College Admissions Scandal

Tom discusses the college admissions scandal that was uncovered this week and reflects on his days struggling to get into college and how he got his admission the old-fashioned way: he earned it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(01:26):
broke Off. Now Here, this the scandal involving wealthy families,
well connected publicly or private ways through their great wealth,
getting their kids into college was not just a little
bit of help with people being flown in to take
the test with him, to lie about their credentials, to
work the system in a way that is disgusting, quite honestly,

(01:49):
and I don't know how it ends, but I do
hope that this is a kind of cleansing of this
outrageous and unfair business that we have about who gets
into what college and under what's our cumstances. I need
to give you something of a background of my own situation.
I grew up in a working class family. Nobody in
our family had gone to college. I was kind of

(02:09):
a hot shot high school student, so I was recruited
briefly by Harvard. I took the S A T. S.
And I was found to be wanting by Harvard, so
I was not accepted. But I went to the University
of Iowa, first rate school in the Big Ten, and
I came out of high school with all the assumptions
that nothing could go wrong. Well, I immediately drove off
the cliff when I got to Iowa City. I've never

(02:30):
seen so many attractive codeds, so many opportunities for doing
something other than studying. And after a year, I didn't
flunk out, but I was so disappointed in my performance
I decided to in effect collect myself back in South Dakota.
But I continued my errant ways and dropped out of
South Dakota. Finally I got a job supporting myself working

(02:54):
and community college, and my wife, who at that time
was just a dear friend, wrote me the harshest letter
I had ever received about how I was not going anywhere,
I was wasting my life. I was disappointing my parents,
and she didn't want to see me ever again. Well
that was a big wake up call. So as I
went back to work and commuted sixty miles a day

(03:15):
to class, taking a heavy load, I kind of reconstituted
myself and Mareth took notice. And the long and the
short story is a year after that meeting that we
had in the library and where she said I apologized
and I said no, I had it coming. A year
after that meeting, we got married, and that was fifty
six years ago, and we struck it lucky. I got

(03:40):
good jobs in Iowa, in Omaha, in Atlanta, and then
I hit the network at a very tender age. I
was just twenty six, and I worked my way up
to being the anchor of NBC Nightly News, wrote a
big book called The Greatest Generation, and had other successes.
And we had three daughters, ordinarily gifted young girls who

(04:02):
went to the best schools in New York City, and
when it came time for them to go to college,
they knew that they had to take the s A T.
Tests and there are opportunities for them to get help
and how to take those tests, how to study for them,
but no one was taking the test for them, and
there was a lot of anxiety, and they did well.
The first one really wanted to go to one ivy

(04:22):
League school, but she was turned down. Instead, she was
accepted at Stanford, not a bad consolation prize, and that
first school that turned her down, she went back there
and went to medical school just to prove that she
was worth their attention. The next one had a very
stop and go kind of beginning in her high school career,
but was natively bright, caught on in her junior and

(04:45):
senior year and went to a wonderful school on the
West coast which will not be named here for the
purposes of the school and for that daughter, and she
got out of there okay, knowing that she could have
done better. The third one had a slight learning disability
but had lots of native ability, and a very very

(05:06):
good school acknowledged and recognized that and took her, and
then while she was there they worked on that learning
disability and helped correct it. Long story short, she graduated
from there, got a master's degree from n y U,
and then wrote a very important book for women in
their forties called forty two. So they got there on

(05:26):
their own with a little bit of help from their
parents because of what we could do in terms of
affording where they were going to go to school. But
there was no payoff to anybody. There were no doctors
that were brought in to help them doctor their preparation
for it, no outside consultants. In fact, we were kind
of pleased with the way the girls had real matority

(05:48):
about getting turned down. Even though they were living in
what was essentially a privileged family. They knew that they
couldn't call on that privilege to get into these schools,
and they have great pride and how hard they worked
and what schools they went to. They are stunned as
we are as well by what we're reading. Unfortunately, one

(06:08):
of the people who is now being investigated is someone
that we knew in their growing up heres. And it's
stunning to us that she somehow got caught in this
because we know how natively bright she is and how
much attention she paid to her daughters, and we can't
imagine that she would have reached over the line to
do something. She shall go without being named, quite obviously.

(06:32):
The real question that is what is the worth of
a college education in America? Today? Here's what I tell
parents in New York if they come to me and say,
my child did not get into Yale, my child didn't
get into Harvard, what am I gonna do? I say,
I tell you what you want your child to have
a more complete life. Go to the University of Michigan,
Go to the University of Iowa, one of the big
tennis schools. Go to the University of Washington or Oregon.

(06:55):
You may think about the Southwest, for example. You may
think of a school like Rights. You may go to
the South where there are a number of very very
good small schools, William and Mary Emery in Atlanta. There
are a lot of places to get a first rate
college education if you take the right attitude to those
institutions about getting the most out of them. Some of

(07:18):
the most successful people that I know in American life
in any variety of fields, in my field and journalism
and big business, in the field of education and politics,
they didn't all go to Harvard. They didn't all go
to Yale or Princeton. A lot of them went to
small schools and their home states and paid hard wages

(07:40):
to get into those schools and then to work their
way through them. And that was better training than just
being in an elite school and coming out with a
degree that says Harvard and expecting that to be a
passport to some kind of a successful life. You'll learn more, frankly,
by going to a state supported college, by being with

(08:01):
working class kids who have earned their way and you
see what they're going through. The big, big, right now
influence on a lot of institutions are the young men
and women who have served in uniform overseas and have
now come back and are going to college. Aristona State
Arizona State University, a great school, has I think two

(08:22):
thousand veterans of the Wars, and the president says they're
having an enormous impact on the school because the other
students can see their seriousness and hear the stories about
what they've been through. So college is more than just
getting into an Ivy League prestigious school. It's about the
whole experience. In my experience, I learned by failing. I

(08:43):
learned that I wasn't all that I thought I could
be just by showing up. And it has never left me.
I still think back to those days and realize what
a failure I was from my family and for myself
and even for my professors who said, Tommy, you should
be doing better. I would be doing better until there
was a chance to go out and have a beer
that night, and I would take that option instead. It

(09:05):
has lingered with me forever. But this business that we're
going through now of people paying so much money to
have their children really scarred for the rest of their
lives because they were part of this terrible scheme. And
too many of the kids took it for granted that
they could be part of that scheme, which also says

(09:26):
something about how they were raised, about the attitude and
the family in which they were raised. It is, I think,
a passage in American life in which we now have
to pause and take charge of the opportunities that are
there for everyone and put into context the importance of
a college education, which ones can do the best for you,

(09:49):
whoever you are and whatever you want to do. You
don't have to go to an Ivy League school to
be a success in life. You can be just as
successful by going to North Dakota State, the University of
South Dakota and doing well. One of my relatives once
the University of South Dakota and went to medical school.
It was then only a two years school. He transferred

(10:09):
to the University of Michigan, one of the top right
medical schools in America, to finish his final two years,
and when he went back for his fiftieth reunion, his classmates,
who had been there for two years ahead of him, thought,
this guy from South Dakota, he doesn't belong here after all,
he's just headed to your education. Now he thinks he
can catch up to us. Well, it turns out they
said you were ahead of us. In fact, we were

(10:31):
all admiring how you were able to just step into
the University of Michigan and graduate with honors from the
medical school. There are thousands of those kinds of stories
in America today. Those are the stories to be celebrating,
not the excess of the attitude. I've got money, I'm entitled.
I can do whatever I want to do for whoever

(10:53):
I want to do it to or four, including my children,
they're going to have to live with for the rest
of their wives, and fact is they've got it coming.
I'm Shan Brokaw now here This for I Heart Radio.