Varsity Blues | The Admissions Game

Lindsay Graham (0:06)

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

In the spring of 2019, when federal agents unsealed the indictments in Operation Varsity Blues, the public was captivated by the greed and deception concentrated at the most elite universities in the country, fraudulent athletic profiles, bribes, fake charities, and wealthy parents gaming the system. But the problems went deeper than just Rick Singer. In many ways, they were the logical conclusion of a broken system. For decades, the American College degree has been pitched as the ultimate engine of social mobility, the most reliable ticket to the middle class and beyond. But behind the scenes, higher education has transformed to a competitive, multi-billion-dollar market. It's a system where enrollment managers quietly prioritize wealth over talent, where college rankings dictate survival, and where the students who need college the most are the very ones being locked out. My guest today is Paul Tough, journalist and author of The Inequality Machine, How College Divides Us. We'll talk about how we got here and whether there's any chance of getting out. Our conversation is next.

Paul Tough, welcome to American Scandal.

Paul Tough (1:51)

Great to be here.

Lindsay Graham (1:53)

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

Paul Tough (2:10)

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

Lindsay Graham (2:40)

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

Why is this a critical period?

Paul Tough (3:03)

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

And the reason that I was optimistic in those early years, sort of like the 2011, 12, 13, was that there had been this push. A lot of it came out of the Obama White House, that the president gathered together a lot of college presidents, the head of the college board, lots of different players in the higher education world. And together, they said, we're going to change things. There was a clear sense that things had become uneven in higher education, and there was this push that things were going to be different. And it seemed like that could make a huge difference in the way that mobility worked in the country as a whole.

Lindsay Graham (4:35)

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

Paul Tough (4:52)

So, you know, if you go back to the period before World War II, only a small minority of American teenagers were going to college. And they were mostly, you know, a pretty homogeneous group. They were mostly white males, a lot from the Northeast, a lot from private schools. You know, the sort of kids who had always gone on to higher education. And then after World War II, things started to open up. And a lot of that was because of the GI Bill that suddenly provided a lot of government funding to returning GIs, most of whom were, you know, not particularly well-educated working class kids, children of farmers, children of factory workers. And suddenly the doors of American universities were open to millions of kids who hadn't even thought about going to college, let alone had access to it before. And that changed a couple of things. One is it just literally expanded the number of kids who are going to college. And most of those kids did really well and persisted and graduated, and that was a big part of building the sort of affluent middle class of the post-war era.