Varsity Blues | The Admissions Game | 5

The parents caught in Varsity Blues went to extraordinary lengths to get their kids into elite colleges. But the system was already tilted in their favor. Journalist Paul Tough explains how decades of rising competition, college rankings and enrollment management transformed higher education into a marketplace where wealth can open doors — and why fixing it may require changing the way America thinks about college itself. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

  Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:16Lindsay Graham?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.

• 0:40Lindsay Graham?

  In the spring of 2019, when federal agents unsealed the indictments in Operation Varsity Blues, the public was captivated by the greed and deception concentrated at the most elite universities in the country. Fraudulent athletic profiles, bribes, fake charities, and wealthy parents gaming the system. What the problems went deeper than just Rick Singer. In many ways, they were the logical conclusion of a broken system. For decades, the American college degree has been pitched as the ultimate engine of social mobility, the most reliable ticket to the middle class and beyond. But behind the scenes, higher education has transformed into a competitive, multi-billion dollar market. It's a system where enrollment managers

• 1:23Lindsay Graham?

  quietly prioritize wealth over talent, where college rankings dictate survival, and where the students who need college the most are the very ones being locked down. My guest today is Paul Tough, journalist and author of "The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us." We'll talk about how we got here and whether there's any chance of getting out. Our conversation is next.

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• 3:44Lindsay Graham?

  Paul Tough, welcome to American Scandal.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Great to be here.

• 3:48Lindsay Graham?

  So by the time this scandal broke, you'd already been covering higher education for a while, speaking with families, students, and admissions officers alike. What was your sense of the admissions landscape at this point? Did you already see it as a kind of broken system?

• 4:05Speaker 04

  I did. I'd sort of gone into my reporting on higher education being pretty optimistic and hopeful that there were these new sort of movements and pushes towards making higher education more fair. That's what got me into the topic originally. And as the years had gone on and I'd done this reporting, I had grown more and more pessimistic, skeptical, even cynical. And yeah, so by the time the scandal broke, it felt like it was just part of the broader story that I had heard over the last couple of years.

• 4:35Lindsay Graham?

  So where did your optimism come from? I mean, college and education more broadly is often pitched as a key to social mobility. And you've written about how social mobility is shaped, especially during the late adolescence and early childhood, the exact high school and college years that this admissions process and then college itself applies to. Why is this a critical period?

• 4:58Speaker 04

  So I'll answer that in two parts. Sort of why I was optimistic and why I felt like it was so important. And why I felt like it was so important was there was, I'd spent, you know, a decade before that, writing about K-12 education and early childhood education. And it was clear that those early years and what was happening in school were incredibly important in determining how likely any young person, and especially young people from more disadvantaged circumstances, were going to do in life. But there was this emerging set of data and research that said that the college years were another, another bite at the apple, another opportunity where suddenly things were in flux for a lot of American kids, where, you know, suddenly having sort of a change of attitude or a change of heart,

• 5:42Speaker 04

  working harder, you could catch up if you were behind. And the choices that you made during those years and the choices that were made for you actually determined a whole lot about how the rest of your life was going to go. And the reason that I was optimistic in those early years, you know, sort of like the 2011, 12, 13, was that there had been this push. A lot of it came out of the Obama White House, that the president gathered together a lot of college presidents, the head of the College Board, lots of different players in the higher education world. And together, they said, we're going to change things. That there was a clear sense that things had become uneven in higher education, and there was this push that things were going to be different. And it seemed like

• 6:25Speaker 04

  that could make a huge difference in the way that mobility worked in the country as a whole.

• 6:31Lindsay Graham?

  Well, let's step back and try to understand the reality underneath this feeling that the stakes are high, that college is meaningful and has become an essential component of social mobility. Here in America, how did higher education become this gold standard?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  So, you know, if you go back to the period before World War II, only a small minority of American teenagers were going to college. And they were mostly, you know, a pretty homogeneous group. They were mostly white males, a lot from the Northeast, a lot from private schools, you know, the sort of kids who had always gone on to higher education. And then after World War II, things started to open up. And that, a lot of that was because of the GI Bill that suddenly provided a lot of government funding to returning GIs, most of whom were, you know, not particularly well-educated, working-class kids, children of farmers, children of factory workers. And suddenly, the doors of American universities

• 7:29Speaker 04

  were open to millions of kids who hadn't even thought about going to college, let alone had access to it before. And that changed a couple of things. One is, it just literally expanded the number of kids who were going to college. And most of those kids did really well and persisted and graduated. And that was a big part of building the, the sort of affluent middle class of the post-war era. But it also changed the public perception of what college could be. It changed it from this sort of sense that it was a finishing school for the elite to this sense that it was a springboard for anybody, that if anybody worked hard and went to a good college, they were in a position to improve their lives. And then those numbers just continued to increase after that. In the 50s and 60s and

• 8:11Speaker 04

  70s, we built this really robust public higher education system in the country. You know, some states, especially like California, had a particularly impressive higher education system. But every state developed and spent a lot, increased their investment in higher education. And so up through, you know, about the 80s or 90s, there was this democratization of higher education. And then in the 90s, things started to shift.

• 8:36Lindsay Graham?

  Okay. What was this shift in the 90s?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  So a few things started shifting at that point. Colleges started to understand that it really mattered who they admitted, that there were certain students who were going to be better able to pay, and that admitting those students was going to benefit the bottom line. In the past, these two offices in the university, the budget office and the admissions office, were totally separate and they weren't talking to each other. There was this push in the 90s towards this movement called enrollment management. It was just this sort of organizational idea that like you should have these two groups working together and we should be admitting students who are going to help us make our budget. In some ways, that seems super obvious now,

• 9:21Speaker 04

  but it wasn't actually the way that most higher education institutions were functioning up to that point. The doctrine of enrollment management has now taken over higher education, such that every admissions decision is made with a really clear focus on the bottom line. It is still not exactly the way the public thinks about higher education, but it's absolutely the way that anyone within higher education knows that they have to think about it. And so that went along with a lot of shifts in how higher education worked. It went along with this increased stratification in higher education, where certain highly selective schools became much more selective. Even 30 years ago, the most selective institutions

• 10:03Speaker 04

  were still admitting, you know, 20, 30% of their applicants. And as more and more students applied to those schools and as those schools decided not to expand the number of students they admitted, those percentages went down lower and lower till they're now, you know, somewhere around 3% for some of the most selective institutions. And along with that was this stratification by income. So going back to the way things were before World War II, where there were a lot of rich kids going to rich colleges, that sort of replicated itself. And so at the most selective colleges, there was this pattern where students from the richest families were much more likely to go to those schools.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  They were much more likely to admit students from the richest families. And students from lower income families were increasingly funneled towards public institutions and especially less selective public institutions, the ones that had the fewest resources.

• 11:02Lindsay Graham?

  So the current state of affairs, and it's not surprising, is that college attendance benefits colleges. But also, we've talked about that it does specifically benefit the average American who attends college in their entire life. But how do we know that? You've written about a researcher named Raj Chetty. Tell us about him.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Raj Chetty, when I started reporting on him, was at Stanford. Now he's at Harvard. And he is a big data guy, has used incredible amounts of data going back for decades from the IRS, from individual colleges, showing in great detail how the effect of attending a particular institution of higher education, what effect it has on the future earnings of kids from low income families, kids from high income families. And so he's been able, he and his team have been able to get really specific about who benefits from which institutions. And what he's found, he's found a few things. I mean, one is he's found that attending the most selective institutions really does pay off in terms of future earnings,

• 12:06Speaker 04

  especially at the very high end. So that if you want to enter the top 1% of higher earning families in the United States, it really makes a difference to attend one of the, you know, 10 or 20 most selective institutions in the country. He also found out that the kids who benefit the most from that kind of education are the lower income students. That higher income students, it matters where you go to college, but not as much as it matters for low income students. But then the twist in what he found was that actually these institutions, these most selective institutions, were admitting very few students from, even from the middle class, certainly from low income families, but even from the bottom 60%, including a lot of middle class kids,

• 12:48Speaker 04

  that most of their students were from families in the top 20% of family income. And even a significant percentage were from the top 5%, the top 1% of the wealthiest families in the country.

• 13:07Speaker 05

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• 14:34Lindsay Graham?

  Let's turn to the admissions process itself. In your book, one of the key lines came from an admissions officer you spoke to, saying that admissions is less about turning down students you want and more about accepting the students you don't want. He called them in specific CFO specials. And that sounds suspiciously like the exact Varsity Blues scandal. Explain what he meant by that.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is a guy named John Bakkenstedt. When I talked to him, he was the admissions director at DePaul University. And to clarify one thing about what he's saying, that was true for schools not in that very top, most selective tier. But in that sort of, you know, still very good college, second tier, there was a very different kind of economics going on, where because students were applying to so many colleges, you would often admit students and they would say no. They would go somewhere else. And so enrollment management at those schools became this much more complicated process of trying to find the students who would say yes if you went in and would pay your tuition.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  These schools, unlike the schools with the huge endowments like Ivy League schools, were much more dependent on tuition dollars to just make their budget every year. And so their calculations became much more complex. And yeah, the students, as John described it, that they were looking for the most were, yeah, the ones he called the CFO specials. It was students with high family income, but not particularly great academics. Because these were kids, if you admitted them, they would be likely to say yes and go because they didn't have a lot of other options. And beneficially for your bottom line, they would also pay full price or almost full price. And so what John was saying was that for schools like his and lots of others in that selectivity tier,

• 16:22Speaker 04

  admissions had become looking for those kids, those kids who were wealthy, who had lots of family income, but weren't particularly great students. And what he said was that, you know, these are not the students that actually benefit the institution the most because they're not great students, right? They have all these advantages, but it's not showing up in their academic record. And so that sort of distorted, I think, the admissions process for a lot of those schools and continues to do so.

• 16:48Lindsay Graham?

  I myself actually worked in higher education for over 10 years, although not in admissions. But the entire campus groaned every time a new college ranking came out. The best known of these is the US News and World Report, and it rates elite schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford highest, which is probably what they want. What makes these schools so good, according to the rankings?

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Well, as you and your colleagues knew, you know, those rankings are, I mean, I don't want to say they're meaningless because they do track a lot of other data that are pretty meaningful, like Raj Chetty's data showing that going to the most selective schools, on average, financially benefits kids the most. But the small variations in, you know, who's in 19th place and who's in 20th place, you know, those are based on things like your reputation. One of the ways that you can jump in the rankings the most is to just get more applications, right? If you're only going to admit 1,000 kids, if you get 5,000 applications, you're going to admit 20%. If you get 10,000 applications, suddenly you're only admitting 10% and you look a lot better to US News and World Report. So the specifics of how US News does their rankings

• 17:57Speaker 04

  mostly don't reflect a real value in those colleges. But they are incredibly influential because parents, you know, face this incredibly complex marketplace for colleges, where there are just thousands of them. And it's very hard, apart from the few that you know, it's very hard to tell the difference, right? This private college in North Carolina, that private college in Michigan, who can tell the difference when you get their catalogs, right? And so if one gets a higher ranking in US News, that seems like a pretty decent piece of data for a parent. And so it really does matter a lot to those admissions offices and thus it matters a lot to the bottom line of the college. But I think you're right that for anyone in higher education, you know, they are torn between the ideal of higher education

• 18:42Speaker 04

  and the reality of the economics of higher education, right? And so you know that like what you want to do, especially if you're a professor, especially if you're an educator, you want to just get kids who really want to learn. You want to get them to your campus. You want to excite them about learning. You want to expand their minds, all of those things, right? And those qualities don't really have much to do with US News and World Report rankings. Those are not things that you can put in a ranking. And so you go into, you know, part of the reason you go into academia is you don't want to be measured by something as crude as a US News and World Report ranking, right? You don't want to care about the bottom line. But this is this moment, I think, for a lot of higher education folks, where like that's the way it works right now, where you do have to care about those numbers.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  And so I think that's a lot of why those numbers rankle so much because they're a symptom of the turn of higher education away from this more idealistic process of expanding the minds of young people toward this process of running a business and trying to keep afloat and trying to make as much tuition money as you can.

• 19:45Lindsay Graham?

  So, parents caught up in the varsity blue scandal went to extraordinary lengths to get their kids into some of these elite schools, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars over the tuition cost. These were already wealthy families and their kids presumably would be fine no matter where they went. What do you think drove these parents to such lengths?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think there are two things. No matter who you are, if you're a high-income parent or a low-income parent, the data is there that going to a more selective institution will, on average, statistically, benefit your kid the most. So, it's not crazy, this push towards trying to get your student into a more selective institution. And if you're a family with the resources to make that happen, whether it's through the kind of machinations that the families that participated in the scandal used, or just, you know, the regular like SAT prep and hiring an essay coach and all the other things that every other family does, there's always a push that, you know, you could be doing more and that is going to benefit your kid.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  At the same time, I think, you know, for every family, but maybe especially for higher-income families, this is a status symbol, right? Where your child goes to college is a symbol for a lot of parents of how good a parent you are, just like, you know, your handbag, your house, your neighborhood, everything else that is a status symbol. Where your kid goes to college is a marker of your family's status. And so I think that's a huge driver. I think it's so deep in the American subconscious, and I think especially the American affluent subconscious, that it's hard to distinguish between how much of this is sort of a sensible reaction to the economic data and how much of it is a nonsensical reaction to the pressures

• 21:29Speaker 04

  of status and prestige, but it's some mix of those two things.

• 21:33Lindsay Graham?

  Let's talk about standardized tests. They've been a part of the admission process for decades, but recently, and especially as this scandal was coming out, a debate raged over the SAT and ACT, arguing that it favored the wealthy because they could afford test prep and tutors. Many colleges responded by deciding to stop requiring the SAT. This is a bit of a change. What was the result?

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Well, it's very hard to figure out exactly what the result was of selective colleges going test optional and even less selective colleges going test optional, in part because it happened during the pandemic. And so there was this huge shift in what was happening in K-12 education and in higher education, and it coincided with this shift towards test optional. There has been this big backlash against test optional admissions, and most selective schools have gone back to requiring test scores, the ones that went test optional. The institution that I think sort of led the way, both sort of practically, but kind of like ideologically as well, was MIT. And to me, that wasn't surprising. I mean, MIT is a school that really cares about test scores and admissions.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  If you look at their test scores for their admitted students from before the pandemic, before test optional admissions, their average math SAT score was a 780 out of 800. You just couldn't get into MIT unless you had an extremely high SAT score and especially an extremely high SAT math score. That was how they defined themselves. That sort of is who they are. And so it was, I think, a bit of like an existential blow to them to go test optional. And so it's not surprising that they wanted to go back. What I did find surprising and somewhat disheartening is that when they expressed publicly why they were going back to requiring tests, they didn't say what I think was true, which is, well, we want to stay elite.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  We want to continue to admit the kind of kids who can afford, you know, $400, $500 an hour test prep. Instead, they said the opposite. They said, well, we found that going test optional meant that we couldn't find the low-income diamonds in the rough who we want to admit. And if we go back to requiring test scores, it's going to lead to a more level playing field, a fairer playing field for those low-income students. And as far as I can tell, there is no data that says that actually they couldn't admit as many low-income students. If you look at the data from the country as a whole, test optional admissions led to more first-generation students, more low-income students being admitted to the kind of institutions that they wouldn't have gone to before. And I think there's also no evidence that I've seen from MIT that those couple of

• 24:06Speaker 04

  years where they did admit students test optionally, that those students actually struggled, right? Because they had lots of other ways of telling who were the best potential MIT students. What math and science courses did they take in high school? How well did they do on AP tests from those high-level math and science classes? But it's hard publicly to make that case.

• 24:28Lindsay Graham?

  So, this college admissions scandal tarnished the reputation of higher education, but it came at a time in which many students were already starting to question the value of college education. What have we seen in terms of broader enrollment trends over the last six, seven years in comparison to a push toward trade schools?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Well, the data, the data can be a little hard to read on that particular question of sort of who is going to what kind of school. In general, there was this relatively strong decline over the last decade or so, which overlapped with the pandemic, but wasn't entirely caused by the pandemic, where enrollment numbers in the country as a whole decreased after, you know, going up steadily for decades and decades. There has been a slight improvement in some of those numbers over the last couple of years, but on the whole, enrollment is still down. Where exactly they're going, that's a little more complicated. There are more students going to community college, going to two-year degrees, going to get certificates.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Sometimes those are the potentially really beneficial ones in the skilled trades. Other times, they are certificates that the data shows do not pay off particularly well. But in terms of a vast shift in how higher education works, still, most students are opting for four-year degrees over anything else.

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• 28:04Lindsay Graham?

  It's not surprising that at the heart of most of the problems in college admission, it's a matter of money. Access to resources to get your student into college or to prepare your student for college, and then the pressures that colleges themselves face when selecting students. There are two ways to solve this, I imagine. One is public funding for universities. How has government education spending been trending recently and affecting the college admissions process?

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right that for all of the problems in private higher education admissions, it is a little hard to figure out what the right solution is because the momentum of the enrollment management system just seems like it is pushing in the opposite direction and finding individual fixes that particular institutions can do or that the nation can do as a whole. You know, they're out there, but they're tricky. The much more relevant fix is in public higher education. So we were talking about how after World War II, in those next few decades, there was this increasing investment on the part of the federal government and individual states to spend lots of money on public higher education, to admit lots of students

• 29:16Speaker 04

  from each state who maybe wouldn't have gone to college in the past. And so states invested in higher education in the sense that like having more of our students well-educated is not just going to benefit them, it's going to benefit our whole state, it's going to benefit our whole country. And then those investments in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s started to really decline. And the percentage, the amount that we spend per student in public higher education has declined ever since, which has had two effects. One is, in some cases, it's hurt those institutions, especially the less selective ones. They have less money to spend on their students than they did before.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Arguably, that means those students are getting a less beneficial education. But it has also meant that students have picked up the slack. So one of the things that these colleges figured out, both private and public colleges, is that if you raise your tuition, kids will still come. And even if there isn't public money to help them pay for college, they're going to be able to take out loans, they're going to find some way to scrimp and save and pay for this education. And that has had all sorts of negative effects on who goes, on what the outcomes are for those students after they graduate or if they don't graduate. But that is the most clear place where we can reverse this trend.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  If we go back to investing in public higher education the way that we did just a few decades ago, it'll change the whole system. I mean, first of all, there will be a lot more spaces for young people at public institutions. There will be the opportunity to get a good college education that isn't super expensive. And that will, in turn, reduce the pressure on private higher education. It will mean that the sort of intense competition for those few selective spots in private universities will be less because, you know, there are great universities all around you, right? I think that was the way it felt for a lot of those students in the GI era, right? Like, there are great colleges everywhere.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Maybe they're not like super elite and perfect, but like the college down the street, the college, you know, in our state capital, these are really good places to go. And it's good enough for what I need. I can get a great education there. Right now, I don't think that feels true to a lot of students. They feel like, you know, maybe there are a couple of public institutions in my state that can give me a really substantive higher education, and those are often pretty hard to get into. And then there's a pretty dramatic drop-off to the next tier of public institutions that often are not benefiting students as much. And so there's this big push, I think, for a lot of those sorts of kids who would have gone to public higher education to find some sort of private school to go to, even if it's really expensive, even if it's hard to get into.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  I think investing in public higher education the way we used to would diminish that pressure and would change the economics of higher education, not only on the public side, but on the private side as well.

• 32:22Lindsay Graham?

  The other solution to this funding problem, the money problem, is available to only a few institutions because unlike most colleges, some private elite schools like Harvard have endowments in the billions of dollars. They're in the unique position to be able to accept more low-income students, but I guess I need to ask, do they or could they?

• 32:42Speaker 04

  They could, but mostly they do not. So there are some institutions over the last decade that have, some selective institutions that have admitted more low-income students. They measure this by their eligibility for a Pell Grant. But on the whole, you know, that very optimistic era that I described a decade or more ago, when these institutions of higher education that were most selective were saying, we're going to change everything, we're going to level the playing field, we're going to admit more low-income students. The data shows that just has not happened. There is this coalition called the American Talent Initiative that was designed a decade ago to increase the number of low-income students on the most selective, the most

• 33:26Speaker 04

  successful campuses around the country. And as that initiative is coming to an end, the data shows it mostly hasn't worked. Things have not changed on those campuses. They're mostly not admitting more low-income students. Could they? The top tier, absolutely they could. They've got lots of money. They are mostly not admitting those low-income and first-generation students because it's not the student body that they want. There are all of these ways that they are choosing to admit students from high-income families, whether that's requiring the SAT, admitting students who are great at, you know, squash or lacrosse or rowing or sailing, whether it's admitting legacies at a higher

• 34:06Speaker 04

  rate than other students, whether it's using early decision to make students commit to your school before they know what kind of financial aid you're giving them. So yeah, they're continuing to do this. Do they need to? No, I don't think so. I think there are a lot of institutions that could do things differently. Those institutions that are in the next tier down, they are often really trapped because they do not have those huge endowments. They are very much dependent on tuition dollars. And so they are kind of trapped in the realities of enrollment management, which is that they have to continue to look for CFO specials, they have to continue to admit students that maybe they aren't dying to admit academically, but who can pay the full freight. Or, you know, if you give them a small discount, a small scholarship, they're going to come

• 34:51Speaker 04

  and pay a huge amount at your school. So those schools are much more trapped, the very most elite ones. They've got lots of opportunity to change, and mostly they have not.

• 35:01Lindsay Graham?

  When you think about the college admissions process today, aren't there any bright spots, any experiments worth mentioning, schools or states that are trying to make a difference?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think lots of institutions are trying different things to genuinely level the playing field. So I live in Austin, Texas, and one of the institutions that I wrote about almost a decade ago that I continue to be impressed by is the University of Texas, in part because of this system that they have here that some other states have a version of, but no one quite like Texas. It's called the Top 10% Program, though in reality now it's more like the Top 5% Program, where if you are in the top 5% of your high school graduating class in any public school around the state, by GPA, not looking at your test scores, you're automatically admitted to UT Austin, our flagship college, which is a great and really selective institution.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Which means that you get this group of kids who are admitted to UT Austin who don't look like the kind of kids who are admitted to selective flagships in other states, you know, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan. The admitted students at those schools look a lot like the kind of kids who are admitted to the most selective private institutions. But at UT, you know, you do get some kids who are from, you know, really wealthy schools in the suburbs of Dallas or Houston. But you also get kids from the Rio Grande Valley, kids from a ranching town in West Texas, kids from urban neighborhoods in Houston or Dallas.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  And they all come together at UT, often with very different levels of preparation, very different backgrounds. And what UT shows is that it works. You know, when you admit those students to a highly selective, well-endowed college like UT, those students succeed. And that makes a difference to them, it makes a difference to their communities, and it makes a difference to the state. So again, it's not a perfect system, and it's not always living up to its promise, but it is an indicator that if we returned public higher education to a system that looked for the best kids from all around the state, the hardest workers, the most academically inclined kids, not necessarily the richest kids, not necessarily the highest-scoring

• 37:15Speaker 04

  kids, and you bring them together and you educate them together, you create an educated class in your state that is much more democratic, much more inclusive, and that creates for your state this, you know, highly educated group of kids who are really attached to their state, attached to their college, and go on to do great things.

• 37:34Lindsay Graham?

  So if I somehow had the power and appointed you the college admissions czar for everything everywhere, what would you do to improve the system? What would be your first few steps? Not solve everything all at once, but to make a difference?

• 37:48Speaker 04

  All right, I'm awaiting the call whenever you're ready. So I think the first thing that I would do, and it's a huge step, and I'm not exactly sure how to do it, would be to increase the amount that we spend on public higher education across the board in every state in the country. To go back to the kind of percentages that we were spending, the kind of investment in each student that we were making back a few decades ago. That, I think, is the biggest shift that we could make, to invest in public higher education the way we once did. For the most selective institutions, I would encourage them to do two things. I mean, one is, I would encourage them to expand, to just admit lots more kids. They've got these tens of thousands of great students applying, and they continue to only admit a few of them.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  And that benefits them on some level, because it makes them look really selective and look really exclusive. But as those numbers of applicants has grown, then the size of those colleges has not. And they can, and they should grow. And then the final shift, I would say, for all of those institutions, both private and public, is to try to shift the culture of enrollment. And it's a tough thing to do, because, as I've said, the true financial and economic pressures of enrollment management are very hard to deny. But it's going to take not just one individual college saying, "I'm not going to play by the rules of enrollment management anymore." It's going to take a real movement among lots of institutions to say, "We are not going

• 39:14Speaker 04

  to make the kind of decisions that we've made before. We're not going to give legacies an advantage. We're not going to use early decision or athletics as a proxy for admitting more wealthy students. We're going to try to really democratize, re-democratize our incoming classes." There are lots of individual shifts that they could do. You know, legacies, athletes, and early decision, I think, are the easiest shifts. But even beyond that, I think it has to be a cultural shift in the way these institutions think about their job, that their job is not just to find the most elite kids and make them more elite. Their job is to create a new elite, create a successful group of young Americans that

• 39:57Speaker 04

  come from lots of different backgrounds and that have lots of potential.

• 40:01Lindsay Graham?

  Well, Paul Tough, thanks so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 40:06Lindsay Graham?

  That was my conversation with Paul Tough. He's a journalist and author of the book, The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us. From Audible Originals and Airship, this is episode five of Varsity Blues for American Scandal. In our next series. During the early years of the Revolutionary War, General Benedict Arnold inspired American forces to a pivotal victory over the British. But instead of being hailed as a hero, Arnold would face political attacks, mounting debt, and what he saw as public humiliation. Pushed to his breaking point, he began down the path toward the most infamous betrayal in American history.

• 40:50Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com. American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by John Reed, senior producer Andy Beckerman, managing producer

• 41:33Lindsay Graham?

  Emily Burke, audio editing by Mohamed Shazib, music by Throm, sound design by Gabriel Gould. Executive producer for Airship is William Simpson. Executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Nevin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giatze. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. Thirty chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You've lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next. Then it's over. The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible: Stories That Speak to You.