0:00

I always say to parents, parents are always going to do what's best for their kids, and they should do what's best for my kids. And you should do that. But you could do what's best for your kid and simultaneously demand that the institution operate ethically, right?

0:26

Hi, folks, welcome back to the podcast, I'm Sheila your host, for don't force it, how to get into college without losing yourself in the process.

0:32

And I thought at this time of year, it might be a good idea to return to the title of this podcast and talk about why I chose that title and what it should hopefully mean for you.

0:45

This is a time of year where juniors especially are starting to get a little worried that maybe there are things they should have done earlier in the year. And that college process is really looming, they might be going on some college visits and thinking, oh, boy, this is right around the corner, I should probably think about this. And for a lot of our teenagers, they're just starting to wake up to this. Now, if you're listening to the podcast, you've probably been a little tuned into this. And you know, you're a parent, you can kind of look ahead with a little more ease than they can you've been through this before, presumably.

1:26

So, you know, there are some things that you need to be thinking about earlier in high school. And now, your student is starting to wake up to that reality as well. And I think it's really important to remember, it's never too late to start working on this. And it's not like you have to do everything at once. I think it's important for you to figure out what's most important for your kid at this moment and help them focus on that. Everybody's going to do this on their own timeline. And for some students, that means we're getting a real head start. And we're thinking about the college list in the fall of junior year. And they've already got ideas for their essays, and their SATs or ACTs are already done. And that's great. But I know that's not the majority of students. And it's totally fine to just start thinking about, what are we going to do about college at this point of the year. So the thing to remember is, it's not too late, you haven't messed anything up permanently. And there are plenty of people out there who can help you, you just have to be willing to ask for it. You can reach out to me, you can reach out to other people who do the kind of work that I do, you can reach out to your high school college counselor, you can reach out to family friends who've been through this process. You know, we've got the internet now. And we've got podcasts where you can find these things. And you're not alone. And I think that's a really important thing to remember, as a parent, the challenges you are facing trying to shepherd your kid through this process are problems that other people have faced before.

3:01

And they are always happy to share their experience and their solutions. So don't be shy. The other thing to remember is that your kid is feeling a tremendous amount of pressure, they probably already are, even if they haven't really woken up to the reality that the college process is looming for them. And this is hard, and it's scary.

3:20

And there are a lot of moving parts. And it's pretty confusing to them and to you. So we're not all going to march in lockstep through this process at the same pace, doing the same things, having the same preferences for colleges or choices of major or goals for after college.

3:41

Everybody's got something different that they're after.

3:44

And it's important for you to figure out what that is for yourself and for your kid. And focus on those priorities and those goals. Because if you start worrying about somebody else's goals, or somebody else's dreams, that's where you lose yourself in the process, right, your kid might be striving to please you or compete with a cousin or something like that, and selling themselves short in the process and making this whole thing harder for them. And part of that is just growing up and realizing, Yeah, everybody's got their own goals. And what actually matters is how you're doing against your own goals, not how you're doing against somebody else's rubric. So this is a great chance for them to learn that very important lesson in life and practice it while you're around to help them through it and help them navigate it and and bring in resources and information that you know that will help them.

4:45

Okay, that aside little sort of temperature check here. Today's guest is a really impressive one. It's Evan Manderey, who is an Emmy and Peabody award winner, author and professor He's been teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York for 25 years, a contributing editor to Politico, and the co founder and board chairman of class action, a grassroots nonprofit that combats career funneling and fights for greater equity in admissions to elite colleges. I first encountered Evan's work when I was starting the research for my own book, which will be coming soon, hopefully. And thinking about how these, you know, Ivan calls them elite colleges. And some people might call them highly rejected or highly selective, or just plain old Ivy, League's, or Ivy plus, the colleges that everybody talks about, we hear about in the media, these are the colleges that have the reputation of being the best in the world, that we don't know what that reputation is based on. These colleges seem to control so much of not only the narrative of college admissions, but also our lives. I was talking to a friend about this recently, there's no real one handbook for parenting, every family kind of does it differently. And even though there's more research than ever before, on how to parent and more books than ever before, on how do you navigate these certain challenges or instill these certain values, there are still so many conflicting messages, and it's really overwhelming. And it's not clear to any parent of a child, what they should do at any given moment. But as that child grows older, we stop worrying so much about the behavior and the values and teaching right from wrong. Hopefully, we've done that already. And there is a new handbook that comes that sort of rises to the top. And I kind of refer to that as the college admissions handbook. Now, there isn't an actual handbook out there that you need to go by.

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But it's this sort of collective knowledge around Oh, you have to do this. And that, because it looks good for college. And what seems to happen, or what I've witnessed is that parents put parenting a little bit aside.

7:12

And they allow what they see as the requirements of a top college to dictate how they spend their time, how they spend their money, how they encourage their kids along certain academic paths, or extracurricular paths. And that becomes the playbook for raising a teenager. It's all of this academic and extracurricular stuff that's going to help you get into college. Right, the goal of that phase of life just seems so much more clear to a parent. And there are practical things that you can do. And there are clear pieces of feedback you get and you don't get in. And so parents sort of fall in line. They're doing the same sorts of things, to help their kids get into college. So excuse the long aside, but this is what Evan is writing about in his book, Poison Ivy, how elite colleges divide us. I'm not going to go into detail about the book because we do talk about that in the interview. But I was very interested in understanding what is the data around parents making decisions about their kids, where they go to school, what they do, even where they live, in order to position themselves well for college admissions. And Evans got the data, he breaks it down for us. And he cites a lot of really other powerful research talks about how elite colleges actually have a major role in shaping our society, as opposed to what they might argue is that the inequities in those colleges are a reflection of the inequities in society. A, there's probably a bit of both going on there. But it's a really interesting argument. And when I read his book, I really saw myself in those statistics, and that is a jarring experience. And it's taken me several months to really process what was coming up for me as I read these statistics about kids going into Harvard, thinking they're going to be a pre med and then coming out working on Wall Street, right? I thought my story was so unique and heartfelt. And actually, I was coming up against systems that 1000s of other students are coming up against and they're making the same decisions that I made. But let me stop rambling.

9:35

Let's go to the interview. And I'll meet you on the other side.

9:40

Evan, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

9:47

Thanks so much for having me, Sheila. Yeah.

9:49

So I learned about your work through your recent book, Poison Ivy, and I was hoping we could start there. I do want to talk a little bit about kind of your career and your perspective on all of these things. But can you tell us a little bit about the book and why you wrote it?

10:04

Yeah, I mean, the book is an argument that elite colleges are drivers of social inequality. And they shape how, you know, mostly affluent white people move through society.

10:14

They live in cities until they have kids. And then they, if they have the means either send their kids to private school or move to an affluent suburb, and they're chasing access to narratives that these colleges value. And you know how I got into it. My parents both went to CUNY. I'm a professor at CUNY at the City University of New York.

10:30

And I think this is my 25th year teaching, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. And, you know, I always had misgivings about Harvard when I went and now having spent a career teaching really, really smart, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, I have a different perception of American higher education. Yeah,

10:52

I can only imagine that. Tell us about some of those misgivings you had, even while you were a college student.

10:59

Well, now I'm old enough that things have changed, right? I'm embarrassed when I look at my class Facebook page, it's almost all white. I mean, it's startling ly white. And, you know, I definitely knew I was a class outsider. You've read my book. So you know, like kind of bowling is the metaphor that I come back to a lot. But I was very middle class, kind of still probably middle class. And I had the experience that a lot of people talk about, I mean, I really never met a rich person in my life. And, you know, all of a sudden, I were meeting people that had gone to Andover Exeter, and we're going to HUD houses on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. And I knew I didn't belong. I didn't know why.

11:45

Yeah, I mean, that resonates with me, even though I went to college, some years after you, I, especially as a person of color, I felt that quite a bit. And my, my dad is a doctor, we had a very comfortable life. And then I got to Harvard. And I saw, really what, what wealth looks like, and met people whose families owned the half of Hong Kong, for example, not an exaggeration at all, and really did not know how to interact. And I think one of the reasons I just could not put down your book is because you put statistics to a lot of the things that I experience. And you describe a lot of the ways that those elite colleges really do shape people's lives and shape communities and choices.

12:29

So maybe I'll back up and read something from your book and have you just tell us a little bit more about it. So early in the introduction, you're kind of citing some of the data about socio economic backgrounds of people who go to Harvard and other elite colleges. And then you write and I quote, The Story Harvard, Yale and Princeton tell us is that these data are a reflection of the underlying inequities in American society, extreme income inequality and residential segregation, create massive educational disparities, that shape who is qualified and willing to attend these schools, elite colleges look the way they do they say, because America looks the way it does. What if the causal chain is reversed?

13:11

What if America looks the way it does? Because elite colleges look the way they do? And that's the end of the the excerpt. And I just thought it was such a provocative question. And you certainly make a great case for it in your book. And I mentioned, you have sections on how elite college admissions really shapes, communities, student lives, their career choices, I'm curious what else?

13:32

I mean, those are the things that really stood out to me because I experienced it. And it really resonated with my lived experience. What else would you highlight about how elite colleges actually do shape the way America looks?

13:46

Well, I liked that passage. So thanks for picking one. You know, I mean, the first thing I'll say is, I mean, I just want to kind of restate in slightly different terms. What I said there, I've now spent a career I, I teach CUNY as an honors college called the Macaulay Honors College and John Jay, my own college has an honors program. So I've now spent, as I said, a quarter century teaching really, really smart, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, many of whom have over 1400 on the SATs.

14:14

So I think the story that Harvard and Yale would tell us that oh, you know, we would really love to help out these students, but we can't lower our standards that far. We wouldn't be able to fill our classes.

14:28

It's just not true. And of course, they do lowered their standards. They lowered their standards to let in athletes and children of alumni and donors right, lowered them quite significantly. And I think when people understand that, so, you know, sports across comes in for a beating and in the book, and it's such a it's such a, I don't know, to me, tragic metaphor, because here's this wonderful sport, was played by the indigenous people of America.

14:57

That's and utterly co opted by white people including changing its name Lacrosse is a French name. And it's basically only available to rich people. And where do you play lacrosse? You know, you know, played in inner city, Detroit, you played in Garden City and Long Island. And you know, people are playing it and in large part because it's a means of access to college. And I think people think, oh, yeah, but sure, it's just a lacrosse team, one out of three students that Williams College and Amherst College is a recruited athlete, it's a massive bucket.

15:30

And unless you're a division one college football, or basketball player, it's overwhelmingly likely that you're white.

15:41

Yeah, and I think one piece of context that may be helpful for the listeners here is what percentage of students get into an elite college because of what we used to call affirmative action? And what percentage of students have you call them children of adlc? Or athletes and children of donors and legacies? Right? And what percentages those make up? And it's just a huge difference.

16:04

Right? And we can, we can talk about them. And I think the media tries to do this to talk about them on even kind of levels of unfairness, if that's the argument against them.

16:17

Right. But actually, one has a much greater impact on the population of those colleges than the other. Right? It's not that they're, you know, those two pathways are sending in the same number of students to these elite colleges.

16:33

Right? Well, first of all, race as a plus factor in admissions isn't now over in the United States, right? I mean, one data point that's mind boggling is that the advantage of being a recruited athlete was greater than the advantage of being a high school student of color, it was worth more to play with cross than it was to be black.

16:56

Right. And, you know, you even mentioned this in your book, and the lots of people have done great research on the sort of status anxiety, the things that drive families to want to pursue this kind of education. And I think one of the things that your book does, that I hadn't seen before is really complete the cycle, and talk about how there's this corporate career funnel, that also pushes students towards certain types of careers, I'm not going to give everything away, I'll let you talk about it. And then that just reproduces not only class, but also this system of people wanting to go to elite colleges,

17:31

Right. I mean, what would be mitigating to me, I don't know, everybody has their own conception of justice would be mitigating to me if Harvard and Yale and Princeton were letting in a bunch of rich white kids and turning them into do gooders but they do the opposite. They admit a bunch of kids who don't know what they want to do with their lives and turn them into. Here's another data point for you and your audience, and Harvard's most recent graduating class 62% of graduates who entered the workforce went into either management, consulting, investment banking, or the tech sector. You know, by contrast, at my college, about three quarters of our graduates go into public service, depending how broadly you defined it. If you live in New York, and you walk down the streets, chances are the police officer or firefighter you meet went to CUNY kids kindergarten teacher probably went to CUNY. But if you walked the halls of Goldman Sachs, that is not going to be the case. I don't know why America invests in that. And we invest heavily elite colleges received collectively about $20 billion a year in tax incentives. So by giving money to Harvard, and this will shock you I don't, but if I did, that would be tax deductible for me.

18:37

Harvard's earnings on my contribution would be tax deductible, and Harvard and most of its peer institutions are exempt from property tax and state tax. So they're charities but what did they do that advances the public interest, they overwhelmingly let enrich students other than at Harvard and Yale and Princeton did disproportionately that enrich white students. And you know, Harvard and Yale and Stanford are mostly recruiting black students from wealthy foreigners, which is a phenomenon that's long been noted. So why should America pay for that? So I think you would either pay for admitting a racially and socioeconomically diverse class of people. And actually, I think if they took a bunch of poor students of color and turned them into investment banking, that's not my ideal conception of good, but that would be better than nothing.

19:22

Or, you know, let's actually see them try to turn some people into teachers. Yeah.

19:29

And I mentioned this when we first spoke, this is really the point of the book where I was like, I have to speak to this man. Because, you know, my, my family immigrated here, as I mentioned, I mean, we, let's say upper middle class, right? So it's not like we were particularly disadvantaged, but the the immigrant experience and then being as a person of color in a rural area of Michigan was certainly an experience full of discrimination and isolation.

19:55

And they wanted me to go to Harvard. Number one, be because they knew their relatives back in the villages of Bangladesh would know that we made it if I did that. But number two, and they have never said this explicitly, but I imagine this is what they were thinking, because they experienced more discrimination than I did when they immigrated, that somehow that kind of elite college degree would protect me, would insulate me from the challenges of being the child of immigrants or being a person of color in this country, which of course it does not. But had they known that only what six or 7% of Harvard's recent graduating class went into the medical field, which was what their goal was, for me, I don't think they would have prioritized Harvard the way that they did. Right.

20:46

And so there's a sort of different set of incentives there, I think. But I think the more that information gets out, the better decisions people can make about where they want to go.

20:57

Well, nothing immunize somebody against race discrimination. But you know, your parents are right, and that one of those degrees does in immunize you against significant downward mobility, very, very hard to go to one of those colleges and end up poor unless you have a significant mental health or physical health issue, or, you know, you go try a real long shot, like to start the next Google and you don't manage to pull it off. So it's somewhat rational in that sense. There's lots of data on this in terms of the value that people get for the degree, actually think probably those degrees are underpriced for the value that people get out of them. It's the the one that's that I think, is an irrational utility calculation is people that pay full freight for kind of a medium status private degree, that unless you're entering into the sciences, I think the data is pretty clear.

21:49

Right, the data is pretty clear on that.

21:50

Yeah.

21:51

Yeah. Well, I am skipping around a little bit, but I would love to hear more about class action, the nonprofit that you founded, because I know part of it sort of twin mission. One is and legacy of mission. And another is to shine some sunlight on this corporate career funnel. So talk to us about that, and how people can learn more.

22:14

Thanks so much for asking about that. So you could go to joinclassaction.us, we actually did a fundraiser recently. And I think we're actually fingers crossed, I think we're about to get our first significant support from a Foundation, a private foundation. I won't jinx it by saying who it is, but it's a great one. And our mission. I've always, I've always envisioned the book having a social kind of justice action component. And I partnered with Brian sees the kowski, who's a recent Stanford undergrad and Master's in sociology graduate. And what we've done is organize a network of student organizations and we're in it like 11 campuses now and the spring we are launching an end legacy campaign, everybody should understand that ending legacy preference would not be sufficient to make college admissions equitable or to have a socioeconomically diverse class. But I've yet to hear a cogent ethical defensive legacy preference, so it should end. And our other kind of lane is to try to combat career funneling steering the students into management, consulting, investment banking, the first mission, most colleges are going to fight tooth and nail. The second though, I think it's conceivable to imagine in a year or two that we could actually partner with them and do some change. And one of our board members is a great sociologist named Amy binder and just say that she refutes the premise that that kids go in knowing that they want to be an investment banker, she basically says no one wants to be an investment banker, and no one even knows what it is. But they're responsive to status markers. And so they see that Goldman Sachs is interviewing at the Charles hotel River and they want the best orders. And so that's soccers people in Meanwhile, my college is not there recruiting at the events.

24:02

Yeah, well, I just think that's so valuable, because at a point where I decided not to pursue pre med anymore, which was a little more than halfway through my college career, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And the thing that just showed up in my inbox, literally at my doorstep, outside of my dorm, were all of these investment banks saying, hey, come work for us. You You don't have to have studied economics, you don't have to do this forever. Just do this for a little while, you'll make a ton of money, you'll have a bunch of connections, and you can go on do whatever you want. And I think I don't know how many of my classmates stayed in that field. A number of them certainly did. And a number of us went and then within the first six months, we said we got to get out here this is like so not the fit. But it's such a distraction from that initial idealism that I went into college with. So I really appreciate you your description of that entire system because it's not just the dangling all of these status markers. It's also the structure of the recruiting process like all of us high achieving kids love a competition, and it was very competitive. And it was all of these things. So I thought was very enlightening.

25:15

A couple of things on that one, you know, when I went to college being a lawyer or a doctor, we're kind of the equivalent of high status professions, but being lawyers and doctor is perceived as low status. Now, very, very few people go into law in medicine that regardless, I'm just like, service professions. And, you know, I, I read a lot of books and writing my own book. And what I loved is a book by a sociologist named Lauren Rivera, it's called pedigree, he talks a lot about what you're just talking about, she embedded herself in a management consulting firm, and how they recruited and of course, they're only recruiting at a handful of colleges. And then it turns out, like, you know, the type of student that I teach, you might make it to one of those places, they don't like that person, they don't like the person that worked 24/7 and got in as a transfer student, they like the lacrosse player, they like people that will be their playmate or drinking buddy, and they're all into this kind of baller lifestyle. So these places like actually exacerbate these cycles of inequality in the first place. So yeah, but I, I mean, I do think part of why I co founded class action and why I put a fair amount of time into it and put a lot of time into my book, obviously. I do think I mean, everybody's gonna have their own view. I'm very despondent about where we are in America. And I think one pathway that Trump I know that one pathway that Trump exploited on this pathway to power in 2016.

26:47

And does to an even greater extent today, is fomenting and tapping into mistrust of the elite. And I don't distrust journalists, even though I know journalists can make mistakes.

27:00

And I don't agree with everything that I read, but I trust the integrity of journalistic process. You know, in part because I do I know three people on the New York Times masthead. But if you've never met anybody who's gone to one of these colleges, and you've never met anybody who got a PhD in science, you don't have any reasonable prospect, and anybody from your family ever will go to one of these institutions. Why should you trust it. And these institutions play an outsized role in shaping the people who go into these elite occupations that set the national agenda and diversification of access is incredibly important to American democracy. That doesn't mean they will have to lead in somebody who got to 72 High School average, we're talking about them letting in a more diverse segment of the population that got over 1400 on their SATs, really, really smart people, but not regarding having worked when you were in high school, as stigmatizing as they do, but rather as a sign of really, really great potential.

28:01

Yeah, absolutely.

28:01

I have two other questions for you. I know you have had a career long career as a lawyer, and then you became a professor of criminal justice. And I know education equity is certainly one of your main research interests. But I know you have many others. And I'm curious, almost afraid to see, are there things that you have, you know, special insight on when it comes to looking at educational in equity, because of your experience in with our criminal justice system? What's the connection there? Is there one?

28:34

I think the it's a very deep connection. I mean, I think we effectively have an apartheid system of higher education in America. I mean, it's not strict apartheid.

28:45

There's, you know, the borders are a tiny bit permeable, but not very permeable. I teach at a college of the poor that educates our future teachers and police officers and I attended a college of the rich, that educates our investment bankers and management consultants. And, you know, I'm one of a handful of middle class people who got in on white. I mean, I had almost no middle class black classmates. And I would say I other than people that kind of took themselves out of the workforce by being a parent, I've probably made the least of any of my classmates. But I love what I do. I love teaching. I love writing. I write about things that interest me. And you know, I don't know if people believe me or not, I wasn't a complete zealot. When I started working on this book, I was very skeptical. But I'm always responsive to data and everything I looked into was significantly worse than I the worst I'd ever thought it could possibly be. What just true, basically, of the criminal justice system in America too.

29:46

Yeah. Okay, so the other question I was going to ask, so I know your book came out in 2022. You cite a lot of data from 2020 and prior, so using my crack detective skills here, I'm gonna guess that you wrote a lot of this book during the pandemic. And then part of the initial lockdown. I did.

30:03

Yeah. And I'm curious how you think COVID may have changed any of this or made it worse or better?

30:11

Oh, significantly worse. You know, I briefly tell the story in the book I, I, we used to live, we've moved now to community that I'm actually quite proud of and love, which is diverse in a lot of cool ways. But for some kind of complicated family reasons, we lived in a affluent white suburb, we were the poorest people, but and I ended up running for school board during the pandemic, because they stopped teaching. And I was like, rich people are going to be fine. They're, they're going to educate their students. I had to kid my kid and her friends, right. I mean, you're not going to let your kid fall behind. But I was like, what about all the, you know, kids whose mom helped working all day? And, in fact, the data has come in on that.

30:55

And it's disastrous. I mean, you're basically going to have a whole generation of students, disproportionately students of color, who effectual effectively were removed from the system.

31:04

And I would argue a lot of the ways the changes in higher education are for the worse. So oh, we're gonna make a test.

31:12

Optional test. Optional is one of the biggest scams in the universe where tons of scams have been perpetrated. Test optional does not mean no tests.

31:24

Right? The rich white kids are still submitting their SAT scores.

31:27

And those averages are crawling up up up. Yep.

31:29

Correct. And I always say like, I don't know what perfect justice is. But I know that everybody has to take the LSAT, or nobody takes the LSAT would be better than the rich kids take the LSAT and get to outperform their high school average.

31:44

Yeah, absolutely.

31:44

This is a message that I'm screaming from the rooftops as well. I mean, I think I could talk to you about a lot of stuff for a long time. But I'm gonna let you go back to your very busy life. Thank you so much for joining me today. And thank you for the work that you're doing.

31:58

Thank you. And can I just say one thing, I know you talk to parents, I always say to parents, parents are always going to do what's best for their kids, and they should I do what's best for my kids. And you should do that. But you can do what's best for your kid and simultaneously demand that the institution operate ethically, right? So even if your kid, you went to one of these colleges, and you want to check the box for your kid, I don't know that you have a moral duty to lie.

32:21

But you do have a duty to demand that your institution and legacy even if you would, your child would have a slight indirect benefit from that. That is an ethical level to which we can all live up to.

32:35

Yeah, thank you for saying that, Evan.

32:37

Thank you, Sheila.

32:39

All right. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I do hope you'll go and read his book. I think it's an easy read. It's very compelling.