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May 27, 2020 42 mins

Colleges today talk a big game about valuing diversity — so why are so many of them failing to retain first-generation students?

  • We meet a homeless straight-A track star and her ad-hoc college application coach to look at why it’s so hard to get into college while rural, poor, and uncoached.
  • We go deep with coaches and students at a non-profit called ScholarMatch, founded by novelist David Eggers, to find out just what it can take to get first-generation college students over the graduation finish line.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Our last episode was about an explosion, an explosion
of coaching in modern life. All sorts of people are
getting paid to be coaches in places that never used
to have coaches, big corporations, wall street, trading floors, fire stations.

(00:38):
People are declaring themselves coaches not just of skills, but
of states of mind and getting paid to do it.
So it's now more noticeable when you come across situations
that cry out for a coach and no coaches around,
when total amateurs who don't think of themselves as coaches
are forced to coach for free because no one's doing

(00:59):
it for money. Like this woman. I am Marsaparadan, author
of several books and articles on banking and inequality, racial
wealth gap, etc. Marissa came to the United States from
Iran as a child. Her family were political refugees. She's

(01:21):
now a professor at the UC Irvine Law School. But
it's not her job that matters here. Mariss's brother in
law is the sheriff of a small town east of
Los Angeles. He called her one day to say he
had taken in a high school student. She was his
son's classmate and track teammate, and she was homeless. Her
name is Kayla. Kayla kept getting kicked out of her

(01:42):
home like on and off and finally permanently last year,
and so their son told his parents and they just said,
come live with us. Right, Marissa found Kayla totally striking,
six feet tall, self possessed. But she's a seventeen year
old African American girl in a poor white town, not

(02:04):
just homeless, but working two jobs, just trying to figure
out how to survive. I don't know exact date, but
I think maybe around September. My mother kicked me out
of the house. It was something that it happened before,
but this time it was a permanent one. So I
just tried to be prepared. But I mean, there's not

(02:27):
what you can be prepared for when that happens. Why
did she say she cooked you out of the house
this recent time. I think it was just maybe I
feel like a lack of appreciation. Maybe she didn't think
I appreciated what she's done for me, because I think
she felt that I was only there to finish my

(02:47):
education and that I was using everything she gave me
just to go to school. So yeah, I think that's
probably the main reason why she kicked me out. Are
you still in touch with her? No, I don't talk
to you at all. Okay, So I asked Kayla a

(03:10):
bunch of questions, but her new friend, Marisa had asked
her more. She learned that Kayla was a star long
distance runner, a great student too, who'd somehow maintained a
great point average of four point zero. Klea had managed
to take the SAT too. She just walked into an
SAT center and taking it cold without any idea of
what it was. She got a score of twelve sixty,

(03:33):
which was better than eighty three percent of the other
people who took it. Marissa could see how badly Kayla
wanted to go to college, and she knew from her
brother in law that college was not the obvious next
step for kids from kayla school. I mean, this is
a high school, and I went to one of these
high schools where the only recruiters that come to campus
are like military and community college. If that so, most

(03:54):
of these kids are not four year college bat. When
she first tells you what she's doing to apply to college,
the first time you sit down and talk to her
about it, what does she say and what is your response?
She says I said, well, what colleges are applying to?
And she says, well, I applied to a couple of
like UC schools. I think she'd applied to like three

(04:15):
schools at the time. She'd actually applied to four schools
state schools, because you could do that for free, never
mind the eventual tuition. Kayla couldn't afford the application fees.
So I just asked Kayla, I'm like, hey, do you
mind if I look, I'll pay for the application costs
and we'll just do it together. Would you be into that?
And she was super into it, right, so she was
like absolutely, I want to do this anyway. That's how

(04:38):
Marissa remembers it. Kayla recalls hesitating before she said yes.
She's like, what colleges you applying for? You're only applying
to four? Well, you need to apply to more. And
I was like, well, I can't pay for this, and
she was like, well, you don't have to worry about it.
I got it. I got it covered. And at first
I was really like, I'm not the type of person
that accepts money from other people. It was the first
time that anyone had offered to help her, and the

(05:01):
situation was as new to Kayla as it was to Marisa,
you know, you could tell that she's hungry for the
coaching and she wanted it, and so I could just
see that. And you know, I don't have a lot
of time either, right, Like I have a full time
job and kids and all the other stuff. But when
you see someone like that, You're like, Okay, whatever it takes,
I'm going to help you with this, because who else

(05:21):
is going to exactly right, who else is going to
Kayla Saster's the kind of kid every elite school in
the country claims to be looking for. Marisa had the
same thought. She also thought, oh no, I'm too late.
I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. A

(05:43):
show about various authority figures in American life. This season
is about the rise of coaches, and this episode is
about a place in American life where there should be coaches.
Columbia asks what exhibits, lectures, theater productions, and concerts have

(06:06):
you liked best in the last year. I'm tempted to
write Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera. Psych My town doesn't
even have a movie theater. Kayla Sassar's deadline for college
applications was less than a month away. There wasn't time
to hire an essat coach and retake the test or
anything like that. So her new friend Marissa just starts
grabbing applications to elite schools off the web. Now she

(06:29):
and Kayla have to figure out how to decode what
they're really asking the kids who apply. I ask her
what kids do for entertainment, and she says drugs. Another
school asks her what her favorite periodicals, newspapers, and websites are.
She doesn't have access to a computer except when she
does homework on a school computer. She doesn't get the
New Yorker. She's never traveled outside her town. It just

(06:50):
seems like anyone who can answer these questions has got
to be coached. Kayla obviously needs a coach, and Marissa,
just by chance and temperament, is the right person to
coach her. But right away she's seeing the bigger issue.
And then I'm looking at these questions and I'm like,
you clearly don't get it right. You don't underst stand
what it's like to grow up in a rural town

(07:12):
and not have resources like you know, elite Americans do.
So she helps Kayla with the application questions, is best
she can. Then they get to the big one, the
personal essay, the place where you let all these college
admissions officers know who you really are. Rich kids get
all kinds of help doing this. They write about their

(07:33):
week long service trip to some poor Guatemalan village as
a transformative experience in which they overcame something or other.
Marisa looks at an essay Kayla already wrote the one
for her University of California applications. So here she is.
She's African American, you know, homeless, works two jobs, and

(07:54):
I mean just every obstacle you want to put in
someone's path, she's had it. And her essays were on,
you know, like how she stopped bullies on the cross
country team, which my goodness, I mean, she's a hero.
But like there wasn't a lot in there where she
was explaining to them the circumstances that she's overcome. Kayla

(08:15):
has like zero perspective on her own life. This doesn't
surprise Marisa. I'm a war refugee. I immigrated to America
when I was ten. My mom spent my entire childhood
in political prison. I saw, you know, bodies hanging in
Iran and I wrote my college application on you know
how Alice Walker's the color Purple changed my view of literature, right,

(08:38):
So there was nothing in my eighteen year old college
application about my background because I couldn't put it into
words at the time. And when you're eighteen or seventeen,
or at least when I was, and when Kayla is
where she's at, you don't want to put that front
and center. You don't want to be a victim. You
are a survivor. You're just like everyone else. You're normal

(09:00):
and you should be. It's not like Marisa wants Kayla
to relive her trauma for the benefit of college admissions officers,
but she does her to get her situation across to
them because it matters. It matters that she overcame so
much just to get to this point. Applying to college,
she wanted to write an essay about international relations in Spanish,
like why you know she wants to do foreign languages

(09:21):
and that's her thing, And she wrote a lot about that,
and I said, why you know, tell me more about
what got you interest in Spanish. And it took like
maybe ten questions to get to. When she first got
kicked out, the family that took her in was Spanish speaking.
They spoke limited English, and she felt like she really
wanted to communicate with this family and she couldn't because
she didn't speak Spanish. So she, you know, started listening

(09:44):
to podcasts and books on tape just to learn Spanish
so she could communicate with this family that was taking
her in. That's the story, right, yes, And for her
it was just I'm really interested in languages and I
want to go study abroad and see how the world
is and all of this stuff. Marisa went to a
high school just like Kayla's. She knows Kayla because she

(10:06):
was Kayla once and now she's her college application coach
multiplied this story by thousands, and you never know, maybe
it changes the world. The decline of social mobility, it's
a desperate problem, and no one seems to know how

(10:27):
to solve it. But when you hear the story of
Kleis Sasser, or at least when I hear the story
of Kleis Sasser, I wonder is this partly a coaching problem?
That is, is it a problem that coaches might help
to solve? This idea isn't original with me. Dave Eggers
had it back in the year two thousand. He had

(10:49):
recently published his first book, which was called a heartbreaking
work of staggering genius, and he'd also started tutoring kids
who'd fallen behind in school. When I heard about Dave
doing this back then, I remember thinking he's just looking
for even more ways to make other writers feel inferior.
But Dave was actually into it. He could see that

(11:09):
his tutoring had a big effect, and a thought struck him.
The teachers here in San Francisco that I knew might
have one hundred or one hundred and fifty students a day,
and they just didn't have enough time to reach and
bring every student up to grade level, especially on their

(11:30):
English writing and reading. And so they kept saying, if
I could clone myself, I could give all of these
kids the time that they needed. And that just sort
of sunk in and rattled in my brain for a
few years, and finally we thought, well, maybe we could
use all of this available time among the writers, editors, freelancers, journalists,

(11:54):
graduate students that we know and have them become this
clone army, helping the students bring each student up to
grade level by giving them that hour or two of
one on one attention every day after school, and it worked,
and it grew kind of rapidly. Dave rented a building
for his Clone Army. It was in the Mission District

(12:15):
of San Francisco. He named the organization for the address
eight twenty six Valencia. In the back was the McSweeney's
publishing offices and the front was all going to be
the tutoring center. But that's when the landlord told us
that the front was zoned for retail and we had
to sell something in the storefront. What about. That's when

(12:41):
we came upon the idea of selling buccaneer supplies to
working pirates. Twenty six Valencia became both tutoring center and
pirate gear retail store. Yeah. Soon Dave opened another tutoring

(13:02):
center in Boston, which sold Bigfoot themed merchandise, and yet
another in Brooklyn, which sold superhero equipment. But as Dave's
organization encountered and helped more kids, he started to see
another problem. You know. The kids started aging up, and
we had a lot of high school kids come in
for various programs, and I started writing college rex for

(13:24):
these kids and realizing that depending on whether or not
their family their parents had gone to college, they had
a drastically different levels of preparation. Dave's tutors were working
mostly with kids from families in which no one had
ever gone to college. He saw that the society was
saying one thing about social mobility but doing another. It

(13:48):
had structured itself to keep these kids in the class
to which they were born. The kids that had family
members had gone to college might be applying to twelve
or thirteen colleges all over the country because they knew
the landscape their parents had sort of told them the
wider national college landscape. And the kids that were first

(14:08):
in their family, they go into public schools here in
San Francisco generally applied to two colleges, City College and
SF State, and they did not generally know about all
the other opportunities. It surprised you that the public schools
that they were in didn't have college counseling departments that
had done this work for them. Well. In California, the

(14:32):
last statistic I saw said that in among public high
school students in California, the ratio of students to counselors
is nine hundred and forty five to one. And that's
not just college counselors. That's all counselors. So I keep
on meeting counselors. They would say, I'd say, what are

(14:52):
your goals this year? And she would say, my goal
this year is to meet the students in my cohort.
Just meet them, let alone spending maybe ten to twelve
hours per student that you might need to properly prepare
them for college. In twenty and ten, Dave created this

(15:12):
whole other organization to do for a bunch of kids
in San Francisco, essentially what Marissa had set out to
do for Kayla, to help them find good colleges and
to get into them. Dave called this new organization scholar Match,
and it was indeed able to help a couple of
hundred high school kids get scholarships and all seemed well,

(15:35):
but all was not well. So Dave eggers in his

(15:58):
scholar Match program, we're helping low income kids get into college.
But once the kids got there, they had a bunch
of problems that Dave hadn't anticipated. Stress about work, stress
about planning an hourly schedule, stress about their families back home,
health issues, and the kids started dropping out. Nationwide, the

(16:20):
dropout rate for first generation college students is scandalous. Only
about one in every nine of them actually finishes school.
Scholar Match thought they'd anticipated this problem. I mean, they'd
found the right school for the student and the money
to pay for it, but still forty percent of their
kids were dropping out. Like, what good is it if

(16:42):
you go to a school with a full ride that
you're going to feel like you don't fit in or
like you're not welcome, and then it's you're going to
struggle the whole way and not make it anyway. Her
name is Diana Adamson. Dave Eggers hired her to run
scholar Match, and Diana started keeping a mental list of
all the snags their first generation students hit. A failed

(17:05):
class and illness, the wrong major, a parent whose immigration
status was called into question. These kids were being dealt
crippling blows by things that privileged kids might treat us
bumps in the road, and the blows could come before
they even set foot on any college campus. The summer

(17:26):
before the start of college was especially fraught. So there's
two things that happened in that summer. One is they
have to put in a housing deposit to reserve their
dorm and it costs a couple hundred dollars, sometimes as
much as four hundred. Most of our students have a
little bit of difficulty of coming up with four hundred
dollars in a week to send off to the school.

(17:46):
But if you don't do that, then you run the
risk of not getting put into dorm. And we've seen
that happen. And so then a student gets the money,
but it's late, and then they're not prioritized for a
dorm plicement, and then they suddenly don't have a dorm.
They have to live off campus as a freshman, and
it just becomes the first step in the unraveling of
oh what am I doing here? I don't belong here.

(18:12):
First generation college students from low income families were in
some ways incredibly robust. I mean, just to get into
a college was an amazing achievement, but they could be
derailed by problems that money alone couldn't solve. Even my
family disagreed with going into Ohio. Meet Andy Saw of
San Francisco, and your parents did not going to college?

(18:34):
No dinning to fardest stag I was in high school.
Were they born and raised here? They are all from China?
Are they? Yeah? None of them speak English. Andy went
through the scholar Match program and it introduced him to
the world, especially the world of private colleges with full
ride scholarships. Before that, he just assumed he'd go to
community college and maybe one day, if he got really lucky,

(18:58):
he'd transferred to a state university. I went over to
Tramission District. I was like, any helped with my application?
I'm not sure what I'm really doing either. That's where
Ohio Wesleyan came into the picture. How did it come
into the picture? Because I told him, well, doubt like
our community, the Asian American community, only thinks about UCSH.

(19:21):
So like you see this, you see that that's like
my only option. And then we have safety schools like
state and City. For sure, I'll get and those, but
UC is to reach right. Andy was talking with a
guy named Noel Ramirez, the person at scholar Match. You
helped him with his college application. And the thing with
Andy is that we had many conversations, and I can
recall with him that he had this exceptional interest in life.

(19:47):
It was beyond getting the job. You know, I think
it'd be letter recommendations I wrote for him that I
said that he was the type of student that wasn't
only interested in, you know, getting a job, getting married,
buying house, having kids, buying a pet. So with that,
I felt he would thrive at a place that would

(20:07):
have those types of conversations, where he could take philosophy class,
a religion class, where he would meet people from all
over the world, where he would take a risk and
go to a place that looks completely different from his world.
So Noel and Andy focused on applying to Ohio Wesleyan.
The school had a great biology program but also a
strong humanities program. It not only accepted Andy, he was

(20:29):
able to go there on scholarship. All Andy needed to
do was to get there, and that's when things took
a turn. Keep in mind, doesn't make my second time flying.
I did not know what to do. Andy's only other
time flying was when he was six months old. He
had no real experience with travel, and at the San

(20:50):
Francisco Airport his plane was fogged in. By the time
he landed in Chicago for his connecting flight to Ohio,
the flight was gone. What do you do? I walked
around just following people who were like on the same
planeful of us to going Ohio. Just listening to what
everyone's saying somewhere like I just I'm gonna go to

(21:11):
a hotel and sleep. And I'm like, I don't really
notice neighborhood, Like I don't want to take that risk.
He's now living in his head. So I walked around more.
They gave us a food voucher and I got my
food from McDonald's and I decided, like, it's not worth
going outside. I should just sleep in the airport. But
then someone told him he needed to go to the
ticket counter to get on the first flight out in

(21:32):
the morning, and Andy met his first gate agent. The
airline person ripped up my ticket. He said, this ticket
no longer works. We're gonna rip it up. He ripped
it in front of my face and I was like, man,
you can't do this to me right now, and I
tear it up. So you thought he was taking away
your ticket. Yeah, I was gonna be trapped into hair.
I was like, why don't you do that? I started
tearing out. I was like where first time crying so

(21:55):
really well, like in front of people. Yeah, they ripped
over your ticket. It's like they sent and seeing YouTube
life in prison in O'Hare airport. Yeah, because what it
feels like I was going to be trapped her Like,
why'd you do that? I have no exit? Now, Yeah,
that was pretty bad, and it was bad, but it

(22:15):
got worse. Andy called home and his family reminded him
that they hadn't liked the idea of him going so
far away. Your family, your family thought it was a
bad idea. It was a bad idea, like, look, well,
look what you've been doing, Like you shouldn't not be
going to this place. Look at all these negative outcome
that happened. Andy tried to sleep that night on the
floor of O'Hare Airport, but his parents' fears echoed in

(22:38):
his head. It was a bad ideally, look on out
negative outcome that happened. This far away college thing was
a big mistake. And he comes back like with this
terrible attitude about the trip, saying, I don't want to
go anymore. It's not worth it. Noel Ramirez again, Andy's
college coach. I just I couldn't believe it. That's something

(23:01):
that I guess I wasn't prepared. I didn't know I
should have prepared him in advanced mentally, what happens when
you face these types of obstacles, But how would how
would you ever have prepared him for it? I guess
you could have taken him you simulate a flight, actually,
you know, to be honest, after that incident, that's that's
what I started to do actually for students that were
going to taking a plane right away. We did develop

(23:24):
kind of a training module for these students so that
they know exactly what to do. This sort of thing
was now happening all the time at scholar Match. Here's
Dave Eggers again. Once there was an obstacle, or once
there was a reason to quit, they often did. They don't.
They don't have a set of assumptions like the set
of assumptions that you and I grew up with that

(23:44):
you just you're just supposed to go to college when
you are the first It can be like heading out,
you know, on a polar expedition to the North Pole,
Like why why would you go do that when you
could be home. Scholar Match had set out to connect
smart and ambitious kids from low income families with rich

(24:06):
colleges that had the resources to support them. But the
colleges were in some ways ill equipped to educate kids
who grew up without money or the assumptions that money
allows you to have everything you've described about and the
coaches have described about the relationship of this pool of
kids to this process makes it feel like a catastrophic

(24:29):
environment where there is there's so many things that could
kill you in the environment. It's true. It's like if
you could build a system against students that didn't have
support navigating it, this is what it would look like.
This is the director of Scholar Match, Diana Adamson. We've
heard this from students before, where almost like they didn't
know they were poor until they got there. And it's

(24:52):
not so much that they thought they had all this money,
you know, It's more like they were fine, like they
were their life was adequate for them, and it's not
until you get to this place where you realize like,
oh wow, the ceiling is so much higher than you
ever imagine and you just didn't even realize. It creates

(25:12):
some complex emotions a bad grain on a paper or
God forbid and f you can feel like the end
of the world for a lot of kids in college.
But it's so much worse when no one back home
has any clue what you're up against. We had a

(25:32):
student once tell us. I think she summed it up
the best, where she was so excited that she had
just picked her major and she didn't know how to
tell her parents about it because she didn't know the
word for it in Chinese and her parents don't speak English.
So there was just this huge disconnect where she wants

(25:52):
to go home and tell her parents all about this
amazing things that she's learning, and she just doesn't have
the words for it. They can't actually understand. Yeah, but
that's a little metaphor for the whole exactly the whole problem. Yeah,
Dave and Diana get the idea of hiring people to
work with scholar match kids. It's after they get into college,
but they need the right kind of person, the right

(26:14):
kind of coach. So we would do a lot of
role plays and just see could they empathize with the student.
So we we had a couple of scenarios that we
knew would come up, and we would have a staff
member play the student and hear how they and they
didn't have to hit do it perfectly. You know, there
was give me an example, I mean, so put me

(26:35):
in the position. Okay, So, um, do you do you
want to be the coach? Yeah, okay, so maybe I'm
applying for the job. Okay, So the scenario is, um,
you're doing a check in call with me, and I
just got my grades back and I'm um, failing a class,

(26:57):
and so I want to leave and go home because
you're failing a class. Yeah. Is it your first year. Yeah,
it's my first time. It's my first investor, what did
you fail? Doesn't matter? Um, I feel chemistry and I
want to be a doctor. You want to be a doctor. Yeah,
And I'm supposed to say something now. Yeah, so you're
calling for what you've seen my grades, but we haven't

(27:18):
talked to my own kid would be what the fuck
are you doing? What are Yeah, so that's already I'm
I'm already disqualified. So I've got to get into a
different space. It's a different kind of child. Yeah. Well,
first thing I'd say is when I was your age,
I failed a class too, actually, and I took it
past fail, so it's even it's even less forgivable. So

(27:41):
just for starters, that f is not the end of
the world. Okay, that's a great first step. You're normalizing
the experience. It's a it's a it's tone at the
end of the world. In fact, I did quite well
in college after that. So it was just it was
just a bump on the road and I had to
figure out what it was I was doing that I
needed to change. In my case, I needed to stop

(28:01):
going to squash play squash instead of going to the
physics labe. But but but that was but it took
me a while to figure that out. So but in
your case, I mean, let's talk about what how did
you feel like it when you were in that class?
Did you? Oh? I felt terrible. I couldn't understand the lectures.
I couldn't keep up with it. I feel like everyone

(28:22):
else in the class had taken chemistry in high school
and so they just knew the stuff and they didn't
even have to study. And that's probably true. It's probably
true that you came into that class. It's some kind
of disadvantage because you're not used to failing much. You've
been a great student your whole life, and it's really hard,
really hard to start off behind everybody in something. And

(28:45):
if you'd been this, if, if if those kids had
been in your situation, they probably would have failed too.
So so maybe the first thing we need to talk
about is how you decide what classes you're going to take.
So we so we don't put you in this situation
again because it's not a fair situation. You're questioning it.
Maybe we would hire you. Yeah, well, actually the first
thing I say is what the fuck are you doing?

(29:06):
So you got you throw me out of the room.
So I'm probably not built to be a college coach,
but Diana finds plenty of people who are and they
start coaching, and the coaching pays off. Scholar Matches started

(29:32):
out almost as a technical advisor for kids on how
to apply to college, how to apply for loans and grants,
but in short order it became something else, a place
where students could be coached as they tried to move
from one social class to another. The new coaches became
deeply involved in the lives of the students, and they
had astonishing effects. The graduation rate for scholar Match kids

(29:54):
went from sixty percent to eighty one, which beat the
national average for all college students, never mind first generation ones.
Coaching these kids all the way to a college diploma
costs scholar Match rough thirteen thousand dollars a student. The
expected lifetime earnings of a person with a college degree

(30:15):
is one point two million dollars more than a person
who doesn't graduate from college. But it's not only that
a college degree in a family that it's never had
one that has even more ripple effects. For instance, it
makes it a lot more likely that younger siblings will
go to college. But the scholar match coaching was also

(30:35):
having effects that were harder to measure. I didn't really
see myself going to college. I don't. None of my
friends that I grew up with did. This is Lewis Mendez.
It wasn't something that was possible for me, giving my
academic background, given to things that you know I was into,
and if you want to get a picture, you know,

(30:56):
I grew up here in San Francisco. We grew up
doing what teenagers in the city do, you know, vandalizing, smoking,
we drinking, you know, and all that. Lewis got himself
thrown out of high school his junior year and he
went to work doing odd jobs. When I was sixteen
or seventeen, I started reading books right my stepdad. He

(31:18):
was incarce rated for about eight to ten years. He
knew all the classic books. He had read them all
while incars rated right. He started passing them down to me,
Napoleon Hill, thinking girl rich, rich dad, poor dad. All
these books they're saying, you know, if you think it,
if you believe it was all the cliche stuff, right.
But I bought into it at the time, like, hey,

(31:38):
like it is possible for me to grow and and
do something with my life. And Lewis turns a corner,
gets a ged, goes to community college, gets a variety
of part time jobs, and gets himself into UC Davis

(31:58):
on his own. And then I was walking into the
neighborhood in the mission, in the mission, right in the
Mission district of Valencia. And it was the summer before
I started school that UC Davis Lewis had spotted the
scholar Match office. He'd already gotten himself into a good

(32:18):
college and you'd already figured out how to pay for
it up to some point, or had you not. I
figured that there is going to fall into place. I said,
we'll figure it out. All Lewis needed at the time
was access to a computer so he could take his
UC Davis placement exams. Scholar Match let him use a computer,

(32:41):
and so Lewis kept coming back and they grew so
fond of him that they offered to help him out more.
He hadn't gone through their program, so they couldn't give
him money, but they could give him a coach. What's
the coach's name? Kate. Lewis had zero sense at that
point that he was going to need Kate, but as
it turned out, UC Davis was a shock to his system.

(33:03):
The campus was only an hour or so away from
where he grew up, but it was the first time
that he felt like he was in another world. I mean, like,
did you have trouble making friends? Uh? Did you? You You
don't seem like camp president is gonna have trouble making friends.
Well my story. I don't want to blame it on
the campus. I don't want to blame it on the
population or you know, the design of the program or

(33:23):
anything like on demographics. But for whatever reason, I did
have a challenge of going deeper in my relationships with
students on campus. I would see students that were like
the best of buds and me, you know, as the
guy everyone knew it, and I was cool with a
lot of people, but I don't think I ever got
to that deep, consistent connection with other ways my peers huh, yeah,

(33:46):
because you felt different. Lewis tried going to a frat party,
didn't like it. I actually found my place in the
Christian community, but on a day to day basis, it
just it wasn't a deep connection. I guess with my peers.
That's unusual. That strikes me as odd that you were
so in meshed in the Christian community and it didn't
yield deep relationships. I would think it would, right, because

(34:09):
that's the idea behind it, Right. Did you feel vulnerable
or exposed or like did you were you scared or
did you did you feel insecure? I was scared and
I was at this point, I remember it clearly. Um.
I was in tears because I thought to myself, if
if I can't make solid friendships and deep connection on

(34:31):
the college campus when it's like geared for that for socialization,
how am I going to make connections and deep friendships
post college when everyone's just everywhere and it is not
as structured, right, and it isn't this the place where
everyone meets their best friends, like where's my so? Yeah,
I was a little scared about that, um, but quitting

(34:54):
and dropping out just wasn't an option for me. Still,
Lewis didn't think to turn to his college coach Kate.
So this is where Lewis wandered in. This is exactly
what where Lewis came when he was working for Uber.
This is Kate Mueller. At the time she met Lewis,

(35:16):
who was driving an uber to make ends meet. She
was also coaching fifty other students, but she paid enough
attention to Lewis to see that he was struggling and
trying to hide it. So she tells him, we're going
to have adult relationship and honesty is a big part
of that, and we're going to be accountable to each other.
And I am here to guide you and making sure

(35:38):
you grow as a person. And when I feel like
there's a missing part of that story, I asked, you
know this isn't totally adding up. Around this time, Louis
did something that caught his coach his attention and would
have caught no one else's. He was late for a class.
I missed calculus exam. I'll walk in and everyone's turning

(36:00):
it into Scantron's. I had to check in with Kate
later that day and she asked me about it. She said, Louis,
how did the exam go I said, well, what happened
was I thought the class started at eleven. You really
started at nine thirty. But I talked to my professor
and it's fine, he said, I still passed the class.
I just cannot miss another one, right, and had this
very relaxed attitude, no guilt, no regret. I got under

(36:25):
the control. Kate. I'm like, whoa, whoa, there's more to
this story, right, There's more to this story about missing
exam that isn't just thinking it's all going to work out.
And my goal then is to have authentic conversation of
don't you think that you should not be half asking
this thing that you've worked for your whole entire life.

(36:48):
The coach had noticed a tendency inner player. It wasn't
about him getting a C in that class. It wasn't
about getting a It was more how does he move
through life and actually push himself to learn and hold
himself responsible when it makes sense. Up to this point
in his life, Lewis Mendez had never really had a

(37:09):
lot of people who believed in him. How did you
decide she was someone you trusted? That's a good question.
I think I'd been waiting for such a long time
for an authority figure, because growing up from just my mom,
my mom being stretched super thin by all five of
us in work and everything, I never had anyone to
tell me what to do. So it's almost as if
Kate finally answered or met this need or this longing

(37:31):
of having someone to tell me to go to class.
Right when you grow up in a privilege environment, you
kind of take that voice for granted, you forget just
how powerful it can be. And she made you aware
of essentially a lower expectation you had for yourself exactly.
You might not even put it into words. I was
unconscious of it. I was unconscious. I figured, you know,

(37:53):
when I get to my career, that's when I really
come alive and turn up and really throw myself into
this work. But I just need to get through this first.
But she said, no, start now, don't wait. And the
reality is, at first he hears my voice saying, but
you know, time, he just hears himself saying, your coach

(38:15):
won't let you give up, even when that's all you're
trying to do. Andy saw hit a snag in the
O'Hare airport and then flew back home. He just wanted
to give up, but he didn't return just to his family.
He had to explain himself to his coach, Noel Ramirez
and got on the phone with Noil like, hey, I

(38:36):
can't do this. I'm gonna stick the safe route, not
the risky route. So I talked to Noel. I was crying,
like I can't do this. No I know you think
it's better, but I don't think it's better. It's not
possible for him me to go to Ohio. Noel, here's
Andy's say that he's already enrolled in a local community college.

(38:59):
He then says, you can do this, go back to
Ohio Wesleyan. It's worth it. What's more, I will go
back with you. I'll get on the plane, fly with
you to Ohio and stay there until you feel happy.
And I was like, okay, I'll trust like I will
trust you like one hundred percent. This is the best option.

(39:22):
I believe you. Noel spends five days on campus, sleeping
on various couches. He introduces Andy to his new life.
After five days, he leaves and Andy stays. A bit later,
Andy's parents finally visited. They went there and they're like,

(39:42):
what does this place? There's no one here. Do you
have any like our Asian food? There's no rice, so
it's a coach of shock for them too. But I
trust everywhere Downie said, I just one hundred percent trusted it.
Andy Saw graduated from Ohio Wesleyan four years later in
two and eighteen with a degree in microbiology. Was it

(40:04):
a good experience? Best four years of my life. I'm
Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against
the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The
show's produced by Audrey Dilling and Katherine Girodo, with research

(40:27):
assistance from Lydia Jane Cott and ZOOE Wynn. Our editor
is Julia Barton. Mio o'bell is our executive producer. Our
theme was composed by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by
Stellwagen Sephonette. We got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our
show was recorded by Tofa Ruth and Trey Schultz at
Northgate Studios in Berkeley and thanks to bb Dio San

(40:50):
Francisco for providing audio for this episode. As always, thanks
to Pushkin's founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Oh I
almost forgot La Sasser the high school senior we began with.

(41:12):
I checked in with her after her acceptance letters started
to roll in. So tell me since we last talked,
which you've heard? Um, So I've gotten into a think
about eleven schools. Um, do you want me to list them? Yes? Okay, okay,
you got, you got. You got into eleven schools. Yes,

(41:35):
c SU Sanbardino, c SULA, and CSU Long Beach. Um.
I got into CBU, UM, University of Redlands, Whittier, UM
UC Riverside, UC San Diego UCLA, which was really awesome,
and NYU. Oh. I also got into San Diego State University,

(41:57):
but I didn't apply to that one, so that was
like really surprising. I didn't know how that worked. So
you got into ten schools that are in California and
one in New York. UM, that's fantastic. Congratulations, thank you,
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