Take on students today based on your reporting. Guest well, i think youre right. I think the Democrat Students today are different, the age of students is different. Im mostly focused on students who were right out of high school, so the experience that i wanted to focus on was what is that transition out of high school and into the work force. So that definitely doesnt capture all of the college population, but i wanted to understand how the pathways diverged after high school for different students. And most of the ways that i found they diverged were by Family Income. Students who have a lot of Family Income are going down much more traditional paths, students without a lot of Family Income had many more obstacles in their path. Host can you start by telling us as we get into those different issues a little more about your own path coming out of high school . Guest yeah. So i had a rocky high school period. Right after high school, i grew up in tampa, and after finishing high school in toronto, i came to columbia university, survived for one semester [laughter] and then dropped out and bicycled around the Southern United States for a few months, ended up half a year later at Mcgill University in montreal. Stayed there for three semesters and then dropped out again and went into an internship at harpers magazine and started my journalism career. And i thought i might when i left and did that, i thought i might go back to college but ended up, i was never a big fan of college, the College Experience, and i felt like what i was getting out of journalism was what i had been looking for in college, just this exciting intellectual conversation. And so i tried to figure out if i could stay, and i did. Host i think we can tell a bit in this book that its not like you just have a traditional path where, you know, everything just came up rosy and youre wondering why it isnt happening for folks. Part of the reason is that you went to a lot of different places, and you really do talk about a wide variety of students. They may all be right out of high school, but theyre not all cut from the same cloth. How did you decide as you embarked on this project, you know, you raised that you went to a Broad Spectrum of colleges. How did you decide where to go . Guest well, i mean, i i looked all over. [laughter] i lived in 21 different went to 21 different states in my reporting, talked to hundreds of students, and part of that was trying to get the hay of the land and understand and hear from a lot of different students that i felt would inform me. But at the same time, i was looking for a number of students who i wanted to follow in depth over time. And eventually i found a few characters that i really connected with, one a couple in north carolina, one in new york, a few in d. C. And together they felt like together that i could tell a portrait of what it was like for a broader number of students. Host were you intentionally trying to make sure, for example, that you were spending some time at what you referred to at the top 270 versus the other 4,000 plus colleges and universities . Guest yes. I think one of the strange things about the way that i ended up at universities was that i started with a lot of students in high school. So some of the students i met were in high school, and there were a few including two of the main characters in the book who were super high achieving, low income students. So i wasnt surprised that they ended up at highly selective institutions, but i would have been interested in their path no matter where they ended up. So that took me to those institutions. But then i also ended up at the university of texas and a few other institutions in austin, and that was, that was through sort of happenstance. But ut turned out to be an institution that really interested me and continued to interest me, so i just kept coming back there over the course of many years. Host its a great Public School. So lets dig into a few of the students. I mean, some of them are just, you know, i think people will find shannon in particular to be a heartbreaker and a fairy tale in certain regards. How did you meet her . Guest so shannon and i met through this program called leadership enterprise for a diverse america which is a remarkable Scholarship Program that selects a hundred low income students in junior year from across the country, all super high achieving academically, and then brings them together the summer after junior year on the princeton campus for a sevenyear sevenweek Summer Program thats kind of like high achieving college boot camp. [laughter] host okay. Guest and these students, most of whom, most of them are either at a low Income School where they are among a few super high achieving students, or they are sometimes one of the few students of color in a sort of high academic track at a more diverse high school. But in either case, they often dont have a lot of students like them where they are. And then they get to this summer institute, and suddenly theyre surrounded by young people just like them, and they love it. So it was at that Summer Program that i met shannon. I met her on the princeton campus. Host and she becomes, you know, the opening character of the book. And i know from having had to choose among students, you know, who youve gotten to know very whale is that decision is a very well is that decision is a big decision. Its a content decision, right . What is it about her story that made you think, okay, theyre going to start wading their way into this, and this person i want them to meet is shannon . Guest well, i have to just confess as a writer that i wrote two completely different drafts for the chapter. Host okay. Guest so now when i look at the first chapter, its like, of course, shannons perfect. But it took me four months of failure to realize that, so i cant claim that it was obvious to me right away. But i feel like there were two reasons that i think shannon ends up making sense as the initial character or as the first character that you meet. One is that i happened to be with her on this really momentous day in her College Experience where she was finding out from certain institutions whether she was in or out. And that felt like a great stroke of luck journalistically. But the other was i feel like she, more than any other student who i met, was at the beginning at least a real true believer in the idea of Higher Education as a force of social mobility and the idea that Selective College admissions was a real meritocracy where her hard work would earn her real consideration. And so that felt sort of conceptually like the right place to start because it led, you know, a lot of what i do in the book is to question those assumptions, and she went on to question those assumptions, but at that moment she sort of had this, was at this crisis point of trying to figure out whether she still believed those two things or not. Host yeah. Do you think shes unusual in, you know, approaching College Admissions with the general belief that, you know, it really is about your talent and hard work . Guest i think she is. I mean, i think i dont know. I mean, shes unusual in all sorts of ways. Host yeah. Guest i think, i think i dont know. I mean, i think we as a nation still have some high ideals about how Higher Education admissions works, but maybe its more so among young people. I do feel like theres a certain cynicism, i think a lot of us do but including young people that they feel like its a game. So they think of it, like, let me figure out the rules and see if i can figure out how to play it. Host yeah. One of the things i was really struck by was when you introduce us to another character, ned, who in some ways teaches people how to be cynical, teaches people how to play the game. And that would suggest can and you should tell us how he does that, but that would suggest even among those raised relatively wealthy, they need to be disabused of the idea that this is real, right . That there is some reason to believe, you know, the s. A. T. S, really measuring your intelligence, right . And then College Admissions offices are actually making assessments about you as a human. Guest yeah, thats a really interesting point. So hes a tutor in washington, d. C. Who runs a company that charges 400 an hour for his tutoring services so has affluent students but bills more hours than anybody at his company. Hes very successful at what he does. And, yeah, i think its an interesting question that youre posing. I think that the affluent students who come to him do already have a sense of Higher Education admissions as a game, that theyve already, you know, been thinking about their Extracurricular Activities since middle school and sports and going on college tours. I think they are wise to that side of it. But i think what he picks up on is that they still think of the test, the s. A. T. And the a. C. T. As a measure of their worth. And i think thats because in their communities and also in College Admissions it is given so much weight. And so they often walk into his office believing that this number on the s. A. T. Or the a. C. T. Is not only going to determine so much about their future, its also going to determine who they are. And sort of what their own sense of selfworth is, what their value to their family is, what their value in their school is. And its that pressure that he feels, actually, paradoxically makes them do worse. Host yeah. You write that, you know, when he helps someone do better by, say, a hundred points, one of the things that was fascinating is you quantify it in terms of the number of people they just pulled in front of. Youre racing ahead, and this could actually change your life. I appreciated the way in which you tried to wrestle with whether or not, in fact, it would actually really change your life though. You do, you actually wrestle with the researchers a bit. Tell me about the effort to, like, make heads or tails of what we actually know about whether the claim that going to a more Selective College because you had higher scores actually pays off. Guest yeah. So among economists there is this ongoing debate about whether going to a more selective institution the makes a difference, and theres this paper from a couple of decades ago by these researchers that says for affluent students, actually doesnt matter that much. And that, i think, i mean, the strange thing about this debate is i think its both sort of an actual, like, data debate that economists understand in ways that i dont about whos using numbers correctly, but its also like this religious debate among americans in general and especially, i think, parents who despite their competitiveness i think dont want to believe that it matters as much as it does. And i think some apartments dont want parents dont want to believe it because they fear that their kids arent going to get into chose selective schools, and others they want to get this advantage that neds students are getting and being able to leapfrog over these other students is not something that matters, but is sort9 of a frivolous luxuried good. And so the competing luxury good. And so the competing study that takes the on the dale and krueger paper says that it really does matter. Most selective institutions increase your lifetime earnings by millions of dollars more than less selective institutions and that also these more selective institutions spend much more money per student than the less selective institutions do. And so where i sort of come down on this is that i think it does i think for any individual student it is not a life and death decision. I really think that, you know, what we often tell our students, that theres a right school for you, is still true. But i do think that the fact that these different institutions are having, on average, such different effects on the earnings of their graduates really does matter especially given the fact that the student bodies of those different institutions are demographically is so durability. Host yeah. I found the discussion so interesting because the part that gets so much attention is what the effect of the test scores and the sort of getting in will be and less attention on the massive differences of what the schools can spend, right . I mean, part of this could be School Spending matters, and the fact that we have such growth disparities in what schools can spend based on the money they have, who has the endowment, who doesnt, gets so little attention. Guest and those disparities have grown. I cant remember which researcher that showed not that long ago the difference between the most selective institutions and the least selective institutions was, like, 4,00018,000 per student per year and so as in so many ways in American Society that those most affluent institutions and individuals have pulled away from everyone else and become more sort of gated communities of Higher Education. Host and that this has happened because of intense decisions that are not publicly debated, right . As a matter of Public Policy, for example, right, the states and you review some of this the states have defunded public higher ed while the wealthier institutions have been able to shield themselves from those challenges with their endowment. So the open acts of public, including the Community Colleges which dont get as much attention, right . Guest true. Host they dont even have adequate sport to educate a student on a perstudent basis. Guest yeah, youre right that it is the individual decision. What is strange about this position is that some of the decisions are being made by politicians host right. Guest and not by us. Host right. Guest you know, weve got our perstudent funding on public Higher Education. You may know numbers more than me, but the numbers i see is by 16 per student since 2001. So thats having a huge and often devastating effect on public Higher Education while at the same time a small number of super affluent individuals are donating hundreds of millions of dollars to a very small number of institutions of Higher Education. And so those individual decisions by those wealthy individuals are making a huge difference. Host yeah. I mean, its stark, to say the least. One of the people who you talk about is kiki, and kiki goes to one of those schools its actually featured in the Century Foundations report, princeton. The Century Foundation features it to explain that princeton receives more taxpayer support on a perstudent basis than a new Jersey College does, which is probably the reverse of what people would imagine. Guest right of. Host and the results are thoroughly intense. As a nonprofit, princeton doesnt even have to pay tax it is on its land, although it has voluntarily done so. But most people would think kiki being at princeton and not being at a new Jersey Community college would find life extremely easy, right . And you dont find that. Talk to me about sort of what you did see happening for her. Guest yeah, i mean, kikis relationship with princeton was really complicated, and i did my best to try to understand it and capture it. I mostly, it was her freshman year they mostly spent talking to her and spending time with her on campus. And so shes a low income africanamerican student who had a pretty chaotic upbringing, but in the last three years of her k12 education of high school at a affluent Public Institution in charlotte, north carolina, got a she was a fantastic student all through school but especially there. Got the sort of preparation for the kind of academic rigor of a place like princeton. And so when she got to princeton, academically she did great almost from the very start. I think her first paper she got a c, but she got nothing but as afterwards. I think the idea that a lot of us have in our heads that a young student without a lot of money who comes to a place like that can struggle academically, definitely not true for her. But she did, she was struck even having had lots of experiences up to that point in her life of being a low income person among high income people, being an africanamerican among lots of white people, she was still struck the how sort of socially and culturally weird princeton was for her, how concentrated the affluence and privilege was. And one of the things that struck her was each among africanamerican students who were the ones she was drawn to where shed tend to find her community, she did feel more of a kinship and connection with them, but their backgrounds were often very different than hers. They were much more likely to have found a private school. Often the children of immigrants where she was from generational poverty in the united states. So i think all that was confusing to her, often made her feel like she didnt belong, made her anxious. At the same time, i feel like shes an interesting case because i feel like she, at the same time she somehow felt when she got to princetop, like, this is where i was meant to be my whole life, right . Academically, intellectually, she loved philosophy, she was in highlevel philosophy classes, this is what i was meant to be doing. So i think thats part of why her freshman year was so complicated. That on the one happened, shed arrived at the place shed been looking for her whole life, on the other, it was truely difficult to feel at home. Host black is not black is not black, right . And she was what was called a black black, right . And what that means, especially around her family, could be very intense. So i think a lot of people probably assume that for her being as low income as she was, she was totally taken care of financially. And i noted that you said something that very few ofs us have actually said out loud about whats happening in higher ed