The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program for the third time, Paul Tuff. Paul is the author of several books, including Helping Children Succeed, How Children Succeed, and Whatever It Takes, Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to the public radio program This American Life.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_02:

Paul, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Great to be back. Well, I'm so excited to speak with you today about your new book, The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes or Breaks Us, which is an up-close look at just that question of how college makes or breaks us. Take us into the research that you did for this book, the reporting that you did for this book, and what you found about how college makes or breaks us.

[01:04] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Well, the reporting took me a while. This was not a super fast book. I spent six years working on it. I counted up and I went to 21 states and talked to lots of different people. I mean, my reporting sort of followed two paths at the same time.

[01:17]

First of all, I talked to a lot of young people, students at the end of high school and the beginning of college as they were making that transition, trying to understand the way these two big themes of higher education and social mobility were playing out in their lives. And then I spent a lot of time reporting with experts of all kinds, educators and economists and psychologists. trying to understand their research that would answer these questions about the role that college was playing in our lives these days. And one of the things that I concluded was that this intersection between these two great forces in America, higher education and social mobility, is really changing. It's become, I think in the past, college was this very straightforward engine of social mobility. It was the thing that would power low income or working class kids when they were aspiring to a higher class as adults.

[02:11]

for individuals i think that still happens there are lots of kids i've talked to who were able to achieve amazing things through higher education but as a society as a culture i think that higher education has lost that position it's no longer the kind of universally effective force for social mobility that it was and for many young people i think especially young people from modest circumstances higher education now feels like the obstacle to their social mobility more than anything else.

[02:39] SPEAKER_02:

Let's maybe talk about the idea of opportunity, you know, because I think as we are starting to learn more about debt and, you know, there's more conversation about the debt that students are leaving college with, did it seem worth it for students to go to college? You know, is that promise of the American dream being fulfilled?

[02:57] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's a tough question to answer. I mean, in some ways it's not. So when you talk to economists about this, this very basic question, is college worth it? They tend to give you either a simple answer or a slightly more nuanced answer. And the simple answer is yes. Right now, what economists call the college wage premium, the amount more that you will earn if you have a college degree than if you don't, is about as high as it has ever been in American history.

[03:21]

A college degree is very valuable right now. But when you look at the stories of individuals, things get a little more complicated. And economists will change their answer to, well, it depends. It depends, first of all, if you're going to graduate. If you don't graduate, an investment in college is much less worthwhile. And there are lots of students who start college and then don't graduate.

[03:44]

But it also depends where you go, what kind of major you pursue, how much you spend on it. All of those things actually do matter. I think we tend to have kind of a magical thinking around higher education, whether we're in favor or opposed. But in fact, it's an investment like anything else. So it matters exactly how you make your choices.

[04:02] SPEAKER_02:

We've long wanted to see college as this vehicle of social mobility, right? This creator of opportunity, especially for students maybe who come from lower income backgrounds, but have a lot of promise. How did you find that dynamic playing out? Did that match the facts and the stories that you encountered?

[04:20] SPEAKER_00:

Well, again, I feel like it's something of a mixed picture because in the lives of individual young people, I followed lots of kids. who were coming from low income families or getting a good college education. And it was absolutely changing their lives. It was transforming them, often in ways that were certainly very positive, but were complicated as well in terms of like social mobility is just a hard thing. So what they were struggling with was what is it like to have opportunities that my family doesn't have, that my parents don't have, that they couldn't really have dreamed of. But for them, in terms of mobility itself, it was working great.

[04:53]

When you look, however, at the national picture, it's harder to be optimistic about the opportunities that higher education is providing for low-income people, not because a college degree is not valuable, but because we are not providing a good pathway into and through college for low-income students. For the most part, low-income students are not admitted to the most selective institutions, the ones that are best funded, the ones that have the highest graduation rates. And instead, they're much more likely to go to the less well-funded institutions, to public institutions, to community colleges. And those institutions, especially in the last couple of decades, we as a society have been underfunding. We've been cutting, you know, at this moment when our young people need credentials, higher education credentials more than they ever have, we have been cutting public funding for higher education.

[05:45]

And they notice, those young people, it changes the way those institutions function. and changes their experience in really detrimental ways.

[05:55] SPEAKER_02:

And one of the questions that you tackle in the book, you know, to kind of flip the coin over a bit, is the question of whether college is an equalizer or whether it's simply an expensive and complicated mechanism for reproducing. inequity and social class. And I think that that issue really came into the public consciousness fairly recently with the college admissions scandal where we had, you know, we saw wealthy people literally buying their way, you know, like literally writing a check, somebody else takes the SAT for their kids. You know, they're bribing coaches and things like that. So what did you find as far as that dynamic of reproducing versus equalizing?

[06:34] SPEAKER_00:

It's a great question. And in some ways, it's really at the heart of a big chunk of this book. You know, there's nothing new about wealthy Americans using their wealth to get their kids into the best colleges. You know, one of the stories that I mentioned in my book, I didn't report it originally. This reporter a couple of decades ago followed the experience of Jared Kushner, now, you know, senior advisor to the president. as his father when he was a senior in a private school in new jersey gave this huge donation to harvard university i think three million dollars and harvard admitted him despite the fact that you know everyone in his high school felt like he wasn't harvard material at all so this has been going on for a long time and you know it works like the reason that that rich people do this is exactly why charles kushner did it he he was able with three million dollars to get his son a Harvard education and everything that went along with it, right?

[07:26]

So in some ways, you know, what's different in the college admissions scandal from earlier this year is it was illegal. You know, giving a huge donation to Harvard and having your kid get in is not illegal. It might be immoral, but it's not illegal. There was something different, I think, in this scandal. But I think what struck me, I read through a lot of the wiretaps of the conversations that this corrupt advisor was having with all of these affluent parents. And what really struck me was they didn't sound like they were part of a criminal conspiracy.

[07:53]

I mean, they were definitely doing bad and illegal things, but they sounded the way that every affluent parent I've talked to sounds when they talk about the college admissions process. There was a lot of eye rolling, a lot of like, can you believe what the system has come to, all this stuff we have to do. You know, the parents that I talk to, they're saying that about like taking their kids to squash practice and SAT tutoring and, you know, a million after school clubs and all of the kind of perfectly legal help that affluent kids get from their parents. These parents were just doing the same thing, having crossed some line, some moral and legal line at some point. But to them, it felt like all the same thing. It felt like this was a system that they knew was rigged and they knew was rigged mostly in their favor.

[08:33]

But they also felt like, you know, if everyone else was doing this, why shouldn't we do the same thing? And I think that's really obviously a sort of a toxic attitude, but it's a complicated one. And I think that a lot of upper middle class and affluent parents now are wrestling with the same thing. They know that the system is not fair, but they're not sure how do you opt out of it? How do you conscientiously object?

[08:53] SPEAKER_02:

Right, right. And, you know, we've seen a big shift away from relying solely on things like grades and SAT scores to looking at, you know, are you on the squash team? Are you on the rowing team? And of course, whoever has the most money can put their kids in the most elite and rarefied sports that can get them the scholarships and things like that. And I'm thinking about the decision that admissions officers face, right? Because this is definitely not a case of, you know, making a spreadsheet and sorting by SAT score.

[09:22]

What did you see as you talked with admissions officers and got a little bit of a glimpse into that world of making those decisions as to who gets to go to which college?

[09:29] SPEAKER_00:

Well, that was some of the most... fascinating and enjoyable reporting that I got to do. I spent some time, uh, with admissions folks and I had, so I, before I got to talk with the admissions people, I had been mostly interviewing students. And when you talk to students or when you are yourself a student or a parent going through the process, Admissions people feel like these, you know, demigods up there on Mount Olympus with this enormous power to shape young futures.

[09:53]

And then when you actually talk to these folks, they don't seem like demigods at all. They're, you know, they're anxious. They're under pressure. They're often the people who get fired most frequently in higher education administrations. And it's because they have, at most universities, they have become responsible not just for shaping a class each year, but for keeping the institution afloat. More and more institutions depend on tuition revenue, and a lot of them aren't making enough money from their tuition.

[10:21]

25% of private higher education institutions right now are running a deficit each year. They're losing money each year. So despite the fact that they're charging these enormous amounts, They're not bringing in enough. And so there's pressure on these admissions people to admit more rich kids because that's the way that you make your budget. And I think for a lot of them, part of the stress of the job is that that's not actually what they want to do. They want to admit the best students, the students who they think can benefit most from the education that their institutions offer, which I think often means a much more diverse, especially socioeconomically diverse class.

[10:55]

But I think they also feel like there's this kind of imaginary way that we talk about college admissions and it mostly makes their job harder because they can't be honest, they can't be forthright about what's really happening at admissions.

[11:08] SPEAKER_02:

So young people come to that process, taking advice from their parents, taking advice from their guidance counselors, putting in their best effort on the essay and sending in their grades and test scores and so forth. How does that translate into the student experience? Because we hear about a lot of students who just feel like a fish out of water, who feel like they don't belong. Maybe they got into a better school than they thought they would. They're a high performing first generation college student. um you know what's happening in you know in in the students mind you know with their their peer group their identity their uh you know take us into some of the uh you know the experiences that students are having after that admissions decision is made because it goes from being this hypothetical thing that adults manage into this very real and kind of all-consuming environment for the student and that student has got to get to graduation right

[12:00] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, college is confusing. It's a weird place to be and it's a confusing time of life. I mean, one of the things that is so striking to me, so I call this book The Years That Matter Most. I mean that in sort of two different ways. One is through the lens of economics.

[12:15]

This is what economists now understand is that when you think about social mobility, it's those years right after high school, the decisions you make and the decisions that are made for you that are very powerfully predictive in terms of what your economic trajectory through life is going to be. But at the same time, as we all know, especially if we know teenagers, this is also a time where young people are sort of becoming themselves. You know, whether they go to college or not, those years at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood are crucial in shaping who we are. And a lot of young people are pretty fragile and are trying on new identities, trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. And the fact that those two things are now happening at the same time, I think, is just sort of an accident of economic history and is really stressful, I think, for a lot of kids that at this moment where they want to kind of just figure things out, they're being told. And in some cases, quite accurately, everything you do matters an enormous amount.

[13:10]

And so I think a lot of students feel that pressure. And it makes for, I think, a really difficult experience at the end of high school and the beginning of college for a lot of kids. And then one of the sort of specific experiences for first generation and low income students, first generation, meaning if their parents themselves didn't go to college, when they are admitted, especially to selective universities that have a lot of rich kids at them, they really feel isolated and alienated in all kinds of ways. And it's not mostly academic. I mean, sometimes they do need to do some academic catching up and figure out how to exist as a college student. It has much more to do with emotion and psychology and finances and social class.

[13:53]

They are suddenly surrounded at these most selective institutions by a lot of rich kids. And if you're not a rich kid, that can be really jarring. So some of the students who I followed at places like Trinity in Connecticut and Princeton, they were really happy to be getting such a great education, but feeling really shaken by the experience that they were having. I think there's lots that colleges and universities can do to create a better experience for students and create more of a sense of belonging and connection. And when they do that, students really thrive. But a lot of colleges don't feel like it's their responsibility to create that environment for their students.

[14:33] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I think about the relationships that are formed in college. And I think a lot is said about the value of the Rolodex that you get from going to a place like Harvard or Stanford. or Yale, that your classmates will be your peers throughout life and are people that you can call on. Did you find that at the more selective institutions that students that were not from wealthy families, were they able to bridge those social divides and build those relationships? Because if I'm going to walk out with a piece of paper and an address book, everybody gets the same piece of paper, but are students walking out with a similar network from those elite institutions?

[15:09] SPEAKER_00:

I think there are conflicting signals in the research. So if you look at it through the lens of economics, the answer is yes, that mostly low-income students get the same benefit from attending a highly selective institution as high-income students. Mostly when students attend the same institution, the effect of their family income is overcome. And they basically have, you know, if you graduate from Harvard, you have the experience of a Harvard graduate, whether you came from lots of money or not much money. So that's The Economist. Then there's a sociologist I wrote about named Lauren Rivera, who has an incredible book called Pedigree.

[15:46]

And what she did was embedded herself, as sociologists do, in the hiring firms that hire mostly out of exclusive Ivy League colleges, for consulting firms and investment banks and top law firms. And she watched how they select students from these elite colleges. And what they do is they just sort of replicate... First of all, they only hire kids from the most selective colleges, which have the fewest low-income students attending them.

[16:12]

But then even within those student bodies, they also select for... um basically what you did in high school not what you did in college so they say yeah we don't really like those you know the grinds who are working all the time getting great gpas we want kids who are a lot of fun who you know play the right kind of sports and to them the right kind of sports are yes lacrosse and squash and rowing and all the things that these kids took in prep school so Big picture of economics is that mostly for low-income students attending a highly selective institution is a positive thing. It's not happening for enough of them, but when it does happen, it really helps. But on the level of individual experiences, if you want to get one of those super high-paying jobs in a place like an investment bank or a law firm, who you are and where you came from and who your parents are and where you went to high school, all that stuff still matters.

[16:58] SPEAKER_02:

So thinking about our audience of principals and people in the K-12 world, should we still be pushing students to attend the best college they can get into? Should we be pushing all students to attend college? Did you find any stories from the field that made you kind of question that push? Because I know we're doing a lot of soul searching in K-12 education about career and technical education and whether college is something that we should really say is for everybody. What came up in your reporting?

[17:28] SPEAKER_00:

It's a great question. And I think it's one there's a whole chapter in my book where I think through this question and follow a few different students who are on the line of trying to figure out whether they should go to college or not. And I think basically, if you're a principal, if you are in K-12 education right now working in a high school, it is fair to say that all of your students need some kind of post high school credential. It is extremely difficult for young people, especially young people who are not coming from well-off families, to achieve a middle-class life with only a high school degree. It happens very, very rarely. And so you need to do something.

[18:01]

You need to have some kind of higher education, which means some kind of college, whether that's a two-year or a four-year college. It depends on the student, depends on their interests, but they need something. To my mind, rather than saying, well, who should go to college and who shouldn't, it's wiser to say everybody needs higher education. Let's try to find for each individual student the right institution, the right program, the right major that's going to help them achieve their goals most effectively. Mostly, I think the situation is not that too many kids are getting degrees and then working at Starbucks. Mostly the problem, especially among low-income students, is that kids are getting out of high school, not going on to any kind of credential, and ending up in low-wage service jobs that they feel like they just can't escape from.

[18:43] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes or Breaks Us. Paul Tuff, thanks so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.

[18:51] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much for doing it. I really appreciate it.

[18:53] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.