is there something deeper going on.
It's a good question. I think there is some partisan
skew too, and I think it's partly that people want
to pay less taxes and so we don't want to
pay for public higher education the way we used to.
But I do think that, yeah, it's sort of the
flip side of the status quo case that we've made before.
(39:31):
If we force ourselves to look realistically at the opportunities
that a studentlike Ori has, it means we have to
do a whole lot more work. And that is the reality,
right We need to do a much better job of
creating a system of community colleges, technical colleges, public universities
that can help students who are not at the top
of their class from low income communities find their way
to a decent, middle class life. We have not created
(39:54):
that system right now. But if we tell ourselves that,
in fact, there are a lot of opportunities that if
a studentlike Ori is not succeed it's his fault, it's
his problem, it's something unusual about him, it lets us
off the hook. It lets us say we've given these
kids all the chances they need. But the reality is
there are millions of students like or who are not
(40:14):
able to make their way through the system, and a
big reason for that is that we are not providing
enough support for them. Like so many things, it's a
convenient argument in the short term and utterly devastating in
the long term. Right, did all this research make you
change your mind or think differently, or think about what
decisions you would try to encourage your children to make?
So my kids, I have two boys, they're four and ten,
(40:35):
so college is still a little ways off, but I
think I actually did go through with my older son,
who's ten. I did go through sort of two cycles
as I did my reporting, And the first was it
made me more anxious and so as I would read
these sociology texts about how, like the sports that you
play in middle school are this great predictor of whether
(40:57):
you're going to get hired by Goldman Sachs, I'll have
to college. All of the advantages that it's clear the
students who go to the most selective institutions have. It
made me anxious and I just started feeling like, Yeah,
what sports should I enroll him in? What extra tutoring
should he be doing now? And it made me, I think,
a less pleasant father to be around. But then the
experience of reporting at the University of Texas, I think
(41:19):
changed my mind again and made me feel like going
to one of those super selective institutions means going right
now anyway, means going to an institution where almost every
student is from a really affluent, privileged background, and there
is not There might be sort of token diversity, but
there is not sort of real diversity. And I think
that diversity is you know, it's not just something you
(41:41):
pay lip service to. It really does matter in terms
of the education of a student. And so the feeling
that I had at big public institutions, including UT, was
just much more what I would want for my kids.
It's a place where there's an excellent education going on,
but there's also an education in sort of being an
American or at UT being a Texan. There's this sense,
to my mind, a much more sort of equitable and
(42:03):
much more fair idea of sort of how the meritocracy works,
how social mobility works, and that I think is as
important a part of education as what's actually happening in
the classroom. This says the world in all its messy
glory right and human potential, and I thought that too. Wow,
University of Texas, here we come maybe anyway, Thank you
so much for being here. This was really illuminating and
(42:25):
I enjoyed it very much. Thanks me too. In this conversation,
I was struck by how our beliefs, whether they be
beliefs of convenience or of ideology, can override the clear
evidence in front of us. It's so much easier to
believe in the wealthy wilder, to believe that colleges are
admitting the most qualified candidates, and to believe that kids
who fail in college just moren't supposed to be there
(42:47):
in the first place. But oh, the waste of human
potential that those beliefs entail. There's a huge long term
cost to that. So what can we do well. I'm
all for the Texas approach, but I also think that,
especially in these times of budget shortfalls, business leaders need
to take a more proactive approach to education. If you
aren't finding the skills and the diversity that you want,
(43:10):
help build them. As for politicians, well, I think the
best we can hope for is more happy accidents. Makia
killing is a co production of pushkin industries and chalkin Blade.
It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive
producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in making Casey. The
(43:30):
executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski.
Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain.
Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at
Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've
most enjoyed.
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