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, which is she wasnt just trying to finance herself while she was in college, she was also sending money home to her family. And, you know with, i was wondering if you could say a bit more about what you saw there, because that issue is so silent. It feels like its not allowed. Youre supposed to have an expected family contribution. Its not that the familys supposed to expect your contribution. Guest yeah. So, yes, that was true of kiki. Her family moved with her to new jersey and was about an hour away. And her so she suddenly had enough money for the first time in her life when she became a princeton freshman. Shed gotten two fulltuition scholar areships and great aid from princeton. She wasnt rolling in money, but she could survive. She could go out and get a cheeseburger when she wanted to. And her family, not far away, was still struggling financially, intensely so. And so she felt pressure within herself and from her family to send some of her aid to them, and she did a few times. And i think that youre right, i did report on that. I feel like it is a subject that is, i feel like those of us who are not from that situation can often be really judgmental about that, like judgmental towards her family and feel like that, you know, what a terrible thing her mom would do, to expect that money from her. And so, i mean, i absolutely understand kikis point of view and her moms point of view. So i mentioned it, but i felt a little uncomfortable dwelling on it too much, because i do think there are ways that the sort of people who would be reading my book, i worried they would be minnesota more judgmental. Host i very much understand it was one of the hardest things to read about, its one of the things that weighs on her while shes there. And you always wonder wouldnt there have been a way to help them, perhaps . Sort of take the it off her mind. I dont know. It seems like another college that you mentioned, its called arupe . You said it was doing a, quote, more impressive job of keeping its students ebb rolled and on track than any other institution you visited. And it seemed like the place that would know more that that was happening with their students. They take this socialpsychological approach to education, and they recognize students basic needs. I was really struck that you noted that they provide every student with breakfast and lunch every day, and this at a time when for those students probably close to one many two has been one in two has been food insecure. Thats kind of amazing. And theyre employing social workers, which is part of a culture of caring. What do you think it is about this place that makes them attend to a students basic needs and see the whole person in and did kiki see any of that at princeton . Guest interesting. Okay, let me host sure. Guest i hadnt thought of it through that lens, so thats a great question. So the college is a twoyear institution in chicago, Downtown Chicago thats associated with Loyola University which is selective fouryear, catholic private institution that mostly enrolls pretty high scoring, high income, mostly white students. Arupes mission is very different, it mostly enrolls black and latino Public School graduates, almost entirely low income and mostly not very high scoring on the a. C. T. , and so this is a population in chicago and elsewhere that has very low college outcomes, who dont graduate from twoyear colleges at anything, any impressive rates at all. And so when i say that, you know, i thought they were doing a more impressive job than any other institution, its not that their Graduation Rate is sky high, not as high as, say, princetons, but they were working for the student population for whom there were no other good options, and they were graduating a significant number of them on time, in two years. And so, yes, the approach that they took was the dean of students father, a jesuit priest, described it as a very intrusive model, and that is not a term you hear very often from Higher Education folks. Host yeah. Guest you know, a lot of the basic concept of college is were going to stand back and let these teenagers figure it out for themselves. And, you know, there are some things to be said for that idea. But when you have students like the ones who are enrolling in arupe like a a handsoff model means they are going to struggle and often drop out. And so the priests notion is that theres so much going on in the lyes of these lives of these students not only academically, but socially, financially, most of them are working jobs, they have family trouble, they have Food Insecurity that he needs to be, to think about all of those different points. To why he does it, i mean, i think it goes to the jesuit model. I mean, i think its a religious duty for him which perhaps means its a little bit difficult to replicate in Higher Education as a whole. But i actually think its not i mean, i think thats what inspires him and where he gets his concept of what a college should be and can be from. But i dont think its a necessary part. I do think that that kind of intrusive culture, that kind of really just caring culture could affect a Secular Institution as well. Host yeah, it does, ive seen it at Amarillo College which is not a jesuit institution. It still strikes metathat, again, youre right, the language was intrusive. Its not as though the students at princeton though dont have people who are leaning into their lives. Its their parents and the people their parents hire, right, who helicopter over them. But when the school does it, well, they might say its in local the parents are involved. They dont know how to be. They dont have the resources to be involved the way the princeton parents are. You know, i wonder about the does it change their a ability to get the education guest change the students ability . Host the students ability. You said kiki wants so badly, i mean, shes there, shes got the talent, if someone was able to lean in more or care, right, do you think she would have gotten even more from it and guest i mean, its a great question. I mean, i think that i mean, princeton has, like, spends a lot more money on students than arupe does. [laughter] i mean, they have just this army of counselors and advisers and mentors and therapists, and its like you can get every kind of help you need when youre a princeton student. And, you know, kiki, i think, was aware of that. But i think there is, but its not intrusive in the same way or not i dont know, maybe not caring in the same way, or at least thats the way the kiki perceived it. She perceived, okay, its there and im grateful for it, and it can be there if i need it. But she did not, i think, have that same feeling that an arupe student did that someone is looking out for me, that someone really cares about me. And i think on an emotional level, that makes a huge difference. Host theres another writer whos got a book out, anthony jack, tony jack, and he lived this as well, this going off to this elite school where they say they care and they give you this low price, but then you kind of come to understand what is and isnt in the domain of what youve been given. You know, at what point did you discover his work on this journey . I was curious if that sort of played a role in your thinking. Guest it did, yeah. He was really influential on my thinking. The hes a sociology at harvard, and i met him i think three years ago. He had been featured in an article in the new york times, and i went to the i think first, maybe the second conference of his group called the first generation ivy movement. And it was at harvard, and so i he was both speaking at that conference, and i interviewed him at the same time and got to know him a little bit. And so, yeah, so when i was writing about kiki, the chapter in which i write about her, you know, the sort of main narrative thrust is her and her experience. But tony jacks Research Just gave me a kind of super structure to understand the experience of first generation students in highly selective institutions. Host yeah. I think its just so powerful to have somebody whos lived it and now is studying it, right . And i really did appreciate the way in which you danced between his need to keep the Institution Name quiet and your need to state it. [laughter] you dont pull any punches in this book. I mean, you do kind of go for it in terms of a number of arguments that people make, and one of the ones thats so rampant right now is this idea that we know college isnt for everyone, and we really know its going to be okay for those who dont go become welders. So i thought we should talk a little bit about welders and this idea that, you know, working with your hands pays off as an effective argument that we really shouldnt worry so much about opening access to college. You know, what did you learn as you tried to dig into that claim . Guest yeah. So i feel like the publication of the welding argument is there are sort of two arguments at the same time. One is a genuine labor economics argument in which its a somewhat complicated story. And the others a very partisanning political argument, and those two have overlapped especially in conservative politics and conservative media in a way that makes it really difficult to disentangle and in a way that the i think makes it difficult for a lot of people to sort of judge. Because all these questions of sort of identity and respect have been tied up in how we just make, you know, simple economic analyses of what kind of professions can earn what kind of money. In a twoyear Associates Degree there are very few apprenticeships you can do after eight aa degree. Some just do shop class in high school, though most of the time thats not enough training it in their Technical Colleges that offer shorter colleges often at high prices so youve had some college. Alternative college to be doesnt make sense. Then there was rhetoric in the years i was reporting that welders were making a ton of that money and there were figures of a hundred 50000 here, 200,000 a year for welders and some do make that much money and anecdotally and in reality its possible. Most other professions when they are judging the value of their profession or the opportunities available dont talk about the highest earners. No wench says you should be a writer because j. K. Rowling is making tens of millions of dollars. With welding we have a tendency to do that. We have a tendency to hit the anecdotes of high earners and reality when you look at data from the bureau of labor statistics the median wage for experienced welders is 41000 a year and at the wage of the 90th percentile is 63000 years of 93 make less than 60000 a year which is about the meeting income for households in the us, so 90 of welders make less than the median Family Income, which is fine, i mean, its a good job, stable in some ways and generally pays more than the wit minimum wage. If you go to Community College well supported by the public and get an Associates Degree without a lot of expensive tigre pathway if that is the work you want to do. We have surrounded welding with all of these political arguments often filled with exaggerations that make it difficult for actual young people trying to get degrees and trying to go into welding to make sensible decisions. We have freighted those decisions with these politics and identity so its difficult them to do what they need to do and what they need us to help them do witches make the decisions on how they can get to a middleclass life. Im struck as you walk through the politicians and all of this common action manage to disappear the role Community Colleges play, i mean, they say you can be a welder without college and then ignore the Community College. On the other hand if you asked what therefore, they are for the Community College. Do you have thoughts on the dynamics on why we dont understand the Community College i feel like you know more about this question than i do so i read the in your insights, but there is something about that word Community College that we had given did negative connotation to so in fact when people talk about where students learn welding they talk about Technical College or Junior College which generally means Community College and i think Community College has this image of being something unpalatable and in fact like Community College is this beautiful american idea of publicly supporting institutions in your community that can do one of two things and the ones i visited were doing these things simultaneously in one is provide high quality job training very specific location whether its nursing or emt your it specialists or a welder and the other is providing Good Foundation for in two years at low expense for a fouryear degree. Both of those are things Community Colleges at their best can do and do on a regular basis , but we because of the way we have been talking about how to saddle those institutions both with job of taking care of students who have not been given other opportunities and support and doing it with very very little resources because we have cut their budget to such a stark amount. I recall in the book you did run into what not one of your young people out of high school who intersects with Community College, but Community College was playing a role in his life and allowing him to move in and out. I guess you found your way to their siblings. Can you tell us what you saw. You mean the student studying welding . Yeah. This was a community in Western North carolina. In this one chapter i follow these three different students at different different intersections with twoyear institutions not all of which are strictly Community College, but they were all none of them loved to school. None were particularly dying to be in a classroom, but they found getting out of high School Without any kind of extra credential method they were trapped in a certain type of lowwage work, very unstable work whether it was service work, food service work, Technology Work or manual labor or hand factory so for all of them they felt like they wanted another alternative and that took them to a few different Institutions Commission many western carolina he had never been in School Personnel wasnt dying to go to college and there was a lot about this institution he loved and was learning a lot about welding. Financially it was so difficult for him to make ends meet, to survive at college, tucson find the support he needed to get through the courses because of budget cuts to that institution that he is still trying to make his way to that degree. Its really something and you swirled around yourself as you heard in your story so i imagine you are able to understand that. I wanted to think a little with you about moving towards the some of the solution and especially you talk a lot about the inequality and how unhappy people are with that. You raise some people think when they think about the problems in Higher Education they think of the problems not with universities or the Higher Education system at large, but with the dust students who are simply uninformed and misguided about where they are promising opportunities like and you can see that in those that say things like lets just give them good wage data and show them those numbers on what you can earn and lets us in the more material. Went to to learn about the validity of that hypothesis . I mean, its like confusing for a 17 or 18year old with the best of resources and students who are in communities where theres not a long history of college going, not a lot of resources, not a lot of family resources, i would visit these schools a senior year and talked to a group of students about their College Plans with it i did that in harlem in rural pennsylvania, rural texas in there was just this you know they were confused about what the right option should be and they felt this sort of responsibility when i would say what are you going to do as every adult in their life was saying to come up with some answer. But, it felt like they were just grasping at something they had heard of and it struck me when bad job we are doing, all of us, of providing them with useful information and support to make those decisions in a sensible way, i mean, part of it is just good advice and good counsel and sort of emotional support. Part of it is the options are often not that great. I think for some of those counselors like trying to figure out the white sort of pathway is difficult so for those three students i mentioned, you know it was partly that it was hard for them to decide on a path and probably there are not great paths for them. Some have tried to say if they need information and advice we are experts and we can send them information and advice and maybe its cheap and mean talk about the 6 solution here. That idea has releasees Higher Education and capture the public imagination, the idea we can nudge people and send them info and we dont have to put more counselors into high schools or some people out to actually do personal work with them. What did you find . Is there a solution we can do on the cheap . Not on the cheap, i dont think. The intervention youre talking about was targeted to specifically not at students like these, but at super high achieving low income students and it was experiment done to by two economists several years ago where they sent this Information Packet to students selected based on their income, the income of their neighborhood and their test scores. Early on there was indication that these Information Packets saying go to a more selective institution than you may think about and if you go you may get good financial aid. When that experience was replicated by the College Board over the course of five years they found very negligible impact. The problem with the way that replication was done is it didnt really give us a chance to figure out why like to figure out whats going on. Part one i think is that information should make a difference; right . It is true these are not lower or even average achieving students. They are high achieving students , so the fact that so many of them are continuing to go to institutions that are less than somewhere they could have more resources is still puzzling, but that experiment hasnt really answered whats missing. As i read that and i have to admit i got more knowledge about the science from your book than i have gotten from the Peer Reviewed publications in that regard. I had to ask myself, is does it have something to do with what you describe as a change in motivation. You said today when students come to college there motivated less by hope and more by fear. Are there other things that are trumping sort of the information that are going on in their families and communities that might keep them yes, i know i could go to this school and the price would be lower, but thats not real for my life. Do you think thats a possibility . I do that again because of the way the data has been not analyzed we dont know a lot about whats going on. One of the things that often is forgotten with that early experiment is most of the students were found it to be following with the economist called income typical path so rather than go to a sort of super exclusive institution that their test scores may allow them to attend they were going to local Community Colleges or not selected institutions, Public Institutions that most of us since we are white and a disproportionate number were white and rule so a lot of my reporting is in this very white liberal part of north carolina, so i think there is a lot going on in those communities that has to do with family and culture and history and even politics. I think that affects the decisions of those students. Sort of a broad generalization and i cannot support it with data, but definitely a struck me being in urban communities of lowincome communities with a lot of black and latino parents who had not gone to college and didnt have a lot of resources, not a lot of knowledge and there was a sense that like our kids and should go to college and they go to a highly Selective Colleges a good thing even if they didnt really know how much information would help the student. In the rural White Communities i visited it was the opposite. Their families were more opposed to them going to hire selected institutions even going away, outofstate, out of the county and that affected a lot of students who either felt constrained by it or had internal [inaudible] that we have a habit in this country of thinking of low income students as students of color and there is a whole phenomenon going on about white rural students especially in the red states who are just not interested in going to institutions of selective Higher Education. I think thats right and i did have to say and i will say this gently, people who are noneconomists have written a lot about why that is insulate to thinking if we turn to marias work whos written about the great work about hollowing out the middle she writes about the ceiling of threat that our Little Community will feel about their breast and brightest leaving and what is it actually do went they dont think they are coming back and similarly kathy kramer wrote a book about wisconsins situation and i couldnt help when i lived there notice the Rural Communities of wisconsin viewed the w madison with suspicion thinking we wanted to take our kids away and you will not send them back home to the farm with eric on their gone. So come i tended to think part of it is we are going to have to broaden sort of our different theories of action here, the part of it is attending to a complicated set of clinical and economic dynamics. You are right there are complicated Political Economic dynamics but it also comes down to complications around a family dining room table and then the complicated emotions of fathers and mothers and daughters and a sons and uncles and grandparents and thats like hard to think about terms of the Public Policy like is the right policy to give more high achieving students out of those communities or not and i feel like thats where i think we have trouble, i mean, you are right there are great scholarships in that area, but i think we have trouble thinking about coming its such a dynamic of so much of our Politics Today whats going on in these communities that we have trouble thinking rationally and calmly about those issues so we had trouble thinking about solutions there are 18 counties in pennsylvania that dont have a Single College in that county. There isnt one, so when talking about Online College but there also is a broad isnt Broadband Access so what would happen if there was a nearby college and ink powered to grant bachelors degree may we be able to increase Educational Attainment without leaving or do people need to leave because thats what you do when you go off in the world. Do we believe its a so special that the talent must go away in order to be fully recognized . Thats a interesting point and i have data thats really about people. To me than the complicated political point is why are these voters in the states defending their public Higher Education and this was the question i kept asking about Community College. I mean, it would seem to be a great investment for his community to fully fund that Community College so people like him could stay, get a good job, get good training and get a better job than he could get and i think that is true in rural pennsylvania as well but a lot of these states are the ones cutting their funding of public Higher Education the most, so it feels like having that local college could be a solution to that problem, that they have to go way problem and so the politics of it i think it feels like a paradox although i can imagine the ones doing the cutting are the legislators. There are people behind them, but they often have a lot of iron about the fouryear schools they also dont have nearly the same kind of money to pay for the lobbyists and all that, but that would make another great book. What has happened . I think it is aiming maybe im overgeneralizing, but i think its in the case in those rule communities that people are most likely to vote for legislators that will cut that. This is true. So, wanted to ask a bit, this is not your first book, so i wanted to ask a bit about as i noted you are very pointed in your critique of many sacred areas in the book which i appreciated. Your other book how children succeed is a very different book at least in my view and it seems to focus on great. This seems to focus far more on systemic problems that sort of the great a child does or doesnt possess. Is that an evolution in your thinking . Am i reading that the wrong way . I think it is an evolution of my thinking. I think that how children succeed to me was a book about a few different things. The theme was non commented skills and i looked at that as from a few different ways. From the point of view of economists studying it especially james from the university of chicago, point of view of educators who called a Character Strength and trying to teach it, but the research i found most important in the book was the sort of medical biological Developmental Research about how growing up in stressful environments can have a longterm effect on young people and how Good Investments in Early Childhood programs can counteract those negative environment so in that way if you like i was trying to look at a structural approach to what was happening in those communities, but i think i was looking at it and maybe this has something to do with looking at young children, but i looked at it through the lens of individual children. I think i was also looking at intervention that i was most wrong to wear ones that intervened with specific children like what can we do in a school in a prek, in a home room that will change the situation around a child and i think when i started working on this book i thought that i might follow that same model that i would find specific interventions that work with specific students and given this intervention or that intervention or that support and that support and i did find some good examples, but i was struck the more i reported how much in Higher Education the obstacles were so systemic and the problems were so systemic. That is probably something of an evolution of my own thinking and i think its partly the difference in the system. Thats fair. So, in the final chapter of the book and this is absolutely one of my favorites because you turn to recipients of the original g. I. Bill and one reason im in now married with this is my grandfather is one of those and at 92 years old he still speaks with me about the importance of that legislation. When people asked me why i do what i do, i pointed that because he talked about the transformative power of that bill and he references now because i taught him about it the research on how it really paid off. Tell me a little bit about what you learned from getting to speak to those folks. Im so glad you capture that because we will lose them and they give us a lot. I talked to a few different that arent of world war ii there went to school on the g. I. Bill and wrote about one named patrick who is in connecticut who grew up in massachusetts the son of an immigrant from ireland , son of a factory worker , went to fight in world war ii and came back, heard about the g. I. Bill and went to northeastern and thrived in a changed his life and his familys life. Into many ways a changed the lives of a lot of people in this country during that year. What struck me reading the research surrounding it is i had not known the history of how the g. I. Bill was written and i think we look back on it as this thing everyone agreed on and there were two ways we werent behind this. First of all when it was written in 1940 1943 and four it was thought no one would really take the government upon this offer. At the time college was very exclusive Institution Just for rich kids, only about 10 of Students High School graduates would go to college. These were gis were some farmers, daughters of factory workers and i did they would want to go to college seemed crazy and yet i think in huge numbers and there was also this thought by before the end of world war ii that if they did show up on College Campuses it would be a disaster. The president from the university of chicago talked about educational jungles that would break out with these uneducated workingclass kids are showing up on College Campuses. In a couple years the student population undergraduate population of american colleges doubled, but they also succeeded they turned out to be great students, so that the medias is one of the most instructive part of the story for me because i think we are in a know their moment that we could expand Higher Education that there are students who seem unlikely to succeed in college based on our preconceived notions of what a Successful College student looks like. So, we dont think we need to support those students with a Public Investment and what the g. I. Bill showed i think is that when this country decides to invest in those unlikely colleges students in a real robust way they succeed and i think theres lots of individuals in a total place i place evidence now that when we invest in any given institution in those unlikely colleges students they do succeed. The nation as a whole we have given up on that idea of expansion. And you also note that we expanded high school; right . Im almost amazed that people think that we just cannot expand education that we could never afford to night argue you cant afford not to mean what if we had not expanded high school cracks what do you think would have happened to us . I think we would not have dominated the 20th century the way we did. This was another time i had not known about until working on the book. High school in the early 20th century between 1910 and 1940 the us drastically expanded the number of high schools in the percentage of students graduating from high school went from about 10 to 50 in 30 years and what was so striking about that was that it was mostly just this like a sort of makes sense, but in a way that seems odd in retrospect because we have so much trouble doing this. Communities looked at the signs from the economies just watching what that employers in their town needed and they noticed technology was changing and offices and farms, factories and in order to get the jobs they needed their young people needed more than a six or eight grade education. So, they had the settlor reaction of lets get them education into a collectively. Lets build free public high schools in pretty much every community in the us and spend our tax money on sending everyone from the community to school whether there are kids or some elses kids and that sort of collective notion was it just made sense, i think, to people and now, we are at a similar notion. This was a hundred years ago we thought 12 grade is probably what you need to deal with technology of 1920 and now, we have technology thats 100 years advanced and we are still debating about whether the 12th grade education is enough its obviously not enough and all this time from the economy and the labor market is that its not enough. Now, unlike our predecessors who responded to that basic economic signs by saying lets educate our young people, we are fighting about it, turning it into questions of identity and snobbery and politics and partisanship when clearly there is a sign we our young people need our support and help and more education with more credentials and skills to survive in the current economy. A century ago we heard those assigned and responded in both a rational and collective fashion. Now, we are responding in an irrational and selfish passion. What do you think the next election we have a big election next year, i mean, what you think it needs for inequality and Higher Education connect great question and its hard to tell i mean i think it is striking that some of the democratic campaigns are talking about radical fairly radical ideas about changing public Higher Education. Personally, i dont think the specific proposals some of the candidates have made are quite baked yet because i think they tend towards sort of a consumer mentality. Save costs or eliminate that when really by contrast what the g. I. Bill was say lets invest in our students, lets two thing is what lets invest in institutions of the other was lets level the playing field. Lets invest in students who are not currently going to college rather than the ones have completed college, so my hope is progressive candidates would understand that those two principles are the ones that would make the most sense from a democratic point of view. If you wanted to create a better, fairer, bigger Higher Education system, but having that conversation or that at least some candidates are having that conversation seems like a promising first step. Thank you. Im graduated into this territory with this book. Thank you. This program is available as a podcast pickle afterwards programs can be viewed on our website at the tv. Org. The house will be in order. For 40 years he spent has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington dc and around the country so you can make up your own mind. Created by cabling 1979, cspan is brought to you by your local cable or satellite providers. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. You are watching the tv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors of a weekend. Book tv, television for serious readers. Now on book tv we are live with bestselling author naomi klein. Her books on economics and Public Policy include no logo, the shock doctrine and the recently published on fire the burning case for a green new deal. Naomi, thank you for joining us here on cspan2 book tv in midtown manhattan where branding and marketing is big business. Let me begin with your first book, no logo