America's Higher Education Crisis

Carls Jr.'s the only place to get the classic Western bacon cheeseburger.

Those onion rings, all that bacon, that tangy barbecue?

Well, have you tangoed with spicy western bacon?

Give me right out the jalapeno heat.

Take a pepperjack punch.

Hmm?

For a limited time, it's high time for a spicy western reintroduction.

Rankle the best deals on the app.

Only a Carl's Jr.

Available for a limited time, exclusive app offers for register My Rewards members only.

Harvard University is about to go to court to defend itself against charges that its admissions process discriminates against Asian American students.

It's the latest salvo in a long-standing battle over affirmative action.

This is a huge fight over a proportionally tiny number of spaces at America's most prestigious colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, students elsewhere are taking on massive debt for a shot at a degree.

These are symptoms of much bigger problems in the nation's higher education system.

And so we have to ask, is that system sustainable?

If not, what could fix it?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me in studio today is a voice that you will recognize as that of Jillian White, Senior Editor at The Atlantic.

Hello, Jillian.

Hi, can't get rid of me.

It's so great to have you, as always.

Joining us in studio today are two staff writers on The Atlantic, each of whom covers education.

First, a voice you've heard before, Aaliyah Wong.

Hello, Aaliyah.

Hello.

Woo!

Hello, glad to be here.

So excited to be back.

Yeah.

And joining us for the first time, making his Radio Atlantic debut, is Adam Harris, who covers IR Ed in the Atlantic.

Hello, Adam.

How's it going?

It's going well.

This is your first Radio Atlantic visit.

It is.

I'm excited.

This is going to be fun.

So am I.

So next week, the U.S.

District Court in Boston begins hearing arguments in a lawsuit against Harvard University brought by an organization called Students for Fair Admissions.

The suit charges that Harvard's admission process discriminates against Asian American applicants.

Already, this trial has gotten a ton of attention, and there's a good chance that whatever this court decides will be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, teeing us up for a definitive ruling on the future of affirmative action in America.

But I don't want to focus in on affirmative action, at least not just yet.

It seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this case seems to be symptomatic of a much, much bigger problem in American higher education.

There seems to be this intensifying fight for a proportionately tiny number of slots at America's most prestigious universities.

The scramble to get into an elite school seems to to be skewing everything in our education system, starting with wealthy parents trying to get their kids into some fancy preschool and ending with a lot of adults incurring massive amounts of student loan debt that will haunt them through their adulthoods.

Adam, you've been covering higher ed for a good while.

You were at the Chronicle of Higher Education before the Atlantic.

Could this be the beginning of the end of higher ed in the U.S.?

Adams, well, there's a strong argument that higher education needs to shift its model or, you a lot of institutions may go by the wayside.

You've already started to see where

some of the smaller liberal arts colleges that saw decades of success and

they had their students and they had their alumni pipelines, some of those institutions are starting to die out because

A lot of students are looking at that and saying, why would I want to pay that much money to

go to an institution that may not have the same prestige?

Now, the Harvards and the Yales and the University of Texases and these large institutions with these huge endowments, they don't have some of those same issues that a lot of these smaller colleges do have to grapple with.

But we are at a kind of crossroads where a lot of institutions have to rethink their tuition-based models because students are saying that what's the purpose of going into so much debt in order to get a college degree?

Aaron Powell, we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about a pretty small number of institutions.

It's sort of a pretty tiny universe of students.

And Aaliyah, why?

Why do we focus so much on the elite, like the Ivies and other elite institutions?

I grapple with that a lot.

I've gotten in trouble for it.

People call me out for being obsessed with the elite schools.

I think in thinking about the sort of outsized role that they play in some of these larger issues, whether it's this kind of obsession with

getting into the top school and having a competitive edge over your friends, or

in sort of maybe abandoning some of your genuine passions because you're trying to prime yourself for what you think these schools are wanting.

All these sorts of forces, I think, are really perpetuated and exacerbated by these schools.

So they deserve the attention and they are, whether we like it or not, models for the rest of the higher education system.

People might like to poo-poo Harvard, but they're still looking at it to see what it's doing.

And that's, that's, you know, I know you don't want to start talking about affirmative action yet, but that's one reason people are concerned that this could be the death knell for affirmative action across the country, not just at Harvard, because it is such a bellwether.

So I'm wondering what makes these top schools, I think often when we talk about top schools, people always say the IVs and just assume, you know, those are kind of the top of the top.

But there's an entire ranking system that people are pretty obsessed with of the top colleges.

And I remember being obsessed with it when I was you know looking at colleges and kind of seeing where things ranked and selectivity was one of the things that was part of the rankings.

So it was like if you had a school that let in less than 10% of the people who applied that seemed to be a fairly high number of maybe like the top 25 top 50 schools.

So I'm just wondering what at this point what is it that even makes a school a top school anymore?

Is it just legacy of excellence?

Is it what is it?

So me and Aliyah were actually just talking about this the other day.

You know, what is it that comprises or makes up a top school?

And it is, it's a mix of the rankings, it's a mix of their selectivity.

But then there are also these designations, as Aaliyah was looking up.

So, you have like the R1s, the Research One universities, and then you have like the AAU institutions

where they enroll a small figure of black and Latino students, but they have this history and this legacy of being one of those top schools.

And they tend to have more funding.

These are the schools with the big endowments.

It's kind of this large confluence of factors that goes into being a top school.

Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, it's funny because we were just wondering, you know, what is an elite school?

We kind of bandy about this term all the time, but it's not, there's no set definition.

And I was talking with Yoni yesterday, and sort of the notion of an elite school isn't just these, that it kind of fulfills a set, you know, number of criteria, but it also has this kind of culture on campus.

I think a lot of the schools tend to be on the East Coast.

They tend to kind of have some of those quintessential qualities, whether it's a really nice manicured campus,

a kind of younger student population, a lot of amenities.

But I think something that does seem pretty entrenched, particularly in this country, is this notion that selectivity is a proxy for one's quality and selectivity is seen as sort of a means of gauging merit.

Yeah, and it seems a little bit like kind of a vicious cycle, right?

So we're talking about history, how long the institution has been around, endowment, which is basically kind of like the intergenerational wealth of a college or a university, and then selectivity, but like all of those things feed into each other year after year.

You know, if you have hundreds of thousands of kids applying to school because forever it's been incredibly selective and incredibly well respected and has a ton of money and a ton of amenities, then it's really hard next year to say, you know, hundreds and thousands of kids aren't going to apply again and kind of just keep fueling that cycle and then bring in more money and they'll have a bigger endowment and keeps feeding into the same thing over and over.

And part of the thing that, you know, I've wondered as I reported on this and reported on mostly the economics of it is, is there any, ever any way for new models, newer schools, newer ways of thinking about higher education to actually break through in a way that is either going to change that or give students kind of the same thing that they're looking for, which is an education and a leg up in the professional world that is as respected or as helpful and useful as the old model of like going to this prestigious, incredibly expensive four-year college.

We can call it the Hogwarts model if you want.

Yeah.

So there are actually a couple of different models and a couple of different schools that people are now looking to and saying that maybe this is something that we should try to do.

And I actually

have reported a lot on Berea College down in Berea, Kentucky, Carter G.

Woodson's alma mater.

Oh, one knows.

I have been diving deep into the life of Carter G.

Woodson, which is fascinating.

Where do you have this time to read five biographies?

It's called weekends.

It's called weekends and weeknights.

So Berea College has not charged students any tuition since 1892.

And they have a $1.2 billion endowment.

But the way that they spend their endowment is actually really interesting because basically they take 5% of their endowment every year.

And that's how they pay all of the students' tuition.

That's how they basically keep the lights on in the place.

And I went down there because I was trying to figure out whether or not this was like a replicable model, like if this was something that other colleges could do.

The answer is probably no.

But there are colleges that have shifted

to the similar work college model that is essentially saying that all of the students who are enrolled in this institution work on campus or have a job.

So

that could either be working in the financial aid office, that could be doing general groundskeeper work, or they can be a web producer or

all of these different jobs around campus that one helps colleges keep the cost down, but two,

Baria likes to say that it instills a sense of work and responsibility into the students.

But you've seen colleges like Paul Coyne College, for example, and HBCU in Dallas, Texas,

that looked like it was going to close about a decade ago.

And they just recently, you know, they've kind of pulled themselves up and they've switched to this work college model, and now they've opened a new campus in Plano.

It's this whole range of different things.

So there are a lot of different models that people are looking at that might be sustainable.

One of the effects of focusing on things like selectivity and

precisely on the things that limit the impact that the higher education system can have on all students

is that it kind of points us away from a universe in which higher education is a democratic value rather than a meritocratic value.

We talk about America as being this egalitarian democratic system.

And one would imagine that in such a system there would be an emphasis or a focus on trying to actually disperse

the fruits of higher education as broadly and widely as possible.

How did it come to be that we focused so much on prestige and selectiveness in the U.S.

as

a symptom of quality in higher ed?

I think in many ways it's sort of this ironic result of this effort to democratize higher education, which started probably in the let's see the early 20th century and then the Merrill Act which created the land-grant colleges but once college became an opportunity or something that people beyond the sort of elite you know Protestant aristocrats could participate in, especially with the GI Bill, there was just this flood of students into these colleges and that ultimately in many ways had this perverse effect of kind of entrenching some of these

fixation on selectivity and this notion that to be a good school, you have to be a really selective school.

And I think, you know, I've been doing a lot of research kind of comparing what makes an elite school in the U.S.

different from one in, say, the UK, whether it's Oxford or Cambridge or Tsinghua in China, which is incredibly selective.

Like, their acceptance rates are well below Stanford's.

Like,

it's an incredibly incredibly hard school to get into.

And they, as public institutions, they have retained that sort of

that sort of public mission and that sort of role as a public good.

Yeah.

Is the education worth the value that people place on it?

I mean, by and large, yes.

It's always interesting when I, when I, you know, you open up the Times and you see an op-ed that's like, oh, is college actually worth it?

And at the end, they're like, well, maybe you shouldn't go to college or maybe other people.

And the people who write those op-eds typically, their kids go to college and they go to four-year institutions and they get a bachelor's degree and they do that traditional path.

But if you simply look at the numbers, so Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce puts out this long report a year or two ago that basically shows that a bachelor's degree is worth about $2.8 million over a lifetime.

And bachelor's degree holders earn about 31% more than people with associate's degrees and 84% more than people with high school diplomas.

Now, of course, that is kind of unequally distributed, where black and Latino

graduates make about a million dollars less over their lifetime than white college graduates.

But the numbers are pretty clear that a college degree is worth it.

It's kind of like the foot in the door.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: And does the prestige premium track with that?

I mean, does a degree from Harvard or Yale mean that much more to you in the bottom line earnings than a degree from University of Central Florida?

Well,

there's this interesting question of

And

a lot of policy experts are interested in this question of undermatching, right?

Where it's low-income minority students not going to the most selective institution that they could ultimately attend.

And the reason why that is, is because there is that prestige premium to say that like most of the members of Congress have gone to elite institutions.

All of the judges on the Supreme Court have gone to elite institutions.

That was a factor, in fact, in the unsuccessful nomination of Harriet Myers.

She had gone to Southern Methodist University, and that was seen as like,

how dare you go to SMU and even pretend to try to be a justice on the Supreme Court?

And as someone who was born in Texas, SMU is very Texas prestigious.

It felt like shade.

I mean, it's a great school.

I have a bunch of friends who went there.

But generally,

there is a prestige premium that comes with going to the Harvards or the Yales or the Princeton of the world.

I was actually just looking at some of this data for a piece I'm working on, and there is, you know, there's a lot of compelling evidence that

you do get higher earnings if you go to a selective school.

But there's also somewhat of a negating factor there with sort of job satisfaction and just quality of life.

There was a Gallup survey maybe a few years ago that asked people, you know, just how happy are you with your jobs?

And

do you intend to stay here?

And that's when we saw you see a little bit more nuance about the answer is that going to selective school isn't going to mean you're going to have a much better job experience in terms of some of these more intangible qualities.

So let's talk about debt then

in this context.

And Jillian, I'm looking at you here.

The stories that we have heard about the rise in student debt have been extraordinary.

They have been stunning.

This debt has accelerated massively in the past few years, and it has just these crippling emotional effects on people's lives and livelihoods for years after they graduate.

Jillian, what caused this explosion in student debt?

Yeah, I mean, well, the biggest thing that caused the explosion in student debt was more people going to school and schools, the price of school, the price of tuition rising astronomically.

So before, where you could like go to a top-tier college and, you know, get out of it with maybe 10 grand in debt, that is an absolute joke now.

And one of the things that we also see that happens a lot is the people who end up with some of the most crippling debt are people who actually do not have that elite college bump.

So they're not actually getting the premium on their earnings.

So you have people who go to, for instance, a two-year school or a four-year school that is not as prestigious and perhaps don't even finish.

And then they are saddled with two and a half, three years worth of tuition debt.

They do not have an associate's or a bachelor's that's actually going to get them a better job with higher earnings.

So now they're stuck paying back, I don't know, somewhere between $15,000 to $35,000 of debt, but they still have kind of the same caliber of a job that they would have had if they had just graduated high school and gone straight to work.

But now they have all of those monthly payments that then completely derail their quality of life and their economics in other ways, right?

So they can't.

This is also where we see a lot of people where there was a lot of kind of teasing millennials about not leaving home.

I mean, this is a lot of it.

Like if you are paying four or $500 a month or more in student loan debts and you are making $26,000 a year and you have a car payment that is $150 a month, where exactly are you going to get the money for rent?

So that is the thing that I found the most interesting about debt and about student loan debt is that it kind of preys upon the people who are getting the least out of the system.

Wow.

Are there

so one of the pieces of context context here is that the number of students enrolled in America's higher ed system has

hit a peak, right?

We're on the downswing.

Yeah, there were about 19 million students enrolled in higher education, give or take, around 2013.

And since then, it's kind of been a precipitous decline.

But a lot of that is driven by the kind of deflation of the higher education, the for-profit sector,

where you've had a lot of for-profits that have either been closed, the ITT tech schools that have closed, Corinthian colleges, things of the sort.

So that's driving a lot of the decline.

But the buildup in debt happened when

there was a huge demand for slots at universities and colleges.

Has that

sort of also started to plateau and decline in line with the shrinking numbers?

Adam's shaking his head.

I'm going to agree with that.

And I mean, mean, part of it is, I think it's important to remember, kind of the buildup in this debt happened when we as a country kept telling everyone, the only way forward for you is a higher education.

The only way forward for you is to take on this massive amount of debt, even if you can't really afford it.

There will be no successful future for you if you do not have a college degree, which then allowed for a lot of for-profit institutions, which did not have great return on investment and had pretty abysmal graduation rates and pretty abysmal job placement rates to flourish and kind of take a bunch of money from people who were kind of already in a vulnerable position and saddle them with debt.

And while some of those for-profit colleges have shuttered, The message about what you need to do to be successful in America has not really changed.

And some of the models that Adam was talking about earlier have not necessarily scaled.

So you still have the same message to every 17, 18, 19 year old, 20, 22 year old around the country about what exactly they need to do.

All the while, the cost of higher education continues to climb.

So

it's not really getting better, even though fewer people might have access to some of some of the institutions, some of the universities that remain.

Why isn't there

a free college for everybody, the way that there is, you know, big public K-12 system.

It is not because they did not try.

And they're still trying to have a free college system.

Yeah, I feel like I keep on hearing.

Yeah, free college is everywhere.

And it's also kind of such a

improper name for it because right now what people are thinking about and talking about is either tuition-free, so not covering your books or your living expenses, your room, your board, all that stuff, your food.

And or they're talking about debt-free, which actually would cover all of those things.

But a lot fewer people are talking about debt-free college than they are about tuition-free college.

And of course, there was a lot of momentum.

You heard Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton eventually talking about it during the election.

But Donald Trump's campaign kind of explicitly said, no, no, no, no, no, this is not something we're going to do.

It's not necessarily on our policy platform.

So

the conversation has kind of shifted to the states.

And there are dozens of free college, tuition, free, whatever kind of college, free college plans throughout the country.

But the argument is kind of really happening now at the state level.

What did you find?

You recently reported on

George Washington, founding father's originalist vision for a national university.

And why didn't that vision ever come about?

So this was perhaps one of the most Atlantic-y stories that I

wanted to write.

But essentially, you know, you have Benjamin Rush and James Madison and James

and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and all of these founding fathers are talking about this national university because they wanted it as a form of civic education

and not only civic education, but a way to get into the arts and the sciences and all of these different things.

And at certain points in history, it looked like it was going to happen.

I mean, it looked like it was funded in the early 1800s and then Congress didn't really do anything with it.

And then, you know, so War of 1812, Civil War, 1870s, there's this really big push and everybody's like, yeah, like National University, let's do this thing.

Around that time, George Washington University is founded as kind of like a, yeah, maybe this can be the national university.

But it ultimately doesn't happen because around that same 1870s, like a little bit earlier, you have the Morrill Act, which builds out this network of state universities, which is the land-grant universities.

And then before the 1900s, you have another Morrill Act because black people weren't helped by the first Morrill Act.

And that second Murrill Act says, okay, now there are a bunch of HBCUs that the black people can go to.

And

after that, there's kind of this elaborate web of universities, of public universities mixed in with the private institutions that kind of makes a national university kind of seem like something that wouldn't be as helpful

because the universities that were were kind of already doing the job.

Wow.

So part of where we are now, we've got this island of prestigious schools with giant endowments, most of which in the U.S.

at least are private.

And this tiny universe,

these institutions serve how many of

what proportion of America's

negligibles.

Yeah, it's like a percent of a percent of a percent.

But so if you get into one of these things, if you get in, not only is your tuition paid for, but those degrees are worth millions of dollars in your lifetime.

And the schools are likelier to get you to that degree.

So

all of this signals these schools being an ever greater focus of more and more students and more and more parents.

And that is all setting the stage for this affirmative action battle that we're seeing right now with Harvard.

Aaliyah, what's the case that Students for Fair Admissions is making against against Harvard University?

Right.

So this case is different from previous affirmative action cases in that it homes in on Asian Americans as the sort of victims of this policy.

And it kind of purports that it's having this ironic effect because affirmative action was designed to protect and to elevate the outcomes of minority groups.

And it's trying to argue that, no, it's actually hurting a minority group and benefiting whites.

And so it's actually taking kind of this

very, it's kind of using and leveraging this twist in the narrative.

It's actually being spearheaded by Ed Bloom, who's the same legal strategist who was behind Fisher.

Fisher versus Texas, which was the prior Supreme Court decision, just a few years old at this point,

that essentially allowed the affirmative action program that the University of Texas had put in place to continue.

Right, right.

So it was the last case, and it basically reiterated that colleges can use what's called a sort of plus factor.

They can basically use it after they've considered all these other characteristics and

looked at all their other criteria and say, well, you know, if we're making a decision between this student and this student, we're going to

maybe, you're going to give preference to the underrepresented student.

What this suit does, it doesn't

explicitly advance this as much as I'd be interested in, but it does say that legacy admits people who have relatives or parents who are alumni, as well as athletes, athletes who are recruited who, contrary to public opinion, tend to be white middle class.

So they're trying to use this data to show that

white students are benefiting from this.

At the end of the day,

whether or not there's bias happening, it's just because of the nature of holistic admissions, which are so complex.

You're looking at this whole person and their context.

So to assert that an Asian American student is being disadvantaged

precisely because of his or her race, but not because she doesn't have the characteristics that they're looking for, isn't

interested in majoring in the kind of academic focus they want to prioritize,

this suite of factors.

It's just, I just don't know how that's going to be argued.

But it is, you know, it is politically palatable now that it's it's saying that a minority group is is

being harmed.

Unlike, say, Abigail Fisher,

who brought the Fisher versus Texas.

Now, has affirmative action at these highly selective institutions,

how much of a boost has that given to black and brown students in

diversifying these student bodies?

So

there's a stat that's essentially saying that a lot of these elite universities that use affirmative action, because when we're talking about affirmative action and race concert submissions,

we should remember that not that many colleges are selective enough to need to use race and admissions.

So it's really only these upper crust institutions that are using race as a factor in admissions.

Anyway,

but essentially,

what the court has decided is that the reason why you can use race and admissions is for the diversity of the campus generally and the overall well-being of the rest of the students.

So basically,

affirmative action is good because it helps white people.

And affirmative action is good because it helps Asian Americans, because it helps black people, and because

it helps the entire campus community,

which is a really important distinction.

You will get exposed to brown people.

Exactly.

It's a really important distinction because in Brown v.

Board,

it was basically saying that the 14th Amendment

is a social justice amendment.

It is saying that a majority cannot overtake a minority if they pass a law and the president signs it and the majority is ruled out and it's still an illegal law or it unjustly harms a minority, then the Supreme Court's there to get rid of it.

But in the Backe decision, which is Alan Backe, University of California Davis,

in 1978, and this is the major affirmative action case that everyone kind of draws on, that shifted.

And it wasn't a social justice thing.

It was a individual rights thing.

And so now, as you've kind of moved through litigation on up into this point,

you have people kind of poking holes at that individual rights argument and saying that, oh, yeah,

this is infringing upon this group's individual rights.

This is infringing upon this group's individual rights.

And so

that is all to say that at this point, you still have kind of negligible enrollments of black and Latino and

underrepresented classes at these institutions.

So

is there something better than affirmative action?

So

that's actually a really good question.

There have been things that have been tried to boost black and brown enrollments.

A lot of them have failed.

But a lot of legal experts who I've talked to have basically said that we've never actually tried affirmative action.

Because if we were actually to try affirmative action, that is saying that this group has been historically

under, you know, underserved, and that can be the Mexican-American community, that can be an Asian-American community, that can be a black community.

This group has been historically underserved.

They should have some form of reparations, some form of social justice.

So the argument is that affirmative action has never actually been given a chance since it was kind of limited in 1978.

What about this lottery idea?

What about, you know, just say everyone that meets a certain basic threshold of ability to perform at one of these higher education institutions,

all their names get thrown thrown into a giant pot, and some admissions officer somewhere

shakes up the hat, pulls a name, does that successfully begin to do that?

That's exactly how it'll happen, right in the regal

boardroom of Harvard.

I totally imagine.

There's probably an acapella group in the background.

Yeah, you'll be there.

Wow.

So what about the lottery idea?

Yeah, I'm actually increasingly a fan of it.

Or I think, you know, it sounds ludicrous just because it's so antithetical to how we think about admissions as a as a

you know as the result of a meritocracy and that it's sort of the extension of that

but you know what we were talking about earlier we just have these soaring numbers of incredibly talented, accomplished,

eligible, you know, that's not even a question anymore that we have, you know, they have students who have perfect test scores and perfect GPAs and have all the credentials.

And in many ways, it already is random.

Like I've been talking with some students, many of them Asian American, and

that's sort of the kind of fact of life that they've accepted.

That one of the students I spoke with, she didn't get into Georgetown, but she got into Yale.

It's not like

if you apply to all of them, you're not going to get into any of them.

It's a very random process.

And I think it would sort of

assuage some of the concerns about bias

and

other

sorts of imbalances that that may be kind of manufactured.

I think in theory it's a good idea.

Whether that would ever

work, I don't think so.

I think it just the very sort of American mentality of

we did everything we

we could to get to this point.

I'm not just going to have my name thrown in a hat and then have an a cappella band singing and

then that will decide my fate whether I get a million dollars

in my lifetime or not.

Yeah, I think it would reveal in some sense what is probably to a great degree true about higher education, that it is a matter of luck.

The admissions process is inherently subjective.

And as long as you have a selective institution,

the thing that gets forgotten is that all of these students are qualified.

Like you have to have some basic qualifications to get into these schools.

It's not like, oh, my score was a little bit higher, so I should get in.

They have a baseline qualification of which to choose from.

So it is, it's an inherently subjective thing that kind of works.

And

it's very subjective to the whims of the person.

In the day, like, oh, we really need

people from

the

Midwest today, and we really need people who want to major in the humanities.

It's very artificial.

And I think a lot of people don't realize that, but that's very much the reality.

So part of me also wonders to what extent like a lottery that says, okay, you know, a bunch of you have perfect test scores, took all the APs, IBs, whatever.

You know, we're talking a lot about kids who they are undoubtedly eligible.

They, you know, have all of the things that look fantastic on an application.

But part of me worries, and I know this is mostly a conversation about higher education, about

the trickle-down effect that has started with the selectivity of higher education,

that has meant that more people are trying to get into really, really selective high schools.

More people are trying to get into really, really selective middle schools.

I mean, exactly.

It's a whole thing, right?

So by the time we say that like these kids are undoubtedly eligible and undoubtedly qualified, it's just hard for me when I think back to, you know, my parents or my aunts and uncles and the stories of like who got into really good schools.

Like what we were talking about were largely a group of people who were all going to similar public high schools and distinguishing themselves on a slightly more level playing field.

You know, we weren't talking about gobs of kids at Andover and Exeter fighting over lottery spots.

We were talking about an actual ability to kind of raise yourself up through education.

And I don't know that that's what's happening anymore because you have kids at younger and younger ages fighting to get into these really elite private institutions that will then get them into the running for really elite private institutions.

And it feels like in a country where inequality is already rampant, I don't know that like solving it right at that convictions level where you've already underwent years of educational inequality, that that is then going, that a lottery, for instance, or a better way of doing something of that nature is actually going to give kids who are brilliant, but, you know, went to Trenton High or something where they didn't have as many AP options a chance to get into Harvard in the same way it's going to give someone from Lawrenceville Prep, sorry, like I went to high school in Jersey, so these are my examples.

In the same way that's going to give a kid from Lawrenceville Prep who was like on the crew team and like had all these great AP scores, but you know, maybe is also now in kind of that lottery group the same chance.

And that's kind of something that I always start thinking about, kind of like the downstream effects of the selectivity of college and how early that starts and how we can possibly fix that.

Well, this takes me back to my proposal that we just eliminate private schools.

We just get rid of them and just kind of create just one school system.

As I recall, that argument was persuasive on none other than the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

It was.

It was.

We had a fleeting moment of

consensus.

I think, like, Natasha Warik, who's a professor at Harvard, she said that, you know, if there were a lottery system, they could create a sort of sophisticated

model in which you would be able to kind of give preference to students, you know, if they if they faced hardship or didn't have the same opportunities.

Of course, that's sort of like theoretical.

And no matter what, I think people are going to figure out a way to game the system because that's just the country we live in.

And so, I guess that leads me to my last question.

It feels like the only way out of this.

So, on the one hand, if we're recognizing that

a degree from a prestigious higher ed institution is really as rare, as precious,

as much a product of luck, and

as

parents and students seem to think that it is, then the only way to make the higher education system work for more students is to actually boost up the whole rest of the higher education system to make more institutions that are capable of delivering a valuable education for more students.

And Adam, I'll point this question at you.

Funding for public universities has been going in the opposite direction.

States have been shrinking their resources for this.

What are the pathways by which we could create a more egalitarian higher education ecosystem?

State legislatures could pump more money into their public education systems.

That is, I mean, one of the most fundamental ways that things could change is to fund higher education.

And we have seen a precipitous decline in higher education funding.

And

one of the interesting things is that, you know, kind of thinking about how higher education might even exacerbate inequality, it's like the institutions that are helping low-income minority students the most are the ones that are most at risk.

It's the public regional colleges, it's the Hispanic serving institutions, it's the HBCUs.

So it's not the University of Texas with its very small percentage of black students or Latino students.

It is the

Mississippi Valley states or the Delta states, both of which are in Mississippi.

So

I think there does have to be a fundamental shift in the way that people think about higher education where

as we talked about a little bit earlier, it's this thought of this is an individual good for an individual person as opposed to it's better if the country is educated and more people are attending college and graduating.

you know, it provides an economic bump for the area if you want if you want to take the economic argument.

I think that

there are also ways that people could do this where you have a large college with a billion-dollar endowment.

Why not have a redistribution of those endowments or something like that?

There have to be some pretty radical solutions that are proposed

to fundamentally change this because the way that things are going, it's not looking great.

All right.

Stick around.

In a minute, we will come come back with Keepers, our closing segment.

What do you not want to forget?

Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs.

That's why you need Shopify.

They'll help you create a convenient, unified command center for whatever your business throws at you, whether you sell online, in-store, or both.

You can sell the way you want, attract the customers you need, and keep them coming back.

Turn those what-ifs into why-nots with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

That's shopify.com slash special offer.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

Price and Coverage Match Limited by State Law.

Not available in all states.

All right, every week I ask our listeners the question, what have you heard, read, watched, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

We will start, as usual, with a keeper from one of our listeners, Jeremy.

My keeper is other keepers from my students.

I teach high school in Berkeley, California, including a class for 11th and 12th graders called Social Justice.

Inspired by the weekly Radio Atlantic tradition of sharing keepers, I have introduced the practice of sharing our keepers at the end of each unit.

Students write down their keepers, their takeaways, the ideas and stories that they will carry with them going forward, and then share them aloud with the rest of the class.

Last week, At the end of our unit focused on the refugee crisis and human migration, students shared keepers such as these.

These people seeking refuge are just like us.

They have family, friends, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Anyone can become a refugee.

We should remember that.

Though it may be difficult to remember, refugees are more than numbers.

They are people and they deserve to be heard.

And lastly,

I don't want to forget the sense of hope that all of the refugees had on their journey.

Imagine if we were in that same situation.

What would we do?

From Berkeley, California, thank you to everyone at the Radio Atlantic team for the inspiration.

Wonderful.

Students sharing keepers.

Get some of those students to call our number and share keeper 2029.

All right.

Adam Harris.

What is your keeper this week?

So as you all know, I have a daughter and every,

like every day there's a new thing.

And this weekend,

we're sitting down for breakfast and

I start eating a pear.

And she's sitting there, you know, she's watching Super Y

and I'm eating my pear and she looks at me and like she reaches towards the pear and I'm like, you want some of this?

She hasn't really started eating food.

So she,

I'm like, you want some of this.

So I cut some of the pear off and she just starts eating eating the pear and watching her show and like I'm sitting there and I'm like this is a beautiful moment and it's been a lot of like ugly in the world and I just wanted that moment to like last for a long time and so I like recorded it and like took a bunch of pictures and we have this old video camera that I like took a took like a D V video and like all of this stuff.

But it's just like every day I get like a little reminder that like the world is still beautiful in like these very small ways.

And how old is she now?

She's nine months.

I wish listeners could see her.

She's the cutest thing I've ever seen.

That's

a good beautiful person.

Aliyah.

I am childless.

I don't have good stories coming from the home.

But sort of relevant to the topic we were talking about, I've been doing a lot of interviews with students about the affirmative action case.

A lot of Asian American students who are either in the Ivy League currently or are seeking to be in it.

So, you know, very much what we would expect in terms of their goals and their priorities.

But it was just really, I think, heartening to hear a lot of them, none of them really said that they felt that they were disadvantaged or that they were being,

that their spots were going towards less advantaged people of color.

I think there was a lot of nuance and candor and just self-reflection in their comments on it.

And, you know, they really think that this narrative that Asian Americans as a whole just are sort of categorically opposed to this because they're disadvantaged.

And they acknowledged,

we are held to higher standards.

We do have to have higher test scores and higher grades.

that doesn't mean it's not fair.

And it was, you know, in contrast to some of the themes we were alluding to with this sort of very narcissistic and self-centered

drive that's fueling a a lot of these

this this sort of select selective college obsession.

I think it was a good reminder that it's not always the case.

Yeah.

Wow.

All right.

So far, faith in humankind.

Two out of two.

Jillian White, what's your keeper?

Somewhat typically.

I am going to differ on this a little bit.

So

my keeper this week is the importance of commiserating.

So I am getting married imminently.

And while thanks.

And while, you know, that part is exciting, wedding planning for large weddings for anyone who has done it is the absolute pit.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

It is, yeah, it's not fun.

So one of the things that's happened recently is that a buddy of mine, Lizzie O'Leary, who is the inimitable reporter and host, we realized we're getting married 24 hours apart and decided to be wedding planning commiserating buddies.

And the thing that we both realized is that no matter how long you're actually planning a wedding for and including your family for, within the final few weeks, everyone will lose their entire mind, the whole thing.

They will have all of the opinions, all of the feelings, want all of the things changed when you're already super stressed and you're just like, why is this happening?

And the best thing ever has been being able to just tweet or text or email her and just be like, hi, this is what happened to me today.

And she's like, oh, same.

And it's not just with this.

You know, I think we are, as Adam mentioned, in kind of a weird and difficult time and things are pretty confusing.

And as much as it is useful to kind of just keep plowing ahead, sometimes it's really nice to have somebody to just look at and say, hey.

Things kind of suck right now, huh?

And have them kind of edify and validate that feeling.

And then it makes it easier, I think, a little bit easier to move along and let you know that you're not alone in that feeling and that there's somebody kind of always in there with you.

Yeah,

you turn that around.

Thanks, thanks.

Faith in humankind's reanitation.

Yeah, I'm going to say.

So, as for me,

I am still cavelling over the just wonderful week last week that was the Atlantic Festival.

It was

just the most Atlantic-y week possible.

It was a direct infusion of ideas, both challenging, compelling,

from

every

different domain of thought and letters.

But my personal highlight was

getting to sit down with Harvey Feierstein,

who is, of course,

iconic actor, playwright, drag star, well before RuPaul's drag race ever existed,

which incidentally was almost also my keeper shout out purse first by Bob the drag queen

Harvey Feistein was who was you know out of the closet before the closet was even a name for a thing Harvey Feierstein

sat down with us at the Atlantic Festival last week and I got to interview him and at the end of our interview this happened

I think I have nothing else to say but then I'm walking out of this.

I've never been so insulted in my life.

Harvey Weinstein.

Thank you very much.

Harvey Firestein!

Harvey Feierstein!

Oh my god!

I didn't.

The tape is going to lie.

The tape is going to lie.

Thank you so much.

I think so.

Ah, yes.

Harvey,

being the great good sport that he is,

played it off beautifully.

And it will remain a moment that I am not soon going to forget.

It was beautiful.

It's also one of my keepers.

So, yeah, faith in humankind, four out of four.

Five out of five, actually, if we include Jeremy's listener keeper.

Adam, Aaliyah.

Jillian, thank you so much as always for an edifying, illuminating conversation.

We've solved it all.

We don't have jobs anymore.

We're still figuring it all out.

Thank you.

Till next time.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Aalia Wong and Adam Harris for joining us.

And thanks again to the inestimable Jillian White.

Thanks, as always, to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

The immortal interpretation of the Battle Hymn of the Republic that serves as our theme song is by the one and only John Batiste.

What is your keeper?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information and what you don't want to forget.

Check us out at theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May your learning be constant and its cost far exceeded by its value.

We'll see you next week.