A few years ago, Paul Tough set out to answer some big questions: Does college really work? And, if so, for whom?
Tough, an accomplished journalist and best-selling author, carried those questions to Ivy League classrooms and community-college welding shops, to data-drenched enrollment offices and experimental colleges located in urban storefronts. Along the way, he gathered data, read reports, and, most important, listened to people’s stories about how college had lifted them up or knocked them down.
Tough wove those true stories into a vivid account of the many ways higher education works against social mobility. In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), he explores how and why the industry’s high-minded ideals often come crashing down — and what that feels like for young Americans struggling to make their way through. “For some people it works,” one frustrated student in the book says of college, “and for some people it doesn’t.”
Tough spoke with The Chronicle about social inequality, the competitive pressures driving institutional priorities, and the nation’s ambivalence about college.
You ask some crucial questions about higher education and its promise, as well as about the state of the American Dream. What led you to ask them?
What motivated me was this paradox: How higher education could be, on the individual level, such a great engine of social mobility, how in one generation it could change a kid’s life. But at the same time, on the whole, for the country, as the data show, higher education is functioning as an engine of social closure. It makes it easy for affluent kids to stay affluent, and it makes it hard for low-income students to achieve anything different in adulthood.
The other question that motivated me was, What does it feel like to be in that? I tried to combine both the big-issue questions about economics and sociology with individual human stories of young people at this kind of amazing time in their lives.
That paradox echoes throughout the book: There’s a burning faith in the transformative power of college, and, yet, as you write, we often doubt it.
Some of that paradox isn’t a debate between two groups; it’s a debate within us. Lots of us have this idealism about higher education and a cynicism about it at the same time. You see these incredible transformations that can happen to students in the process of going to college, but it’s also, like, really: Can four years of writing some essays and drinking too much make something happen to young people that can really change them that much? Or is it something else that’s happening in that system?
There’s also this political side to that. So much of the skepticism about the value of higher education is pretty new. So what I came to believe is that while a lot of that skepticism is genuine, some of it is politically motivated. There’s a campaign to discredit the value of higher education, to convince people that it’s OK to not publicly fund higher education the way that we used to.
Let’s talk about welding, which some politicians and journalists have portrayed as a hot career path. That appealed to a young man in your book named Orry, who struggles on that path. What’s up with the welding-will-save-us story?
Orry was sort of the ultimate nonstudent, who did not like high school at all and was not enthusiastic about continuing his education. But he was studying welding at a community college because he thought it was this opportunity to improve his fortunes. I had been reading all of this commentary, especially in the conservative media, about welding as this magical career that could allow students to do an end-run around higher education.
In examining that rhetoric and watching Orry as he made his way through school, I was able to see some of the contradictions inherent in that political argument. The enthusiasm for welding is politically cynical on one level, but also genuinely hopeful on another. The fact that you need more education than you can get in high school in order to have a decent shot at a middle-class existence is not something that makes most people happy. There really was something better about a world where you could get out of high school, not want to read more books and do more math, and still get a decent job that allowed you start a family and have a middle-class life. That’s part of why people still want to believe in it. Because it would be better if there were a decent alternative for kids like Orry.
We meet some other memorable students in your book, like Kiki, who comes from a low-income family and enrolls at Princeton University. What did her story reveal to you?
There are two important things about her story. One was her search for belonging at Princeton, which was related to her search for belonging throughout high school. Her story is a complicated portrait of what it’s like to be the one poor kid, often the one black kid, in these superselective classes. One thing I learned through her was the complexity of what diversity looks like at a university like Princeton. It was a place where the stated goals of the institution and its way of describing diversity was in conflict with the reality of what Kiki was experiencing every day.
The other thing I got from Kiki was the difficulty of experiencing social mobility yourself, what it’s like to go through that moment of transition. So much of what she was thinking about was her family, entering this new world of opportunity while her family was basically staying in the same place where they had always been.
You interviewed a young man who felt out of place at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn., which you describe as sometimes feeling “like a host trying to reject the transplanted organ it needs to survive.” Tell us what you mean by that.
It was amazing to me how many students from low-income families had some version of the same story: They knew they were superlucky to be there, they were usually on great financial-aid packages, and they were getting this incredible bargain. But they were also kind of miserable. They just found the experience of being a low-income student at this institution kind of difficult. And that’s true all over the country. Social mobility is often not fun when it’s happening. He felt like he couldn’t find his way into the community.
You describe how Trinity’s enrollment office is trying to improve its racial and socioeconomic diversity — and the forces working against that push.
Students think of admissions officers as these demigods who have all the power. That’s how it feels to most high-school students and their parents.
But then you hang out with admissions officers, and you understand that that’s not the way it feels to them at all. They’re in this moment of intense anxiety, they have all the pressure on them at their institutions. They have to create a class and keep their institutions afloat financially. That was a real revelation to me. It made me appreciate how hard the job is, how many contradictions you have to deal with on a daily basis, and how those pressures make it difficult to do as much as you aspire to.
Enrolling a low-income student is one thing, but helping her succeed is another. I was inspired by your rendering of one professor’s heroic efforts to help his students, especially those who didn’t attend well-resourced high schools, to conquer calculus. No easy task.
My goal for that chapter was to show what is possible. The professor is an extremely talented teacher, but mostly what’s different about him is that he wants his students to succeed, and that he feels it’s his responsibility. I don’t want educators to feel like those are skills that this professor has that no one else could possibly develop. I want them to feel like it’s a mind-set.
Part of what has made the student-success movement hard is that most institutions have this mind-set of college as a place where educators should take this hands-off approach. That’s led to a sink-or-swim mentality. Gradually, that’s changing, but many colleges are trying to figure out what to do if they don’t follow that model.
You describe some of the entities that have a great hold on higher education. One of them is the College Board, which, you conclude, misrepresented its findings about the effectiveness of its recent test-prep interventions that were meant to level the playing field for students taking the SAT.
I followed these projects and interventions that the College Board was undertaking, which were supposed to make the SAT more fair. My conclusion is that most of them didn’t have much of an effect at all. It made me somewhat cynical about those interventions.
A lot of what the College Board tried to do is protect the brand of the SAT. Over the last few years, they’ve been really successful at it. The College Board is in much better financial shape, their market share is much better than it was, and that’s obviously been part of their goal.
The public face of the College Board has been that they’re a nonprofit, that this is not just about competition, and that this is about improving outcomes for low-income students. And, on that level, I do not feel like this has been a successful few years for the College Board.
How did this research change you, a college dropout who just wrote a book about the experience of college?
The overall effect was to make me appreciate higher education more. There’s a lot of pessimism in this book, a lot of angst. But I still feel like the way the lives of some of the students were transformed is incredible and inspiring. It’s what higher education should do, and sometimes does do.
There’s an optimistic side to our historical, national memory. There have been moments in American history where people came together and said more people need more education, and we can pull together and provide it. That made me hopeful that we could have another moment like that.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
