By Heidi Stevens
Chicago Tribune
Long before actor Felicity Huffman was sentenced to 14 days in prison for paying $15,000 to rig her daughter’s SAT scores, long before she and actor Lori Loughlin and a couple dozen other wealthy, connected parents were charged in a sweeping college bribery scandal, Paul Tough was on the case.
Tough is a journalist and author of the new book “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,” which he spent six years reporting. It’s a complex, essential book that asks an urgent question: Is our current higher education system designed to protect the privileged and leave everyone else behind?
(Spoiler: Yes.) (Still, you should read the book.)
“The college cheating scandal is the ultimate expression of this broader change in the way we think about higher education,” Tough told me in a recent phone interview. “In the last few decades, we’ve moved from thinking about it collectively as something that benefits us all to thinking about it as a consumer good — something we are supposed to compete for. And I think that mindset shift is behind so many of the problems, because once you start thinking about this valuable social good as a consumer good that we’re all supposed to elbow each other out of the way for, it changes the way we finance education, it changes the way we think about admissions, it changes the way we think about equity.”
The stories and research and statistics spelled out in the book, he hopes, will serve as a reminder that we all benefit when society educates its citizens.
Tough’s reporting brought him all over the country and into the company of admissions directors, educators and, mostly, students — high-achieving students, first-generation students, low-income students, students who are skeptical about the benefits of college, students who’ve had their sights and hopes set on an Ivy League spot since middle school.
It’s a fascinating, troubling read. Even as the cost of college continues to increase and the competition for spots at elite schools tightens, college has come to seem like a moral imperative in America, Tough said.
“It puts a lot of pressure and a lot of guilt and shame on families, on students, on parents,” he said. “On either side: Either it’s this evil power we have to resist, or it’s this good that we have to sacrifice everything for. And in reality, it has its costs and its benefits like anything else. And the fact that we’ve put so many of those costs onto the students means it’s harder than ever to make good, rational decisions that benefit yourself and your family.”
From Tough’s book:
“If you pick any two freshmen at the same college, they are very likely to be paying completely different tuition rates. Those rates are based not on the true value of the service the college is offering or even on the ability of the student’s family to pay. Instead, they are based on a complex calculation, using sophisticated predictive algorithms, of what the student is worth to the college and what the college is worth to the student.”
And:
“American colleges collectively now give more institutional aid to each student with a family income over $100,000, on average, than they do to each student with a family income under $20,000.”
Tough explores the benefits — and limitations — of approaching post-high school life with a lot less pressure to attend an elite university, or any university at all. His story about Orry, the youngest child of a family in rural Taylorsville, North Carolina, who decides to pursue a career as a welder, is a gut-check. Contrary to stories about welders making $150,000 a year, Orry finds well-paying welding jobs are in the $30-$40 per hour range and require an associate’s degree.
There are success stories in Tough’s book as well. He takes particular interest in Arrupe College, a small school in Chicago that costs very little, admits students based on a personal interview rather than test scores, and takes an extremely hands-on approach to its students’ learning. The founding dean, Stephen Katsourous, proudly calls it “a very intrusive culture.”
But their graduation rates are good, and most students leave with no debt. And they’re students who may otherwise have fallen through the cracks after high school, Tough said.
Tough’s stories put our current approach to higher education under a microscope, and what you see isn’t all that pretty. Taken together, they serve as a cautionary tale about the way we set up certain kids for success, and the barriers we put in place — or leave in place — to keep other kids from it.
They also prod us to ask who that’s really serving. Good question.
