Speaker 1: I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews,
Speaker 1: exploring the headlines you thought you understood and finding the
Speaker 1: lessons we can all learn from them. Already in this series,
Speaker 1: I've spoken with Sahil Patel about Netflix, Mike Isaac about Uber,
Speaker 1: and Peter Robeson about Boeing. I'm at Bethany mac twelve
Speaker 1: on Twitter. If there's a difining commonality to upper income
Speaker 1: life in America for people with children, it's school stress.
Speaker 1: How do you get your kids into the right preschool
Speaker 1: such that they can get into the right high school
Speaker 1: such that they can go to the very best college?
Speaker 1: And what sports should they play in order to improve
Speaker 1: those very difficult odds, because, oh my goodness, everything hinges
Speaker 1: on whether or not they attend the right college. So
Speaker 1: for anyone who is already worried, the title of Pultov's
Speaker 1: new book, The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes
Speaker 1: or Breaks Us, is not exactly reassuring. He writes, it
Speaker 1: sometimes felt as though the country was splitting into two
Speaker 1: separate and unequal nations, with a college diploma the boundary
Speaker 1: that divided them. As that quote shows, the issues this
Speaker 1: book raises are so much greater than the stress it
Speaker 1: causes the elite. And while we're all fixated on the
Speaker 1: varsity blues scandal, that really is just the proverbial canary
Speaker 1: in the coal mine. College, which was supposed to be
Speaker 1: the great equalizer in America, has become something that both
Speaker 1: depends on and reinforces class and privilege. This is a
Speaker 1: huge deal for the business world, and not even mostly
Speaker 1: because the impending student loan bomb threatens our economy. If
Speaker 1: we're losing talent, we're losing more than mere words can say.
Speaker 1: This is, also, of course, a huge deal for our society.
Speaker 1: It's not too grandiose to say that education determines the
Speaker 1: shape of the society in which we live, So what
Speaker 1: shape do we want that to take. Tuff's book was
Speaker 1: fascinating to me for another reason. I'm obsessed with how
Speaker 1: data can be manipulated, as Mark Twain famously said, lies
Speaker 1: damn lies and statistics, How apparent facts can be not
Speaker 1: factual at all upon closer examination. How words on the
Speaker 1: surface can mask the reality underneath. This is a major
Speaker 1: underlying theme of his book. What colleges tell the world
Speaker 1: they want in their student body is not actually what
Speaker 1: they want. The business of standardized testing is not only
Speaker 1: more ruthless than you ever would have imagined, it's disingenuous
Speaker 1: as well. The famed News and World Report survey of
Speaker 1: the best colleges, well, what does best mean? Ohen, we'll
Speaker 1: get into the pervasive idea that low income Americans should
Speaker 1: skip college and become welders. I am so delighted to
Speaker 1: be here with Paul, who has written three previous books,
Speaker 1: including the best selling How Children Succeed, Grit, Curiosity in
Speaker 1: the Hidden Power of Character. He's also a contributing writer
Speaker 1: to The New York Times magazine, among many other things,
Speaker 1: and he's here in Chicago on his book tour, so
Speaker 1: we get to record this episode in my home city.
Speaker 1: So welcome Paul. Thank you great to be here. I'm
Speaker 1: delighted to have you here. So before we get into
Speaker 1: some of the numbers and the societal cost, let's start
Speaker 1: with the individual human cost of this. I was so
Speaker 1: struck by some of your characters. And you begin with
Speaker 1: a girl named Shannon who realizes that this institution that
Speaker 1: she's poured so much of herself into has decided she's unworthy.
Speaker 1: What was this like to talk to these young students yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, it was an amazing opportunity to do this reporting.
Speaker 1: I mean, so it took me all over the place.
Speaker 1: It took me six years to report it. But the
Speaker 1: reporting that really sticks out in my mind is the
Speaker 1: individual conversations with students who were making their way through
Speaker 1: high school and then into college. And Shannon Shannon was
Speaker 1: certainly one of the ones who stuck with me the most.
Speaker 1: The thing that really drew me to her, and the
Speaker 1: reason that I opened the book with her is that
Speaker 1: I think she was the most idealistic of the high
Speaker 1: school students that I met. That she really believed in
Speaker 1: this idea of a meritocracy, really really believed in this
Speaker 1: idea that college was this ticket to social mobility for her.
Speaker 1: She was growing up in low income, single parent home
Speaker 1: in the South Bronx, an incredible student in high school
Speaker 1: and wanted to believe that that was going to get
Speaker 1: her to a college that was going to change her
Speaker 1: life and change her family's life. But she felt an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of stress on her to jump through all
Speaker 1: the hoops and overcome all the hurdles in order to
Speaker 1: get there. And she also as time went on, and
Speaker 1: especially on the day that I was with her the
Speaker 1: day that she was waiting to hear the results that idea,
Speaker 1: that there was some logic to the whole thing, that
Speaker 1: there was some sense that hard work paid off. That
Speaker 1: idea was really under threat for her in her mind,
Speaker 1: and it turns out to be under threat. Right. She
Speaker 1: realizes there's a lot more luck in this than there
Speaker 1: is necessarily any kind of meritocratic methodology. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it really felt kind of capricious. So she gets in
Speaker 1: one place, doesn't get into others, and she realizes that
Speaker 1: there is some way that it is just kind of random.
Speaker 1: And part of what I tried to do in that
Speaker 1: first chapter is use her story as this microcosm of
Speaker 1: how the whole system can often feel random to students,
Speaker 1: whether they're affluent or low income like her, about how
Speaker 1: there's also these deep inequities and unfairnesses that for a
Speaker 1: student like her who doesn't have family connections, doesn't have
Speaker 1: family money, the obstacles for her are just so much
Speaker 1: bigger than for anybody else. One of the fascinating things
Speaker 1: to me was that the inequities you lay there continue
Speaker 1: through someone's college career. There's a really emotional anecdote of
Speaker 1: a young woman named Kiki Gilbert who's in her seminar
Speaker 1: at Princeton, and you watch how she is playing a
Speaker 1: different game, as you put it, than the other students.
Speaker 1: Explain that, Yeah, Key was another student I felt really
Speaker 1: lucky to get to know. So she came from a
Speaker 1: low income, really sort of chaotic family that moved around
Speaker 1: a lot during her childhood, ended up in Charlotte, North
Speaker 1: Carolina for the last few years of high school. An
Speaker 1: amazing student got into Princeton, and then so I watched
Speaker 1: her as she was making her way through her freshman year.
Speaker 1: And academically she did great. I mean, a few hiccups
Speaker 1: and bumps at the beginning, but mostly really did well
Speaker 1: in her freshman year. But socially, emotionally, psychologically, the experience
Speaker 1: of being thrust into this this world of Princeton that
Speaker 1: mostly for her just felt very affluent, very white, very privileged.
Speaker 1: It was jarring for her. Partly, it was just jarring
Speaker 1: in the way that social mobility is always darring. When
Speaker 1: you're a low income student. You're suddenly leaving behind your family,
Speaker 1: your home, your culture, learning the new habits and customs
Speaker 1: of this new world. But what really struck me for her,
Speaker 1: and sitting there in that Humanity seminar with her and
Speaker 1: all of these mostly affluent, mostly white students, was how
Speaker 1: she was kind of playing this different game. She was
Speaker 1: very focused on reading the book extremely carefully and arguing
Speaker 1: very precise way making her point about this ancient Roman text,
Speaker 1: and all of the other students had this kind of ease.
Speaker 1: They were sort of relaxed and laid back and sort
Speaker 1: of ostentatiously laid back. Exactly what it felt like to
Speaker 1: me was that she was playing this different game than them.
Speaker 1: She was very sort of uptight and on getting everything
Speaker 1: exactly right. And there are a number of sociologists who's
Speaker 1: work I write about in this book that says that
Speaker 1: this other sort of affluent affect, this laid back approach,
Speaker 1: is actually how like how you make the system work
Speaker 1: for you, Like that's that's what you're rewarded for at
Speaker 1: a place, like it's what employers are looking for, and
Speaker 1: so it becomes this very defining aspect. And I thought
Speaker 1: it was so interesting that you point out that college
Speaker 1: success isn't just about academic success the way low income
Speaker 1: students who aren't raised in this world may think it is.
Speaker 1: There's this other game you have to know how to
Speaker 1: play too. I found that fascinating and frightening. How did
Speaker 1: the way you thought about upward mobility change? It's a
Speaker 1: great question. I mean, so I've been drawn to the
Speaker 1: question of upward mobility, I think my whole life, certainly
Speaker 1: my whole writing career. It is just this phenomenon that
Speaker 1: for me is important in two ways. One is that's
Speaker 1: important in terms of the politics and the sociology of
Speaker 1: the country itself, Like if you don't have upward mobility,
Speaker 1: so many of the American ideas just start to fall apart.
Speaker 1: But it's also fascinating to me just on a personal level,
Speaker 1: like I just love hearing stories inspirational. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and complicated too. I mean it's never smooth, it's never easy,
Speaker 1: I think, especially when you're going through that mobility in
Speaker 1: your late teenage early adult years, which are complicated enough.
Speaker 1: So that's a lot of what drew me to that idea.
Speaker 1: And you know, some of what drew me to writing
Speaker 1: this book about higher education was this understanding that it's
Speaker 1: those years, as those years right after high school that
Speaker 1: now in American life have become so crucial in terms
Speaker 1: of social mobility. You know, I've written a lot about
Speaker 1: early childhood, about K twelve education in previous books, and
Speaker 1: certainly what happens in those years is important, But it
Speaker 1: is those college years or whatever happens to you after
Speaker 1: high school that the signs in the economy are that
Speaker 1: that now is the period that most defines what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in terms of your mobility after them, which
Speaker 1: is probably really frightening to any parent listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1: But before we get into that, I want to come
Speaker 1: back to a little bit this human cost and this
Speaker 1: societal cost, because if system is broken, there's an awful
Speaker 1: lot of waste, right, waste of human potential. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel like that is definitely one of the big
Speaker 1: conclusions that there are all of these young people, especially
Speaker 1: from modest and low incomes, who have the potential to
Speaker 1: be great students and great graduates and to contribute to
Speaker 1: society in all sorts of ways. But the way that
Speaker 1: we are doing college admissions, and then the way that
Speaker 1: we are helping or failing to help students succeed and
Speaker 1: persist and graduate from college, it's wasting a whole lot
Speaker 1: of that potential, right, And I was thinking as I
Speaker 1: as I read your book, how every business leader should
Speaker 1: be taking an active role in thinking about this because
Speaker 1: this is the future of their companies as well. So
Speaker 1: I'm embarrassed to admit I actually didn't know about the
Speaker 1: fate of the American Graduation Initiative until I read your book.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about that. You set it
Speaker 1: up in a fascinating contrast to the GI Bill from
Speaker 1: so many years ago. So explain that. Sure, yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't know about either. That makes me feel better. So
Speaker 1: the President Obama when he was elected back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, early in his presidency, he may this
Speaker 1: big promise, this big commitment. He pointed out that the
Speaker 1: United States had fallen from being number one for decades
Speaker 1: in terms of the percentage of its young people who
Speaker 1: graduated from college, that we had fallen by two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine to number twelve. There were eleven other countries
Speaker 1: that were graduating more of their young people, and he said,
Speaker 1: this is strong. We're going to change it. We're going
Speaker 1: to get back to being number one within ten years.
Speaker 1: So he put the deadline at the end of twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: So it's time to check and see if we've succeeded,
Speaker 1: and in fact we haven't. We are still number twelve
Speaker 1: ten years later. So in this final chapter of the book,
Speaker 1: I contrast that with the gi Bill era, where we
Speaker 1: actually did commit as a country to changing our whole
Speaker 1: approach to higher education, to educating a whole generation millions
Speaker 1: of returning gis, and that had a huge effect not
Speaker 1: only on those gis and their families, but on the
Speaker 1: country a lot of what created the great post war
Speaker 1: economic boom in the great American middle class of that era.
Speaker 1: But by contrast, when President Obama in two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine this pledge, this commitment, the country did not come together,
Speaker 1: and he and his administration and Congress did not put
Speaker 1: the kind of resources behind it that happened in the
Speaker 1: gi Bill era. And so the American Graduation Initiative was
Speaker 1: one key factor in the sort of collapse of that dream,
Speaker 1: of that commitment. This was a pledge to spend twelve
Speaker 1: billion dollars on community colleges, which is really where I
Speaker 1: mean all of the data suggest that is where investments
Speaker 1: are most needed. That is, those are the institutions that
Speaker 1: are most underserved, Those are the institutions that can help,
Speaker 1: especially not the Keky Gilberts and the Shannon tauris Is.
Speaker 1: But the young people who are not superior students, who
Speaker 1: don't have other options, community colleges can get them to
Speaker 1: a good sort of middle class living if we run
Speaker 1: those institutions right. But we haven't been. We've been underfunding
Speaker 1: them for years, and so this was going to try
Speaker 1: and reverse that, and it all got mixed up with
Speaker 1: the healthcare bill and at the last minute, Congress just
Speaker 1: sliced those twelve billion dollars from the budget. The White
Speaker 1: House did not put up much of a fuss, and
Speaker 1: it just got dropped. And what really struck me, I
Speaker 1: mean the fact that you didn't really know about it.
Speaker 1: I didn't really know about it. I don't think anyone
Speaker 1: really paid attention to it. It was this, you know,
Speaker 1: here was the President making this huge commitment and it
Speaker 1: just sort of sank without a trace. And I think
Speaker 1: that's indicative of the way that we as a country
Speaker 1: have failed to coalesce, to motivate, to connect over this
Speaker 1: goal of improving higher education to provide more social mobility.
Speaker 1: It's a really striking marker when you think back to
Speaker 1: the GI build. The contrast you set up is so
Speaker 1: striking because you think back to how the country came
Speaker 1: together over around that. I mean, of course there was
Speaker 1: skepticism from the elites about whether we wanted this massive
Speaker 1: you know, uneducated people descending on colleges, but the country
Speaker 1: came together around that. And when you think of the
Speaker 1: contrast to this just fading without even a whimper, it
Speaker 1: made me worried that maybe education is a sign of
Speaker 1: art decline as a cleerent society, rather than both causing
Speaker 1: it and a sign of it. Right, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: there's these two sort of competing traditions in American history, right,
Speaker 1: one is this tradition of mobility. So I went back
Speaker 1: and read Democracy in America and what was so striking about?
Speaker 1: So here's this, you know, French aristocrat Alexis Totokfille writing
Speaker 1: in the early years of the United States about what
Speaker 1: seems new and important and different about the United States,
Speaker 1: and it was social mobility that he kept coming back to,
Speaker 1: and he found it sort of horrifying. He was like,
Speaker 1: why can't the United States just have a nice aristocracy
Speaker 1: like France does, so everyone knows their place in society.
Speaker 1: But it was such a marker of sort of what
Speaker 1: we believed in. But there I think at the same time,
Speaker 1: there has been this long skepticism in the United States
Speaker 1: about elites about education, about the idea that you need
Speaker 1: to go to one of these elite institutions in order
Speaker 1: to succeed. And I feel like right now those two
Speaker 1: American traditions are coming together, are sort of colliding, yep,
Speaker 1: betting heads with each other in a very interesting way.
Speaker 1: And so that's also what's striking to me about the
Speaker 1: Gibill era that what succeeded about it was sort of
Speaker 1: an accident. You know that so many of the representatives
Speaker 1: in Congress who passed this bill didn't really think that
Speaker 1: many of these gis would take them up on it.
Speaker 1: They thought, you know, these are working class kids, children
Speaker 1: of farmers and factory workers. They're not going to go
Speaker 1: to college. They're not going to succeed if they do.
Speaker 1: And then they do, right, so then they all come back.
Speaker 1: They all the American undergraduate population doubles in just a
Speaker 1: few years, and this whole generation changes. And so I
Speaker 1: feel like we're in another moment where Americans, and especially
Speaker 1: American elites, are really skeptical that there is this potential
Speaker 1: for many more working class and low income people to
Speaker 1: succeed at college, except the need for it is even
Speaker 1: greater now because the opportunities without a college degree are
Speaker 1: so much less than they were in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: Well maybe that's actually, in a weird way, a more
Speaker 1: optimistic way to think about this, that societal change transformational
Speaker 1: societal change has been an accidental surprise in many cases,
Speaker 1: and the mere fact that so many people aren't on
Speaker 1: board with it now actually as thus it ever was
Speaker 1: right and we just need to get something done anyway.
Speaker 1: If that's true, though, then there's the question of so
Speaker 1: how is it going to happen? Like, how do you
Speaker 1: get that moment where suddenly Americans are able to say, hey,
Speaker 1: actually know people can succeed in college who we might
Speaker 1: not expect to. So one of the things that struck
Speaker 1: me in your book was all the data and the
Speaker 1: way data has been appropriated and misappropriated and misused. You
Speaker 1: came out pretty clearly, despite some data implying that good
Speaker 1: students who went to Penn State were as likely to
Speaker 1: do well as if they went to Princeton, you came
Speaker 1: out pretty convinced that it does matter where you go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something that economists have debated for a long time.
Speaker 1: I am persuaded by the work of two economists. One
Speaker 1: is Carolyn Huxby, who is at Stanford. The other is
Speaker 1: Ross Chetti, who's now at Harvard, and he works with
Speaker 1: a whole collection of economists, a whole group of economists
Speaker 1: who are studying social mobility, and they both in their
Speaker 1: data have what I consider to be really strong indications that,
Speaker 1: even if we would like it not to be the case,
Speaker 1: that it matters a lot where people go to college.
Speaker 1: If you look at it from an individual point of view,
Speaker 1: if you're a parent worried about your child, or if
Speaker 1: you're a student. I don't want people to interpret this
Speaker 1: as saying, like, you, individual student, it really matters whether
Speaker 1: you go to Princeton or Penn State, because I do
Speaker 1: think that it's true that for individuals there's a lot
Speaker 1: of variation. Especially affluent students, they tend to do well
Speaker 1: no matter where they graduate from. But on a societal level,
Speaker 1: it matters a whole lot. And it matters that the
Speaker 1: institutions that are doing the most to produce high income graduates,
Speaker 1: which are the most selective institutions, It matters that there
Speaker 1: are very few low income students who are going to
Speaker 1: those institutions, and a lot of high income students. And
Speaker 1: because the low income students are the ones whose life
Speaker 1: has the most potential to change, right, I thought was
Speaker 1: a very telling quote in your book that it actually
Speaker 1: the elite college campuses are almost entirely populated by the
Speaker 1: students who benefit the least from the education they receive.
Speaker 1: So explain that. Yeah, so this is something that ros
Speaker 1: Jetty and his colleagues found that when low income students
Speaker 1: go to these super selective institutions what he calls the
Speaker 1: IVY plus institutions, which are the Ivy League colleges plus
Speaker 1: a few other highly selective institutions, their lives change a toime,
Speaker 1: their potential, their income, how much they make as adults,
Speaker 1: is just transformed. Whereas for affluent students, there is an
Speaker 1: advantage to going to more selective institutions, but it's a
Speaker 1: much smaller one. And so these institutions have this ability
Speaker 1: to change the lives of young people like Shanatais and
Speaker 1: Kekey Gilbert, and there are very few Shannonturis and Keky
Speaker 1: Gilberts at these institutions. What raj Chetti and his colleagues
Speaker 1: found is that I like at Princeton, for instance, I
Speaker 1: think two point two percent of the student body came
Speaker 1: from families in the bottom economic quintile, and almost three
Speaker 1: quarters of the student body came from families in the
Speaker 1: top income quentile. So talk about that issue a little bit,
Speaker 1: because it's one of the most striking acts of disingenuousness,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better way of putting it, in
Speaker 1: your book, that colleges say, we want these low income students.
Speaker 1: This is a student population we want, but you point
Speaker 1: out that actually the student population they want is precisely
Speaker 1: the opposite of that. It's a complicated situation, and it's
Speaker 1: difficult for me to know exactly what is going on
Speaker 1: at these at these institutions, like I mean, I think
Speaker 1: there is I think there are a few things. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one thing is that raj Jetty's data is
Speaker 1: a few years old, so it's from about twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: So some of these institutions say that things have changed
Speaker 1: a lot since then, and that's possible that there have
Speaker 1: been some changes, but there's a lot of what I saw,
Speaker 1: especially looking at Princeton through the eyes of the student
Speaker 1: Kiki Gilbert. That showed me that institutions like Princeton, there
Speaker 1: are all these ways that they can nudge the numbers
Speaker 1: and game the numbers to make them seem more economically
Speaker 1: diverse than they really are. So my suspicion is that
Speaker 1: that continues to be what is going on at those institutions. Right,
Speaker 1: and colleges have a huge incentive to get people in
Speaker 1: the door who can pay, and even the colleges who
Speaker 1: don't need people who can pay have an incentive to
Speaker 1: get high test scoring students in the door. Right, is
Speaker 1: that the right way to summarize it. It's a great
Speaker 1: way to summarize it. And so there are these two
Speaker 1: different types of incentives that push different sorts of institutions
Speaker 1: in the same way. And the sort of the algorithm
Speaker 1: that comes out of it is admit more rich kids
Speaker 1: for wherever, whatever kind of institution you're in, but it
Speaker 1: is slightly different. So I some time in the admissions
Speaker 1: office of a college in Hartford, Trinity College, which is
Speaker 1: highly selective institution, but not as selective as those IVY pluses.
Speaker 1: I just want to go there. After reading your book,
Speaker 1: I must say, so, Trinity like a lot of four
Speaker 1: year private institutions is losing money. So a quarter of
Speaker 1: four year institutions are losing money each year. They're losing
Speaker 1: about eight million dollars a year. So they, like many
Speaker 1: other institutions that aren't the very wealthiest institutions, they need
Speaker 1: to admit more wealthy students just because they need to
Speaker 1: stay afloat. Most of their income comes from student tuition
Speaker 1: and fees, and so they need to look at their
Speaker 1: applicants as potential customers. But that top echelon of schools,
Speaker 1: the ones with the huge endowments, they don't really need
Speaker 1: tuition dollars at all, and yet they are the ones
Speaker 1: who are admitting the most affluent freshman classes. And there
Speaker 1: I think it's much more to do with culture, you know.
Speaker 1: I think there are all these reasons. Whether it's legacy students,
Speaker 1: whether it's the kind of athletes that they care about,
Speaker 1: whether it's students who have especially high test scores. All
Speaker 1: of these what they consider markers of eliteness, exclusivity, excellence.
Speaker 1: They all correlate with family income. And it's partly a
Speaker 1: US News and World Report ranking issue to write at
Speaker 1: all these schools, and that part of the ranking is
Speaker 1: the kids test scores. So if test scores are biased
Speaker 1: in favor of family income, then that's what you're going
Speaker 1: to end up with if you want to keep your
Speaker 1: US News ranking high. Yeah, I think there are all
Speaker 1: of these incentives that all correlate, right. So it's family income,
Speaker 1: it's legacies, it's test scores, it's just being able to
Speaker 1: pay tuition. All of those pressures on admissions people push
Speaker 1: them toward students who already have a lot of one.
Speaker 1: On that note of legacies, I was struck by another
Speaker 1: statistic in your book. I think it was that Harvard
Speaker 1: admits a third of legacy of children of parents who
Speaker 1: have gone to Harvard versus five percent for the overall
Speaker 1: population average. It's just a fascinating statistic in this age
Speaker 1: of debates about affirmative action. Right, what does affirmative action constitute?
Speaker 1: How did you come to think about the Varsity blue
Speaker 1: scandal that happened at the tail end of your reporting
Speaker 1: on this book or as you were finishing writing, and
Speaker 1: what did you think about it? So? I think, first
Speaker 1: of all, it was is just this kind of amazing story, right.
Speaker 1: The details of it are so kind of scandalous, ridiculous,
Speaker 1: The lengths to which families were willing to go, and
Speaker 1: so in some ways it felt like it was completely
Speaker 1: different than anything that I was reporting on. I was
Speaker 1: reporting on stone families that were spending thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: to send their kids to expensive tutors, getting all, you know,
Speaker 1: finding other ways to get legal advantages in the system.
Speaker 1: But what really changed my thinking was reading back through
Speaker 1: the transcripts of the FBI wire taps of these affluent
Speaker 1: parents who ended up being arrested and charged in the
Speaker 1: Varsity Blue scandal as they were talking to Rick sing Or,
Speaker 1: the corrupt college coach at the heart of that scandal,
Speaker 1: and the way the parents sounded in these wire taps,
Speaker 1: they didn't sound like they were part of a criminal conspiracy.
Speaker 1: They sounded just like all of the affluent parents who
Speaker 1: I had met in my reporting. They sounded like they
Speaker 1: just couldn't believe all the hoops that they had to
Speaker 1: jump through in order to get their kid into college,
Speaker 1: and this was just one more thing that they had
Speaker 1: to do. And of course what they were doing was
Speaker 1: illegal and kind of crazy. They were, you know, sending
Speaker 1: in photos of their kids to have rixing or photoshop
Speaker 1: the heads onto place kickers or rowers or divers, and
Speaker 1: yet to them it just felt like, Okay, it's a
Speaker 1: crazy system. I get that it's unfair, so therefore there
Speaker 1: must be no rules. Anything I do is what I
Speaker 1: need to do for my kid. And so I ended
Speaker 1: up feeling like it was this right, you said, Canary
Speaker 1: and Nicole Mine, this more extreme example of what has
Speaker 1: infected I think affluent parents all over the country as
Speaker 1: they deal with the anxiety of college applications. I thought that,
Speaker 1: as I read your book, what's really the difference? I mean,
Speaker 1: perhaps illegality, but in moral terms, what's really the difference
Speaker 1: between paying a four hundred dollars an hour test coach
Speaker 1: to help your kid boost their scores on their SAT
Speaker 1: by two hundred points and faking their SAT scores? Or
Speaker 1: what's really the difference between bribing a school to let
Speaker 1: your daughter in and donating two million to Harvard in
Speaker 1: order to get your child in. So it's all on
Speaker 1: a continuum that betrays how incredibly really corrupt the system
Speaker 1: has become. Yeah. Well, the other thing that I read
Speaker 1: after finishing the book was Felicity Huffman's letter to the
Speaker 1: judge who was sentencing her, and again she broke the law.
Speaker 1: She deserves the punishment that she got. But it was
Speaker 1: really hard not to sympathize with her reading that letter,
Speaker 1: because what she described was not sort of this like ambition,
Speaker 1: I want more and more for my daughter. It was
Speaker 1: this sense of trying to avoid failure. She's just right,
Speaker 1: Rick Slinger was able to commitce her. If you don't
Speaker 1: do these things for your kid, you are letting your
Speaker 1: child Dan, You're betraying your child. And I think that
Speaker 1: is such a deep fear for parents, and I think
Speaker 1: that's behind so many of the perfectly legal, crazy behaviors
Speaker 1: that especially affluent parents do. This sense that if every
Speaker 1: other parent is hiring these tutors and these coaches and
Speaker 1: slipping your kid to soccer games and squash practices, I
Speaker 1: need to be doing the same thing where I'm letting
Speaker 1: my child down. This incredible sense of insecurity that pervades
Speaker 1: modern American life. Right. So I was also stunned to
Speaker 1: realize just how much of education really is big business.
Speaker 1: And I had not realized the College Board. Were you
Speaker 1: shocked to realize what, in many ways ruthless big business
Speaker 1: it is? Yeah, I mean I started reporting on the
Speaker 1: College Board back in twenty thirteen, and when I first
Speaker 1: connected with them, I thought I was going to be
Speaker 1: writing something really positive about the efforts that they were
Speaker 1: taking to make college admissions fairer. But as the years
Speaker 1: went on, then I continued to report on them. First
Speaker 1: of all, I found they were increasingly elusive about letting
Speaker 1: me see the data of these various experiments and interventions
Speaker 1: that they were doing. And as time went on, it
Speaker 1: started to feel like each of those moments of elusiveness
Speaker 1: connected to this bigger way that they were trying to
Speaker 1: shape the story about the role of standardized tests and admissions.
Speaker 1: What I kind of concluded about the College Board is
Speaker 1: that they are, in some ways this sort of schizophrenic
Speaker 1: institution that has these two personalities. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: they are, you know, they're a nonprofit and they genuinely
Speaker 1: are trying to address issues of inequity and higher education.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, they are a business that brings
Speaker 1: in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue,
Speaker 1: that has some very highly paid executives, and they depend
Speaker 1: on selling a product, the SAT, which is basically a
Speaker 1: sort of coke and pepsi way more or less indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from this competing product the act. And when you get
Speaker 1: two companies that are competing for market share, they tend
Speaker 1: to behave pretty ruthlessly. And so that revenue enhancing side
Speaker 1: of the personality I think is really at war with
Speaker 1: the more idealistic side. And during the years that I
Speaker 1: was reporting on the College Board, it was the revenue
Speaker 1: enhancing side that was definitely winning. Let's pause on one
Speaker 1: of those elusive things about the College Board, which is
Speaker 1: this idea that they argued for a long time that
Speaker 1: test prep didn't work, and yet there's a whole industry
Speaker 1: of test prep. How did you come to think about that?
Speaker 1: Test prep has for decades been the sort of existential
Speaker 1: threat to the SAT into the College Board. It started
Speaker 1: with Stanley Kaplan, this young guy from Brooklyn who started
Speaker 1: tutoring students in New York and his parents' basement and
Speaker 1: was able to help them get much better scores on
Speaker 1: the SAT. And this was during an era where the
Speaker 1: A definitely did stand for aptitude. The idea behind the
Speaker 1: SAT was that you couldn't study for it, and so
Speaker 1: the idea that by hanging out with Stanley Kaplan you
Speaker 1: could increase your score was really threatening, and so they
Speaker 1: tried to discredit him. They tried to get them arrested,
Speaker 1: run him out of business, and it didn't work. And
Speaker 1: students who saw there was an advantage, first with Stanley Kaplan,
Speaker 1: then later with Princeton Review, and then with lots of
Speaker 1: individual tutoring services, realized there was this real advantage. And
Speaker 1: so for many years the College Board continued to say,
Speaker 1: there's not much of an advantage that you can get.
Speaker 1: They had this one study that said you only get
Speaker 1: a small advantage from having any kind tutoring. That did
Speaker 1: nothing to dissuade affluent on parents from continuing to send
Speaker 1: their kids to tutoring centers. And I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time with this one tutor in Washington, DC whose
Speaker 1: students were just making incredible gains in their scores. And
Speaker 1: then I think during the years that I was reporting
Speaker 1: on the College Board, the College Board decided that they
Speaker 1: couldn't keep this argument up any longer, and they changed
Speaker 1: their tune and decided to offer free test practice through
Speaker 1: this organization, this learning online learning system con Academy, and
Speaker 1: in lots of ways, the product that they came up with,
Speaker 1: official SAT Practice is great. I mean, it is a
Speaker 1: good idea to have free SAT practice out there. But
Speaker 1: when it came time for them to analyze how well
Speaker 1: official SAT practice had done, who was practicing on con academy,
Speaker 1: and what kind of benefit they were getting from it,
Speaker 1: they chose to spend the data, spend the results of
Speaker 1: that study in ways that I felt didn't really reflect
Speaker 1: what was really good and why. What was their incentive
Speaker 1: to spend the results. Everything that they were doing these
Speaker 1: years was to try to make the case that in reality,
Speaker 1: the SAT made college admissions more equitable, more fair, that
Speaker 1: it was a friend of low income students, and it
Speaker 1: just isn't it. So you know, every study of admissions
Speaker 1: makes it clear that SAT scores and family income correlate
Speaker 1: a whole lot. If you just look at high school GPA,
Speaker 1: you get a more socioeconomically diverse picture of who's succeeding.
Speaker 1: And so that's a problem I think for an institution.
Speaker 1: They could just do what they had done for years
Speaker 1: and just ignore that fact and say, like, that's the
Speaker 1: way it goes in America. Rich kids get better scores
Speaker 1: and that's because they're smarter, And so that became harder
Speaker 1: for them to say, and so they try to make
Speaker 1: this alternate argument that In fact, there were things they
Speaker 1: were doing that were leveling the playing field that we're
Speaker 1: giving low income students this advantage, this opportunity through the
Speaker 1: SAT to get into the school of their choice and
Speaker 1: achieve social mobility. And so I think that the kon
Speaker 1: Academy collaboration was a big part of that. They wanted
Speaker 1: it to show that the expensive test prep that rich
Speaker 1: families were paying so much for was actually not giving
Speaker 1: them an advantage, that low income students were getting the
Speaker 1: same advantage from the kN Academy program that affluent students
Speaker 1: were getting from high priced test prep. David Coleman, the
Speaker 1: head of the College Board, when he announced this con
Speaker 1: Academy collaboration, said that this was basically going to put
Speaker 1: expensive test prep out of business. This was a bad
Speaker 1: day for them. He said, it was basically the best
Speaker 1: thing he'd ever been part of in his life. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was
Speaker 1: something along those lines. No, I mean, the quote he
Speaker 1: said he I'm paraphrasing too, was that it was he
Speaker 1: had never seen the launch of a technology at this
Speaker 1: scale that didn't more to solve problems of racial inequity
Speaker 1: in the country than this and data just did not
Speaker 1: bear that out. The main finding was that high income
Speaker 1: white male students with college educated parents, they were using
Speaker 1: con Academy more for longer periods of time than more
Speaker 1: disadvantaged groups. And so, I mean, the news was that
Speaker 1: it was if a low income student used it, if
Speaker 1: a high income student used it, their scores were going
Speaker 1: up in an equivalent amount. So it was potentially providing
Speaker 1: this opportunity for low income students, first generation students, but
Speaker 1: in reality they were not using it as much as
Speaker 1: those wealthy students. And that was the part of the
Speaker 1: story that the college were really left out of their
Speaker 1: public presentation of the data when they released it, And
Speaker 1: it seemed to me that they took it one step
Speaker 1: further into perhaps I'm being too harsh, but outright misment
Speaker 1: representation with this more recent argument that actually the SAT
Speaker 1: is this equalizer and grades are a form of discrimination
Speaker 1: when the data shows the opposite, right according to your work, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had the same feeling that they made this case
Speaker 1: publicly in two seventeen that because of grade inflation, which
Speaker 1: is a genuine thing, grades really are inflating, that rich
Speaker 1: kids were getting this advantage from high school grades. That
Speaker 1: only the SAT could level the playing field and save
Speaker 1: low income students from the advance, which is that rich
Speaker 1: kids were getting from their great inflation, and the data
Speaker 1: just doesn't bear that out. I mean, there has been
Speaker 1: great inflation, and there's some data that says that private
Speaker 1: school students, at private schools grades are inflating more than
Speaker 1: at public schools. But when you look at it by race,
Speaker 1: by family income, there is no indication that more advantaged
Speaker 1: groups are experiencing more great inflation than less advantaged groups.
Speaker 1: And there remains a whole lot of evidence that SAT
Speaker 1: and ACT scores give lots of advantages to the most privileged,
Speaker 1: most affluent families in our society. You had a fascinating
Speaker 1: concept in your book as well as in the New
Speaker 1: York Times magazine cover story about this that was really interesting.
Speaker 1: SAT discrepant, So talk about what that means and what
Speaker 1: you saw. Yeah, this was the study that College Board
Speaker 1: did and did not spend a lot of time getting
Speaker 1: this out to the public, but I think it's a
Speaker 1: really important It helped me understand what was going on
Speaker 1: with SAT scores and admissions. The way they divided the
Speaker 1: population up in the study, about two thirds of high
Speaker 1: school senior have test scores and high school GPAs that
Speaker 1: are more or less correlate. So that's true for most
Speaker 1: students that basically, your your SAT score is what your
Speaker 1: dying up there there is. It actually is a measurement
Speaker 1: at least of high school achievement, right, And so for
Speaker 1: those students, your SAT score doesn't really matter. If the
Speaker 1: college just looked at your GPA, they would admit the
Speaker 1: same students as if they looked at both. But then
Speaker 1: there are these two groups, each about a sixth of
Speaker 1: the population that have discrepancies. Either they have test scores
Speaker 1: that are higher than what their GPA would predict, or
Speaker 1: they have GPAs that are higher than what their test
Speaker 1: score would predict. And when the college board looked at
Speaker 1: these groups, they found there were real demographic differences. And
Speaker 1: so the group that tended to have higher test scores
Speaker 1: than their GPA would predict were more likely to be male,
Speaker 1: more likely to be white and Asian, more likely to
Speaker 1: have affluent, well educated parents. And what educators also tell
Speaker 1: you is these students, the students who with higher SAT
Speaker 1: scores than their GPAs, tend not to be the most
Speaker 1: motivated ones. Because your GPA is a reflection not only
Speaker 1: of intellectual capability, but also of your work ethic, how
Speaker 1: hard you actually work at school. Then there's this other group,
Speaker 1: the group that has higher GPAs than their SAT score
Speaker 1: would predict. And those students are more likely to be female,
Speaker 1: more likely to be black and Latino or Latina, more
Speaker 1: likely to have less affluent, less educated parents. And so
Speaker 1: those are the students statistically who are most disadvantaged by
Speaker 1: a system of admissions that puts a lot of emphasis
Speaker 1: on test scores. These are students who often have really
Speaker 1: high GPAs. They are like Shannon TOAs the student I
Speaker 1: met from the Bronx. They work incredibly hard at school,
Speaker 1: They are right at the top of their classes, but
Speaker 1: their test scores can keep up. And certainly in my reporting,
Speaker 1: the indications are when those students get to a good college,
Speaker 1: and especially if they get a little extra support from
Speaker 1: that institution, they do great. But a system that focuses
Speaker 1: on test scores as the main metric of admissions is
Speaker 1: going to ignore those students, is not going to give
Speaker 1: them a chance. It's one group of students that we
Speaker 1: are for sure failing, which are those students whose GPA
Speaker 1: would say you can do something at a highly selective college,
Speaker 1: you can succeed here, and then their test score is
Speaker 1: saying something different, and we're letting the test score influence
Speaker 1: the outcome, but increasingly we're not. Do you think this
Speaker 1: test score blind philosophy that's spreading with the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago embracing it more recently, does that fix the issue
Speaker 1: or is it part of affix? I think it might
Speaker 1: be part of effex Yeah, I think it's easy to
Speaker 1: overestimate what a difference it will make. So the U
Speaker 1: of Chicago is now the most selective institution to have
Speaker 1: gone what admissions people call test optional, meaning there's still
Speaker 1: lots of students who apply it to University of Chicago
Speaker 1: and submit their test scores, but if they want to
Speaker 1: not submit their test scores, they can and Chicago will
Speaker 1: still consider them. And an increasing number of schools, especially
Speaker 1: small liberal arts colleges, have test optional admissions, and I
Speaker 1: think it does give an opportunity to students like those
Speaker 1: discrepant students to get admission to the kind of institution
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be considered at otherwise. But it is not
Speaker 1: Test optional emissions is not a magic bullet, because there
Speaker 1: are still so many other pressures on these institutions. I mean,
Speaker 1: like Trinity, the college in Connecticut where I did so
Speaker 1: much of my reporting. They went test optional, but they
Speaker 1: still their big pressure was the fact that they needed
Speaker 1: tuition dollars, and so it wasn't easy for them to
Speaker 1: admit low income students, whatever their grades, whatever their test scores,
Speaker 1: they needed tuition dollars. Talk about the myth of the
Speaker 1: wealthy welder. So one of the students who I followed
Speaker 1: was one of these students who didn't particularly like high school.
Speaker 1: His name was Or. He was in a white, working
Speaker 1: class rural family in western North Carolina, and he after
Speaker 1: he got out of high school, he went to work.
Speaker 1: He didn't get any kind of post secondary credential, worked
Speaker 1: in factories were changing oil, and after about five or
Speaker 1: six years he was making more than minimum wage. But
Speaker 1: he was basically still broke and had come to believe
Speaker 1: that there were no great opportunities in the economy for
Speaker 1: people without anything more than a high school degree. And
Speaker 1: so he enrolled in community college to study welding. And
Speaker 1: so I was following him through that path. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, there was this new rhetoric in the
Speaker 1: United States about welding as this perfect alternative to college,
Speaker 1: and especially among certain politicians and certain media outlets, there
Speaker 1: was this push that college was a waste of money,
Speaker 1: it was a waste of time. In fact, there were
Speaker 1: all these opportunities through the skilled trades for which you
Speaker 1: did not need a college degree. And so as I followed,
Speaker 1: or partly I just wanted to see what happened to
Speaker 1: him and understand what it was like to be in
Speaker 1: his shoes, But partly I wanted to understand this debate
Speaker 1: and this rhetoric about welding and about the skilled trades
Speaker 1: through his eyes. And what I found was that there
Speaker 1: were two big, big problems with this argument that welding
Speaker 1: is the perfect alternative college. One is that you need
Speaker 1: to go to college in order to become a welder.
Speaker 1: So Ori was enrolled in community college. He was completing
Speaker 1: a two year degree. Welding is really complicated. He think
Speaker 1: he had to do thirteen different technical classes, plus metallurgy
Speaker 1: and English and math and how to read blueprints. It's
Speaker 1: a complicated career and he needed college in order to
Speaker 1: get there. And at the same time, part of the
Speaker 1: rhetoric that was being thrown around during those years was
Speaker 1: that there was this huge opportunity for people in skilled
Speaker 1: trades to make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars All
Speaker 1: Street Journal. There is a Wall Street Journal outfit that
Speaker 1: made that case, and then that sort of turned into
Speaker 1: this meme that made its way through the media. And
Speaker 1: there are certain welders who are able to make that much,
Speaker 1: But the average salary, the median salary for a welder
Speaker 1: right now is forty one thousand dollars, which is well
Speaker 1: below the national median salary. So there's a way that
Speaker 1: the argument just focuses on those high earning welders to
Speaker 1: make the case against college. And so part of the
Speaker 1: argument is right that we should be doing a better
Speaker 1: job to help students like or get credential to help
Speaker 1: them become welders. It is a good job for him,
Speaker 1: even if it's not paying one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year. But the kind of the irony of
Speaker 1: that argument. The argument is used to undercut funding for
Speaker 1: colleges because the argument is not we should be spending
Speaker 1: more on colleges so that people can become welders. The
Speaker 1: argument is we don't need to spend money on colleges
Speaker 1: because people can become welders. And so that argument is
Speaker 1: part of why over the last ten years or so,
Speaker 1: North Carolina, where Ori lives, cut it's funding to community colleges,
Speaker 1: including the one that he was going to buy millions
Speaker 1: of dollars, and so his tuition went up, the resources
Speaker 1: that his college has went down, and it became harder
Speaker 1: and harder for him to get this degree. So at
Speaker 1: this moment where the rhetoric is all about how there
Speaker 1: are these fantastic opportunities in the skilled trades for people
Speaker 1: without college credentials, in the actual colleges where actual students
Speaker 1: like Oria are trying to learn to be welders, we
Speaker 1: are cutting funding to those institutions and making it harder
Speaker 1: and harder for students like Ori to succeed. That's stunning
Speaker 1: and incredibly disheartening. Why do you why do you think
Speaker 1: that is? Do you think it's a matter of ideology
Speaker 1: that again, it's more convenient to believe that it's up
Speaker 1: to people to succeed and we've given them all the tools,
Speaker 1: and the tools are there in society and if they
Speaker 1: can't take advantage of it, well it's their fault. Is
Speaker 1: it just convenience or is there something deeper going on.
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I think there is some partisan
Speaker 1: skew too, and I think it's partly that people want
Speaker 1: to pay less taxes and so we don't want to
Speaker 1: pay for public higher education the way we used to.
Speaker 1: But I do think that, yeah, it's sort of the
Speaker 1: flip side of the status quo case that we've made before.
Speaker 1: If we force ourselves to look realistically at the opportunities
Speaker 1: that a studentlike Ori has, it means we have to
Speaker 1: do a whole lot more work. And that is the reality,
Speaker 1: right We need to do a much better job of
Speaker 1: creating a system of community colleges, technical colleges, public universities
Speaker 1: that can help students who are not at the top
Speaker 1: of their class from low income communities find their way
Speaker 1: to a decent, middle class life. We have not created
Speaker 1: that system right now. But if we tell ourselves that,
Speaker 1: in fact, there are a lot of opportunities that if
Speaker 1: a studentlike Ori is not succeed it's his fault, it's
Speaker 1: his problem, it's something unusual about him, it lets us
Speaker 1: off the hook. It lets us say we've given these
Speaker 1: kids all the chances they need. But the reality is
Speaker 1: there are millions of students like or who are not
Speaker 1: able to make their way through the system, and a
Speaker 1: big reason for that is that we are not providing
Speaker 1: enough support for them. Like so many things, it's a
Speaker 1: convenient argument in the short term and utterly devastating in
Speaker 1: the long term. Right, did all this research make you
Speaker 1: change your mind or think differently, or think about what
Speaker 1: decisions you would try to encourage your children to make?
Speaker 1: So my kids, I have two boys, they're four and ten,
Speaker 1: so college is still a little ways off, but I
Speaker 1: think I actually did go through with my older son,
Speaker 1: who's ten. I did go through sort of two cycles
Speaker 1: as I did my reporting, And the first was it
Speaker 1: made me more anxious and so as I would read
Speaker 1: these sociology texts about how, like the sports that you
Speaker 1: play in middle school are this great predictor of whether
Speaker 1: you're going to get hired by Goldman Sachs, I'll have
Speaker 1: to college. All of the advantages that it's clear the
Speaker 1: students who go to the most selective institutions have. It
Speaker 1: made me anxious and I just started feeling like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what sports should I enroll him in? What extra tutoring
Speaker 1: should he be doing now? And it made me, I think,
Speaker 1: a less pleasant father to be around. But then the
Speaker 1: experience of reporting at the University of Texas, I think
Speaker 1: changed my mind again and made me feel like going
Speaker 1: to one of those super selective institutions means going right
Speaker 1: now anyway, means going to an institution where almost every
Speaker 1: student is from a really affluent, privileged background, and there
Speaker 1: is not There might be sort of token diversity, but
Speaker 1: there is not sort of real diversity. And I think
Speaker 1: that diversity is you know, it's not just something you
Speaker 1: pay lip service to. It really does matter in terms
Speaker 1: of the education of a student. And so the feeling
Speaker 1: that I had at big public institutions, including UT, was
Speaker 1: just much more what I would want for my kids.
Speaker 1: It's a place where there's an excellent education going on,
Speaker 1: but there's also an education in sort of being an
Speaker 1: American or at UT being a Texan. There's this sense,
Speaker 1: to my mind, a much more sort of equitable and
Speaker 1: much more fair idea of sort of how the meritocracy works,
Speaker 1: how social mobility works, and that I think is as
Speaker 1: important a part of education as what's actually happening in
Speaker 1: the classroom. This says the world in all its messy
Speaker 1: glory right and human potential, and I thought that too. Wow,
Speaker 1: University of Texas, here we come maybe anyway, Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for being here. This was really illuminating and
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it very much. Thanks me too. In this conversation,
Speaker 1: I was struck by how our beliefs, whether they be
Speaker 1: beliefs of convenience or of ideology, can override the clear
Speaker 1: evidence in front of us. It's so much easier to
Speaker 1: believe in the wealthy wilder, to believe that colleges are
Speaker 1: admitting the most qualified candidates, and to believe that kids
Speaker 1: who fail in college just moren't supposed to be there
Speaker 1: in the first place. But oh, the waste of human
Speaker 1: potential that those beliefs entail. There's a huge long term
Speaker 1: cost to that. So what can we do well. I'm
Speaker 1: all for the Texas approach, but I also think that,
Speaker 1: especially in these times of budget shortfalls, business leaders need
Speaker 1: to take a more proactive approach to education. If you
Speaker 1: aren't finding the skills and the diversity that you want,
Speaker 1: help build them. As for politicians, well, I think the
Speaker 1: best we can hope for is more happy accidents. Makia
Speaker 1: killing is a co production of pushkin industries and chalkin Blade.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive
Speaker 1: producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in making Casey. The
Speaker 1: executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski.
Speaker 1: Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob
Speaker 1: Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've
Speaker 1: most enjoyed.