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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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.