E Caelo Nobis Vires

I’m going to talk about the Gustavus motto today – the Latin one, on the seal. Why I think we chose it, and why it’s still perfect for us. And I’m going to talk about strength, and in particular some research that shows how we build it through experiences and relationships in the college years. That’s where we’re headed.

The (Attempted) Mattress Heist of 1993

But first, I’d like to confess to a crime. It was the Mattress Heist of 1993, a break-in with a getaway car, like the recent daring caper at The Louvre, except if it had been done by people who were bad at heists.

I spent my junior year at Oxford, which is on trimesters, so you’re not done until almost the middle of June. I came back to campus to spend the summer of 1993 teaching math. (To myself. That’s another story.) I found a place to live with one of my closest friends, who is now a highly regarded professor at a respected university, which will seem like a surprising outcome after you hear the rest of this story.

My buddy, who I will refer to as Scott to protect the half-innocent, had an apartment in town that had almost everything we needed. That did not include windows – it was someone’s basement. It did include some elements of a kitchen underneath all the unwashed plastic dishes, a couch that generally matched the dishes, and a TV. I remember that we watched a good deal of Beavis & Butt-Head on that TV. The fact that we were immersed in Beavis & Butt-Head sets the scene pretty well for what happened next.

Because the apartment had just one mattress, and after I arrived there were two of us. I spent a few nights sleeping on the couch that matched the dishes before one of us observed that there were around 2,000 unused mattresses in St. Peter, and we knew where they were. We planned to borrow one for the summer.

We got into Scott’s Ford Probe, a car that was kind of like a Prius but sportier and with less storage space. The plan was for Scott to drive up to the front door of the CoEd dorm, drop me off, and pull around to the back. I would go in, find my quarry, and then drag it a few hundred feet across what is now the softball field to his car. The idea, I think, was to elude the gaze of campus security while we got the mattress into his car.

We did elude campus security – they were nowhere to be seen. We did not elude the Saint Peter Police, who it turned out can identify a mattress heist pretty easily when it looks like this:

* A guy and a mattress emerge from the back utility door of the CoEd dorm.

* Mattress and guy hustle across an open field for 200 feet, or however long a regulation softball field is. It was like Pickett’s Charge, but dumber, and with a mattress.

* Mattress and guy arrive at an obviously waiting getaway car, at which point the perpetrators have no idea how to fit a Twin XL plastic mattress into a Ford Probe.

As I sat in the back of that Saint Peter Police cruiser, I thought – this is a surprising way for college to end. Campus security was consulted, which resulted in Steve Waldhauser being consulted – he was the head of Res Life in those days. To my great relief, no charges were filed, the mattress was returned, and I had a date to meet with Waldo the next day.

I was back on the couch that night, and I did not sleep well. I do not remember the details of the meeting the next day except that it involved tearful groveling and resulted in some assigned community service. I got off easy, you could say, which had to do with the fact that I had no prior record of heists, mattress or otherwise. I was a heist virgin, and Waldo could tell, given how good I was at heisting.

For whatever reason, my community service couldn’t happen until school started again in September. I did my penance by spending the Labor Day weekend screwing towel bars onto the backs of dorm room doors in CoEd. As it happened, the first time my wife ever laid eyes on me – I had been gone for the entire preceding year, remember – was that weekend. She was a CF, and I was walking around in overalls with a cordless drill screwing towel bars onto the backs of doors. It was not love at first sight. She understandably assumed I was not a student. There is obviously a lot more to that story, which would not develop until much later. Given that it started with me wearing overalls, that too may not be a surprise.

How Strength is Built

As I said, I want to talk about strengths today. How we build strengths in ourselves and in students, and what conditions we need in order to build them. So let’s turn to that.

Our kids are in college now. We have two, plus a bonus child who was given to us in the form of our son’s “randomly assigned” freshman-year roommate at Luther College. (It wasn’t random. I don’t believe there is a renegade molecule in the universe.) We have been reminded by the ups and downs of these years that strength is shown in the successes – the play that finally turns out right, the year-long research project that eventually does make it onto a poster-board for the big presentation, the grad school application with a happy ending. But that’s not how strength is built. Strength is built in the moments when you’re groveling in front of Waldo because of the dumbest attempted heist in world history, or you finally turn off the light and go to bed, believing that the paper really never will get done, or walk out of a rehearsal knowing in your heart that this play will be nothing but an embarrassment.

Nobody has ever stood up at their retirement party and said, “I am the person I am today because of my Hawaiian vacation in 2007.” We are transformed by the hard stuff. Our strengths come from the work and the failures and the suffering. Not just what’s intellectually hard, but when the challenge becomes emotional. We have lifted all we can, and there’s nothing left. We get strong from the weight room, not the jacuzzi. And we don’t get strong alone. Not usually. We are social creatures, so our strengths are built with the support of relationships that help us through the hard stuff. The encouragement of our key relationships gets us through building strength to showing strength.

And strength is built when we know there’s a purpose. Pain that is pointless is just pain. It breaks you down. For pain to build strength, we need to know there’s a calling to something more.

From Heaven Comes Our — What?

I want us to look at the college seal. It’s simple – just “GA” and our Latin motto: e caelo nobis vires.

It has been dormant for a few decades. I’ve asked around, and I tend to find that nobody knows what it means. But I think it’s ready for a comeback. Let’s talk about what it means.

Caelo means heaven. Think ‘celestial.’ So, e caelo = “from heaven.” Nobis of course is “ours” or “to us.” So we’ve got “From heaven comes our … vires.”

What’s vires? I always thought it was truth. Harvard’s motto is just “veritas” – which does mean “truth.” So I figured vires is probably related to veritas, and it makes sense for a college motto to be, “from heaven comes our truth.” So for a few decades I wore a Gustavus class ring with – as far as I was concerned – “from heaven comes our truth” on it. (I have an unusual class ring – it’s just the college seal.)

But that’s not what it says. Our daughter would roll her eyes at my ability to be confidently wrong for so long – I think it’s a gift; she has doubts. She’s quite clear that vires means “strengths” – it’s plural.

So here’s the Gustavus Latin motto:

e caelo nobis vires

from heaven come our strengths

On the fact that nobody but the Classics department knows what this means - I’ll let us off the hook on that a bit. The University of Chicago’s motto is crescat scientia; vita excolatur. Nobody knows what it means. Well, not quite. There’s an official translation, which was necessary because nobody knows what it means. Here it is:

crescat scientia; vita excolatur

let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched

Somehow four Latin words that nobody understood became thirteen English words that are still a little confusing. With a semicolon. Perfect for the University of Chicago. I think Latin mottos have been ignored for a few decades at most colleges, except at Harvard where the founders took the precaution of making it just one word.

What has been hiding from us for so long, though, is the fact that the Gustavus motto is different from the rest. Chicago’s is about knowledge. Harvard’s is about truth. That’s what you’d expect for a college, right? That’s what this is about. But the Gustavus motto is about strength.

Scrappy From the Start

The people who created St. Ansgar’s Academy, later to be renamed Gustavus Adolphus College, had reason to beg heaven for strength. They had gotten themselves into something and they didn’t know how it would end. They were scrappy, and they did what they needed to do. But they weren’t about to do it alone, nor could they.

Gustavus was started in 1862, on the frontier, by people who lived in wood structures they built with their own hands. Minnesota had become a state just four years before. 1862 was the year of the Dakota War, a series of civilian massacres followed by the largest mass-execution in American history. That happened just down the river in Mankato, the day after Christmas.

The Civil War was raging and some of the Swedish immigrants who founded this place would be swept up in that war. In the summer of 1863, when Gustavus was still St. Ansgar’s Academy, some of them would fight in the Battle of Gettysburg where the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment famously gave its last full measure of devotion and, by some accounts, saved the Union. The Swedes who came to this unruly place must have wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

So perhaps it’s natural that their chosen motto was a little different. Oxford’s motto asks God for illumination - dominus illuminatio mea. Yale’s is lux et veritas – “light and truth.” Those are mottos for the life of the mind, for schools where things are secure and the libraries have thick stone walls. That was not the situation in Minnesota in the 1860s. The wind blew through the walls of our library, which was also the classroom and sometimes the cafeteria. We were begging heaven for strength because we needed it.

And we got it, and I think we kept it. It’s in our character. We were scrappy from the start.

To be continued.

Thanks, Sara, for all of it.

*

About a year ago, Annika declared that our house was Elbertwood School. Then she started conducting classes. And recess. And gym. And lunch. And after-school clubs. We have no idea where the name came from - neither does she - but every day, Annika and Tollef come home from school and they promptly start school again. In real life, Annika is in first grade and Tollef in Kindergarten at Minnehaha Academy, but at Elbertwood they are both in second grade, and Annika is both teacher and student. The daily saga of Elbertwood has been our story in 2009.

An Annual Update From Elbertwood School

An Arts & Snacks Magnet School

Dear Parents & Friends of Elbertwood,

I write to provide an update on events in our beloved Elbertwood School in 2009. Miss Annika remains our only teacher, but enrollment has grown considerably. Tollef was the original conscript – well, student – but classmates now include Emma, Tom, Tim, Abigail, Olivia, Julia, Tookie, Manjo, TV and Noodle. Even with so many imaginary friends at Elbertwood, Tollef gets all the attention he could possibly need from Miss Annika, and I think it’s fair to say, more than he ever wanted.

Curriculum remains innovative and rigorous. Miss Annika prints worksheets from the internet and grades them meticulously. Subjects include math, language arts, science, lunch, snack time, candy time, gym, and recess. Miss Annika has been enhancing the Bible curriculum lately, but not without some challenges along the way. She was preparing to teach a class on Psalm 100 when she discovered that her Kids’ Bible did not have Psalm 100 in it. A stern conversation was had with the Head Librarian, and real Bibles have replaced the Kids’ versions.

2009 has not been entirely smooth sailing. The cafeteria/kitchen was flooded in August and has not been functional since. Miss Annika and her students were nonplussed by the news that it had been raining in the kitchen, and positively thrilled to hear that Snuffy’s Malt Shop and Pizza Luce would be on the menu until it was replaced. Miss Sara – the Principal of the Lower School – has overseen the kitchen’s reconstruction, and it may be functional by the New Year.

Elbertwood was pleased to get a new mascot this year. Porter, our faithful 15 year-old poodle, is still with us – but a local radio station ran a piece on a 14 year-old poodle at a local shelter. The entire school piled into the car and got him.

Emmy, Elbertwood’s goldfish, is a different matter. Emmy was acquired in 2008 and she is still with us. Her original aquarium-mate, rest her soul, is not. Nor is her second. Or third. Or fourth through seventh. Emmy now lives alone, as even the snails at the local Petco recoil with fear when we enter the store. Word got around.

Elbertwood staff and students enjoyed Summer Camp in Ontario again this year. We did not manage to do the intended Fall Camping Trip, but living without a kitchen has been a lot like camping. For other extra-curriculars, Miss Annika and her student are both in Spirited Feet Dance Class at church, and the recent recital was a great success. It featured about 150 girls – and Tollef.

Miss Sara splits her duties between Elbertwood and Bible Study Fellowship International, where she now teaches the three year-old class every Tuesday, and Easter Church, where she teaches and helps to lead the childrens’ programs in various ways. Mr Dan continues on as Custodian and Principal of the Middle School. There are no Middle School students. He is occasionally consulted on matters of curriculum, particularly for Gym Class. His travels continue.

Elbertwood has had a fantastic 2009, and looks forward to an even better 2010. Students and staff alike wish you and yours a blessed New Year!

Even though AI creates huge efficiencies, I think it is likely to increase employment in many knowledge-intensive industries. Whether this happens in any given field will depend on whether we are capable of consuming more of whatever that industry produces. This is because automations like AI make things a lot cheaper, and we buy more things when they’re cheap. The result is that “job-killing” automations sometimes end up creating more jobs. This is called the Jevons Paradox, named for the economist who first noticed the phenomenon.

Why Automation Sometimes Creates Jobs Instead of Killing Them

I think the best example of the Jevons Paradox is cars. The earliest cars were hand-made, one by one, so buying a car in 1900 cost about twice what most people made in a year. Because of this, very few cars were sold, and hardly anyone could earn a living by making them. Then in 1913 Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and reduced the labor necessary to make his Model T by almost 90%. By then the Model T had been assembled by hand for five years, so the workers at his factory likely thought their jobs were toast. In a sense they were right: assembly line work was very different than what they had learned to do, and in many ways it was worse. But they couldn’t have imagined what would come next. Here’s how many cars Ford sold from 1905 to 1925:

Ford’s plant employed 12,000 people in 1910; by 1920 it employed 40,000. But look at the bars for 1910 and 1920 above: Ford increased employment by 400% … and increased production by 4,500%. Our ability to consume more and more cars — which is to say, our ability to consume more and more transportation — meant that millions of people would earn their livelihoods in the automotive industry, including much of my family throughout the 20th century. Those millions of jobs only existed because “job-killing” technologies made cars affordable.

This doesn’t always happen when job-killing innovations come along. Sometimes they just kill jobs. Agriculture is a good example, because we produce food much more efficiently than in the past, but the agricultural labor force didn’t grow - it did this instead:

So in the case of cars, labor-saving tech created jobs, but in the case of food, labor-saving tech killed them. Why the difference?

In short, there’s only so much we can eat. (I contest that point whenever an Oreo McFlurry comes through the driver’s-side window – but even I have a tiny bit of shame, so it’s embarrassing to order more than two when it’s just you and the dog in the car.) When food gets cheaper, we eat a bit more than before – but consumption doesn’t multiply tenfold, or a hundred-fold. But cars? We can buy as many as we want. Here’s how many cars we owned per person from 1900 to 2000:

So whether a new technology will kill or create jobs depends mainly on how much we can increase our consumption of whatever it makes. If some blessed soul invents a $1 McFlurry, I will — with regret — cap my consumption at something like two a day. Three on Sundays and holidays.

All that said, it’s usually quite hard to predict whether demand for a product will rise or fall. Ten years ago, Impossible Burgers seemed ready to take the world by storm – then they didn’t. But if you told someone in 1905 that Ford would make 1.9 million cars in 1925, they couldn’t have conceived of it. This is partly because they would have had to imagine a different society, one where people didn’t need to live close to work and could go nearly anywhere for the weekend - not just where the trains ran. Whole cities were built around these changes, and broad social transformations like this are nearly impossible for most of us to envison before they happen.

Will AI Make IT Jobs Scarce?

Let me take two examples of fields where I think jobs will be steady or even increase: IT and law.

Computer science graduates have had a very hard time getting jobs lately, and some tech CEOs have talked openly about AI-driven hiring freezes and even layoffs. The ones who are singing this tune are, of course, selling AI-powered tools to corporate customers, so their hiring freezes and layoffs are part of the sales pitch: Our AI product will reduce your biggest cost – people. Other tech companies are doing business as usual, and some are taking the opportunity to hire top graduates in a soft market. Overall, the market is in a rough transitional period on the back end of an explosion of computer science majors:

The computer science wave seems to have crested, which is probably good. Official data isn’t out yet, but programs started reporting steady to lower enrollment in the Fall of 2025. I think studying computer science comes with AI risk, but so does studying a lot of other things right now. If incorporeal robots are the future of work, getting close to them might be a pretty good move.

To be clear, coding has been transformed in just the last year. Software engineers commonly don’t write their own code any more; they orchestrate code delivered by AI tools. That orchestration still requires an enormous amount of human expertise, and like the assembly line, it’s at least ten times more productive than the previous method.

So it comes to this: can we consume at least ten times more software? When I ask it that way, it seems like the answer could be no. But let me ask it this way: does the software you use at work suck? Or, is there software you only pretend to use … because it sucks? If I say this describes most corporate IT platforms, the only people who will deny it are the ones who sell corporate IT platforms. It also describes the still-terrible checkout experience at every online retailer except Amazon, and much other bad software that we simply take for granted.

On the Good Leadership Podcast a few weeks ago, Dan Mallin, a long-time corporate hand and software entrepreneur, said that the typical corporate IT department has about five years of “technical debt.” That’s the amount of work you have to do to make the software you currently have work properly. Forget about the software you should have. And by the way, making your ERP or CRM systems work properly won’t cause people to actually use them. Solving that is yet more work. (If you don’t know what an ERP or CRM system is, you should stop right now, say a prayer of thanksgiving to God, and forget about them forever.)

All of this is to say that we have a lot of very productive work left to do in software – making it better, and making better stuff. For the first decades of the computer era, we’ve been typing code with our fingers, something that will seem as absurd to the next generation of software developers as hand-making each Model T seemed by 1920.

Will AI Kill Legal Jobs?

My second example is law, and I can shorthand it this way:

* After decades of legal technology development, most legal work is still hand-crafted.

* If you ask the general counsel of a big company how much legal and compliance work doesn’t get done in her organization, she’ll tell you – well - we’re all right.

* Then she’ll close her office door and tell you the truth. You have no idea.

This is one of my principal fields of work, and I can attest that the “legal debt” in every big company is at least as formidable as the technical debt Dan Mallin described above. Organizations are simply too big and complex, and too fast-moving, for the lawyers to handle every question or review and tailor every contract. Not even close. And the cost of hiring more lawyers - forget it. They’re already some of the most expensive people in most companies.

Another example: when a big company like Netflix buys another big company like Warner Brothers, they are really acquiring tens of thousands of contracts. That’s what a corporation is — a nexus of contracts. The research Netflix’s lawyers do before the final purchase – called due diligence – usually involves looking at a just sample of those zillions of contracts, since it’s not humanly possible to look at them all. In other words, they’re buying a black box the contents of which are largely unknown - but they have an idea.

This could be done better, and AI will make it so. Most acquisitions destroy shareholder value, and it’s basically because their scale and complexity is far beyond any person’s ability to comprehend. It’s not just the contracts - it’s everything. We’ve been assembling increasingly complex corporate structures with duct tape and pliers. Now that it will be far cheaper to do the work thoroughly and well, I expect lawyers to remain very busy. And like IT engineers, they will increasingly be in the business of orchestration, not hand-crafting.

Law will be transformed at the consumer level, too. Over half of Americans have no will. Over fifty percent of people show up in court with no lawyer — they’re too expensive. Entrepreneurs regularly start businesses without incorporating them or papering their contracts. Small business owners rarely consult lawyers, and the same goes for management advisors and even accountants, not because they don’t need the advice, but because they can’t afford it. When did you last consult a lawyer? And I don’t mean your friend who went to law school.

AI will make legal services accessible, just as it will make big IT projects affordable and maybe even on time. I expect jobs in these fields to change, and I expect there will be lots of jobs in these fields going forward.

A Final Depressing Note About Suicide, Sort Of

It’s going to be painful. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim famously observed that the rate of suicide rises when the stock market falls, which is natural. But he also observed that the rate of suicide rises when the stock market rises. His point was that we are deeply shaken by big changes to economy and society, even if they seem like good changes. He called this anomie, because the French can make even suicide seem a bit stylish. I think AI will shake the world of white collar work at least as powerfully as blue collar work was shaken by the manufacturing boom of the early 20th century and its later decimation by robotics and offshoring. There were big winners and big losers in those moves. AI will be just as fearsome a transformation, and it will happen a lot faster. The pace of change in the AI era is what worries many experts, and I certainly agree. It’s not whether we can digest the technology, but whether our society can handle the torrid pace of change. To do that, we need America’s greatest generation to be in the future, not the past.

Robbie then visits a wise owl named Alex, who gives different advice: “Just keep reading for examples. The words will make sense once you have enough samples.” Robbie dives in. He scans thousands of books at great speed. “He built vast language models including words, patterns, order, position.” By the end we are told: “Robbie learned, after studying heaps, that you can know a word from the company it keeps.”

That’s essentially what AI does. It knows a word by the company it keeps — by what other words tend to appear near it, in what order, in what contexts. This is a powerful thing to be able to do. It is also not what reading is.

World models

Consider this sentence: “You are the light of the world.” What does it mean? For a human, the answer involves an extended frame. There’s a speaker saying something metaphorical about identity and moral visibility. The reader has to understand the metaphor, understand who is plausibly being addressed, understand what the speaker probably wants the listener to do. To understand the sentence, you have to build a mental model of what the speaker thinks the listener will think he means. That is not word prediction. It is world construction.

This is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Now more than ever, education is about understanding, since machines can retrieve and render all the world’s knowledge at almost no marginal cost. The competitive advantage of humans is our ability to understand.

Here’s an illustration of one thing you can do that AI can’t. You are riding your bike along a highway and an ostrich merges somewhat aggressively into your lane. Like this:

Even if you have never traveled with ostriches before, you know the ostrich won’t do certain things. For example, the ostrich will not:

* meow

* suddenly melt

* draw its sword

* ask you for a light

* blast off vertically

* transfer itself to your C: drive

* stop on a dime (that’s Road Runner)

You know these things because you have a world model. Even if you’ve never seen a live ostrich before, you can tell that it is a large bird, a biological creature, subject to certain laws of physics.

But AI lacks a world model, so it is quite capable of believing that an ostrich’s next move will be to melt or meow or draw its sword. No five-year-old human would make these mistakes.

What does this mean for knowledge work?

For now, machines are useful for tasks where meaning can be derived from word associations and statistical patterns, and where a high degree of accuracy isn’t that important. That’s a lot of tasks. Summarizing a document. Drafting an email. Answering a routine question. Brainstorming titles for a Substack post. Finding the relevant sections of a long report. These capabilities are rapidly enhancing the productivity of knowledge workers, and the world will be better for it.

But the underlying limitation remains. A machine does not understand what it is reading in any sense a human would recognize. It is doing something else.

This matters especially when being wrong can be catastrophic. A doctor who confidently makes a bizarre diagnosis is a bigger problem than a doctor who is modestly wrong in a sensible direction. A financial analyst who confidently asserts that a bridge is a sailboat is more dangerous than one who is slightly off on a growth estimate. Even if this happens one time in a thousand it will destroy credibility and ruin a career. We rely on working with others who share our world models.

The solution for now is to have humans initiate, review and oversee the work of machines. There will be lots of jobs like this — seeing where and why AI is wrong, and imagining how it could be made to do its work even better. These are management skills, but the jobs will be entry-level. There are plenty of young people who can do this well, but most of our educational system is not built to develop these skills.

As to our title question, the answer is no, AI can’t really read. It can’t be surprised, or notice that something is off, or wonder what the author really meant. Those are jobs for humans, and they will remain so for a long time.

*

Links to the original series at Legal Evolution:

I: Legal’s AI rocket ship will be manned

II: Did Robbie the Robot really learn to read?

III: My new Volvo is a Mazda

IV: My mind is just a broken machine

I sometimes teach a course on presentations at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. It grew out of a class we ran at CEB, the research firm where I grew up professionally. It was live-fire training intended to help young professionals get better at delivering presentations. The speaker was carrying a message developed and refined by an experienced research team, so they knew what to say – they just needed to get good at saying it. That’s what the training was for.

When I first taught the class in a law school, the students were similar – people in their 20s and 30s, college-educated of course, varied backgrounds. As with the corporate course, the core activity was speaking: from Day 1, every student gets up and presents material.

And on Day 1, I discovered that this course was going to be about judgement, because the students got up and said things that would get them kicked out of the room – or worse – by a real audience. Real audiences have their own problems and their own perspectives, and the first thing to figure out is not what you’re going to say — it’s what their situation is. It’s the management team of a failing tech company, or the assembled partners of a booming law firm, or a disappointed student activist group, or a church governing board (no adjective necessary: there is always strife). So occupied by the task of presenting material, students hadn’t thought this aspect through.

In practice, judgment is asking, and envisioning, how will these people interpret and understand me in light of their situation? What is their situation? Do they agree among themselves on the nature of that situation? (Always: no.) Who do they think I am? Do they have an incentive to agree with my framing of their problem – or to disagree? What does the audience want to hear, and what don’t they want to hear?

And finally, the job: in light of all that, what do they need to hear? It is empathy fueled by imagination.

If this seems sophisticated, it is. But we start doing it before we can talk, and we keep doing it throughout our lives. Children learn to imagine what Mom wants, and what Dad wants, and what their insufferable older brother and insufferable younger sister want. These imaginings are imperfect but serviceable, and we get a lot better at them over time. They help us navigate. They help us get another Christmas cookie or another story before bed. It’s how we get a date to the prom or a first job or a recommendation from a professor.

At CEB, everyone had lived a few years in the corporate world before getting up in front of an audience. We had some experience imagining, based on our experience, what supply chain executives cared about, how that varied by industry and capital structure, how it differed from what their colleagues in Legal or Finance or HR or Strategy wanted. We imagined what they thought of consultants, and young consultants, and young consultants in suits or not in suits, depending on the location. This let us anticipate and manage what this Finance or Legal or Supply Chain executive wanted to hear, and needed to hear. This is judgement. It’s imperfect but serviceable. I did around 800 live presentations, and only faced full audience uprisings in three or four (one of which involved a threat to have me removed by corporate security … we got through it). Sometimes you really don’t get to have the extra Christmas cookie.

Back to class - law students don’t necessarily have experience with this stuff, and their first presentations reflected that. Figuring out what to say and how to say it doesn’t leave much brain energy for seeing the six different ways their words could be received by different audience members.

Can you teach judgement? Absolutely. As anyone can attest who knew young Danny Currell, I (ahem) didn’t always have it. We get it by putting ourselves in others’ shoes, envisioning diverse “what if?” scenarios, considering alternate outcomes, and doing all of that repeatedly. We build judgement by feeling the effect of mistakes, but more than that — and this is perhaps a hallmark of natural intelligence — we build judgement by correctly inferring effects that we never experience. (I call it natural intelligence, by the way, because animals are quite good at this, too. We’ve had self-driving vehicles since horses were tamed.)

In class, developing judgement was mainly about the audience: Who are they? What do they care about? Who’s the decider? Who knows the most? Who’s the most powerful? Who’s the influencer? Who can call corporate security on you? In the event of defenestration, what floor are you on?

Yesterday, I wrote about the idea that AI doesn’t have a world-model – only a very sophisticated text string. After that post, an old friend and I emailed about whether it matters that machines currently lack the ability to envision things and to rapidly manipulate those resulting images or mental models like we do. His point is that if AI can use text to describe our mental models accurately and instantly, does it matter if they are one step away from having those models themselves? Let me say why I think it might matter.

* Confidence and trust. Part of good judgement is imagining when we are likely to be lied to and why. AI struggles to separate truth from lies, lies from inaccuracies, and lies from fiction. (We know there’s a difference between lies, inaccuracies and fiction. It’s a matter of intention, which that requires empathy to imagine.) If we’re working with AI, at least now we try to mitigate the problem with better prompts. In other words, we supply our judgement.

* Empathy and anticipation. Judgement also involves empathy and anticipation. Empathy is “what if I were her?” Anticipation is envisioning what I might do next if I were her. It is alleged that, when asked how to carry out a school shooting, ChatGPT provided a helpful (to the shooter) response. Humans would normally recoil at the question, so it’s worth thinking about why. I think it’s because we instantly imagine why someone would ask such a thing, then – involuntarily, instantly – envision what that person may want to do next. Those thoughts, those world models and their alternatives, form in the blink of an eye. By contrast, at least for now, AI has to run complex calculations to identify a risk, or - as here, allegedly - it just answers the question.

How do we teach people to be better at using their natural judgement? It’s a question for the ages, but I think a short piece of the answer is a series of simple questions that are hard to answer:

* How do I know?

* Who am I dealing with? Are we sure? Are they real?

* Who else could I be dealing with?

* What might they want? Why?

* What’s the best outcome from my perspective? From theirs?

* What facts do we probably agree on?

* What do they want to hear? What do they need to hear? Am I sure?

* Will others accept what I know? Why not?

* Who’s getting paid? In the short run – and in the long run? How – and why?

* How well does the audience, the author, or my opponent understand their own situation?

* How well do we understand our own situation? Do we disagree internally? Why?

Tomorrow (post #3) I’ll turn to a related question: what AI, critical thinking, and the liberal arts have to do with each other – and why the answer matters more than most people think.

*

*On the matter of how our brains work, at least in the terrain we’re talking about here, I think some of the most helpful stuff comes from Iain McGilchrist. Here’s a fun and easy starter video on his ideas. After that, Ways of Attending is terrific. After that, the reading gets a lot longer — The Master and His Emissary at least fits into one volume; his most recent two-volume work, The Matter With Things, I will freely concede I haven’t read yet.

A patient walks into a clinic. She is tired, anxious, and has a list of symptoms. The doctor has fifteen minutes. Over those fifteen minutes the doctor will do something remarkable. She’ll listen to the patient describe her symptoms, but she’ll also watch the patient, read her body language, notice what she’s not saying. She’ll pull dozens of small observations into a provisional hypothesis — an abstract framework for what might be going on. She’ll test that hypothesis with questions, blood work, and maybe imaging. She’ll adjust her framework as new data arrives. At the end, she’ll explain her conclusion in a way the patient can understand and act on.

At least, the best doctors will do this. It’s very hard. My doctors are like this; I’m lucky.

What artificial intelligence can’t do

Could machines do this? Sort of. A machine can process the blood work, and machines are getting very good at reading imaging. But machines struggle to integrate the inputs into a series of alternate hypotheses, question or doubt those hypotheses, or explain alternate conclusions reliably. This is because machines cannot build or manipulate abstract mental models of the world. Not yet.

It’s important to note that AI can simulate our mental models and improve our ability to work with them. But since AI can’t envision the world, it cribs off of our visions of the world (or, more accurately, our descriptions of those visions). It’s like a student cheating on a standardized test by looking at the smart kid’s answer sheet and copying them down. That can return a perfect exam, but it can also be a disaster if the AI maps its responses to the wrong questions. AI is just as happy to be confidently wrong as confidently right, because in a sense it can’t tell the difference.

Judea Pearl, a UCLA scientist who laid some of the foundations for modern AI, has argued that current AI has a fundamental limitation. In an essay in the book Possible Minds, Pearl says AI “cannot reason about ‘What if?’ questions” and still lacks “a blueprint of reality, a model — similar to a road map that guides us in driving through an unfamiliar city.” As a result, even the most sophisticated AI models learn from human interpretations of the world rather than from the world itself.

What natural intelligence can do

Humans learn from the world directly, we do it effortlessly, and we start doing it in infancy. A baby knows her mom. A toddler has developed a category for moms generally, and for parents, and for authority figures. A child has a mental model of hierarchy, of sources of love, of dangerous things. Perhaps the turning point for our species, as the Israeli anthropologist Yuval Harari has argued, was when we created categories for things that are unknown, imagined, and potentially not even real — but somehow still “things.” Law is in this category. So is money. So are corporations, nation-states, and modern finance. None of these exists in any corporeal sense. They exist because humans agree that they exist.

This is what knowledge workers do all day. They place facts into categories. They adjust the categories when the facts don’t fit. They argue about which category is correct. They explain why. A lawyer argues over whether an act is a crime or a tort. A doctor argues whether symptoms add up to one condition or another. A consultant argues whether a company is a good acquisition target. An accountant argues whether a transaction is revenue. None of these is a calculation. All require a mental model of the world into which the facts can be placed.

AI can’t do this stuff yet. Pearl outlines three levels of reasoning to illustrate what machines can and can’t do:

* Statistical: What can one fact tell us about another? Machines are great at this.

* Causal: What happens if an input changes? Machines can do this, but less reliably.

* Counterfactual: What if we tried something different? What if we’re wrong? Machines cannot do this at all, because they lack a mental model of the world.

Nick Chater, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick, goes further. In The Mind is Flat, he argues that humans are not just capable of building mental models — we can’t stop doing it. We are masters of serial improv, continuously conjuring and renegotiating stories and categories as we go. We supply connective tissue to facts by conjuring frameworks.

For example: We are a city on a hill. We are seed scattered on different kinds of soil. We are going to turn it around in the fourth quarter. We are thinking we might need a change of pace. None of these words make any sense unless you have a mental model into which they can be placed.

What does this mean for education?

ChatGPT seems to carry on a conversation. It seems to understand. Isn’t it understanding our world models?

This is the crucial question. The answer is no, but the reasons are subtle and things could change. Right now, AI’s veneer of understanding is produced by an extraordinarily sophisticated statistical prediction of what word is most likely to come next in any given context. This is not produced by an independent view or model of the world.

The difference may seem academic, but it is not. It is the reason LLMs hallucinate. It explains why they confidently assert things that are false. It explains why they cannot be trusted in settings where being wrong has consequences – like doctor’s offices, courtrooms, airplane cockpits and so on.

Here’s what this may mean for education. In a society infused with artificial intelligence, people will be paid for what only their natural intelligence can do. This includes initiating and pausing projects, analyzing AI output, asking and re-framing questions, constructing alternative and ‘what if?’ scenarios, reserving and exercising judgement at the right time, and explaining all of this to other humans in a way that creates trust.

Tomorrow: how do we develop those skills?

*

Links to my original series on this topic at Legal Evolution.

I: Legal’s AI rocket ship will be manned

II: Did Robbie the Robot really learn to read?

III: My new Volvo is a Mazda

IV: My mind is just a broken machine

It’s a fair question. It’s also, in my view, the wrong question to start with.

Here’s the right question: what do humans do that machines can’t? Once we understand that, we can think more clearly about what college can and can’t do, at least when it comes to career development. The caveat matters a lot, because the importance of education beyond one’s career is big and growing. (More on that later, but here’s a short preview: what did fifth grade do for your kid’s career? How about 10th grade? So why is 14th grade different? It is — but you need to know why.)

In 2021 I wrote a four-part series on AI and the law in Legal Evolution. At the time I was working in the Senate on technology-competition issues touching on national security, and AI kept coming up. I took on the legal AI project to go deeper, because AI seemed likely to develop faster and have a more lasting impact than most of the other technologies I was looking at. That has turned out to be true.

In late 2022 the true AI tremors began with the release of ChatGPT, and this February was the first real earthquake with the release of the latest models. As I write this, Mythos either is or isn’t on the precipice of changing the world. I think it probably will.

For all the recent developments, the primary conclusions I drew in 2021 haven’t changed, since everyone figured that this level of AI would arrive eventually; the only question was how fast. It turned out the answer was: fast. And though we still don’t know exactly how AI works, it still appears that it doesn’t have a mental world-model or “common sense” as we know it. AI is wildly powerful and useful, but it’s best understood as a labor-saving device, at least in terms of its economic effects. The cultural effects are a distinct but very much related matter, and we’ll get to those.

In this series I’m going to look at how AI impacts the broader world of knowledge work: medicine, consulting, accounting, engineering, research, journalism, finance, management. Any work that consists mostly of analyzing information and drawing conclusions. That’s much of what college-educated Americans do – especially the summa cum laude crowd. The fact that AI especially threatens students at the top of the class is an inversion of what we’re used to. More on that later, too.

Here’s the plan over the course of this series. We’ll start with what humans do that machines can’t — and why that’s a lot less obvious than it sounds. We’ll look at what machines are doing when they appear to “read” or “understand” something, which begs the question of what we are doing when we “read” or “understand.” We’ll ask why some labor-saving devices increase employment rather than decrease it. We’ll examine how expertise becomes software, and what that means for entry-level jobs. We’ll think about how the combination of human and machine will shape the new division of labor. And then we’ll bring it all back to one of the central questions of 2026: what will humans be paid to do in 2030, and why?

I have three central points that will show up across the series, so I’ll give them to you up front.

First, knowledge work is not going to disappear. The demand for it will expand, and total employment in fields like medicine, law, consulting and finance will probably grow. But the work those professionals do will change substantially.

Second, entry-level work will change more than senior work. This has big implications for how young people are trained, and it is not good news for the conventional law, accounting, or consulting firm model of “dump work on the juniors, and you’ll get a partner every few years from the survivors.” That model is already under stress; AI will break it.

Third, the skills humans will be paid to use are central to the real work of higher education – yet they have been eradicated from the curriculum at many colleges. They are the ability to frame a question, evaluate evidence, apply judgment, and explain a conclusion in terms that other humans can accept. These skills are particularly unlikely to be present in the high-growth technical and professional programs that have driven enrollment at the biggest schools in the last 20 years. This means many colleges have been leaning into an approach to teaching that is most vulnerable to disruption.

This is a critical point. Since 2000, the most popular institutions and majors have grown by selling knowledge. It’s memorization and application of information validated through tests leading to a degree. But you can’t get paid for knowledge anymore – you can only get paid for understanding and judgement. When the machines know everything and can instantly and accurately manipulate it for free, humans will not be paid for doing the same thing in a slower, less accurate and infinitely more expensive way. Instead, humans will be paid to direct, manage and evaluate the machines. This requires initiative, skepticism, questioning premises, and imagining how the world would look if another approach was taken. In other words, humans will be paid for their judgement, and you can’t teach judgement in a 200-student lecture hall.

Those three claims will seem obvious to some readers and controversial to others. That’s the nature of the AI conversation right now. Smart people disagree about what’s going on because generative AI is genuinely new and predicting the future is genuinely hard.

That’s part of where we’ll turn next: what are humans, really, and what is it that we do all day?

**

Links to the original series at Legal Evolution:

I: Legal’s AI rocket ship will be manned

II: Did Robbie the Robot really learn to read?

III: My new Volvo is a Mazda

IV: My mind is just a broken machine

I asked a few friends who know the schools in question, and ended up talking to them about college choices in general. One of them said, “You’re picking out a dog at the pound - you take the one home that you connect with.” I think that’s right - it’s largely a gut decision. Even so, you want the right inputs. So based on those conversations, here are some things to consider when choosing a college.

Learning community. Is there a community of people who want to read and learn the stuff that you want to read and learn?

* This could resolve the whole thing, since it speaks to both learning and community. If you’ve got those things, maybe you have what you need.

Dominant culture. Is there a dominant culture? How homogenous is it? Do you fit? Does it matter?

* We are inclined to think a dominant culture is limiting – but not necessarily. For example, West Point has a very specific culture because it is a place that forms people in addition to educating them. In a sense, every institution does that, and culture is how that happens.

Subcultures. Are there subcultures? Can you access them? How easily? Dominant culture may not matter if a subculture aligns.

* Subcultures can be thick - Greek life, sports teams, campus ministries, music groups - or even a specific academic major can define a college experience. For some people, college is an amazing experience of academic study and ROTC that happened to take place at one university or another. The subculture was what mattered.

Faculty culture. What’s the faculty culture - e.g., how do they interact with students? How much are they on campus? How accessible are they when they’re there? What research and publishing do they do, and does it influence the school?

* This varies a great deal between colleges and even departments, but it’s often ignored by prospective students, who commonly spend more time investigating the cafeteria. (For the record, I take cafeteria matters very seriously, and I believe the quality of soft-serve ice cream should come up in accreditation reviews. But man cannot live on soft-serve alone, someone keeps saying, so – we think about the faculty thing too.)

Intellectual culture. Smart and intellectual aren’t the same thing. Does the culture (or subculture, or department) value curiosity or inquiry in a way that fits you?

* The world is full of brilliant people who are not intellectuals. If an engineer invents a better airbag but has no desire to bore his friends to tears with the details of how it works, they’re probably fine with that. But if his friends are the kind of folks who want to hear about it, it’s great if he wants to share. Again this is a matter of fit – and even at top schools, the intellectual culture varies a lot.

Surroundings. Where do you thrive – and why? Some schools are cloisters; some are classrooms sprinkled around a central city.

* Many students want big cities and big schools these days. How do the surroundings fit with what you want to learn and who you want to be in four years? I was easily distracted, so I loved being on a hillside in rural Minnesota. Chicago and Oxford were great too, but I was pretty distracted by those surroundings.

Fields of study. Is there a concentration or wide spread of study between sciences, humanities, professional, engineering? Is it more or less concentrated in your area? Which way does that cut?

* A humanities student (languages, history, the arts, etc.) might naturally choose a humanities-heavy school. There are obvious reasons to do this. But consider how the presence of engineering and STEM yields a different campus culture, creates different opportunities, and might make the humanities better. Needless to say, it cuts the other way, too. So you may only be interested in one field of study, but the total mix available at the school will change who your peers are and that will influence your experience.

*

Atul’s kids have made three “where to go to college” decisions in the last five years and mine made two, plus one for graduate school. The winners included a 30,000-student public university in California, a 434-year-old university in Europe, a mid-sized Jesuit university on the shore of Lake Michigan, a liberal arts college in Chicago, a liberal arts college in Iowa, and the Catholic mother ship in Indiana.

Since a couple million high school seniors and their families are making similar decisions this month, Atul and I thought we would do a retrospective on the decisions our kids and families made, how we made them, and how they turned out. We talk about:

* Financial boundaries

* Understanding the academic program

* Personal fit, geography, and campus culture

* The international option

* Career support and alumni networks

* Defining the “why” for attending college

With brief detours into Irish murder mystery shows, whether anyone pays attention to the curriculum, the secret Norwegian-Lutheran roots of Notre Dame football, the job market for language teachers, the limits of meritocracy in Silicon Valley and more.

Dan Currell and Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit discuss strategies for improving financial aid offers and understanding college pricing.

Colleges need to attract students, making them more willing to negotiate financial aid than people think

30% of families appeal for more aid 

70% of those families are successful in getting more aid

TuitionFit helps families understand actual costs and compare offers

We discuss the complexities of the FAFSA and CSS Profile

[Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free!

(It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

As Americans, one of the things we like to do is threaten to leave the country and then not do it. In our defense, we can’t find our passports, and sometimes we can’t find other countries. For example, I recently looked for Holland and couldn’t find it. I’m not accusing anyone here, but I’m worried The Netherlands may have done something bad, because Holland used to be right next to Belgium, and now it is gone.

In any event, we threaten to leave, but we rarely do, which might be just as well since the rest of the world is not always eager for our company.

Sometimes we threaten to make our kids leave the country for college. We don’t do that either, but the rant is a good one. It goes like this:

College is impossible to get into and costs all of the money, leading us to fill out inscrutable forms and take out crushing loans. Sports scholarships are how most people avoid this, but the kid behind the counter at GameStop was totally wrong - there are no DI scholarships for Super Smash Brothers. What the hell? Perfect Daughter’s SAT isn’t high enough to get her into Harvard, which is the only school that won’t be bankrupt by the time she graduates.

In sum, college in America is stupid, but the kid at GameStop said college is free in Germany - even for Americans! Perfect Daughter can go there. Germans love paying for other peoples’ stuff.

Hey kid – go get your passport. What do you mean we never got you one?

If you’ve been reading TCQ, you know where this is headed.

The Short Answer

Let’s start by looking at what people do rather than what they say. About 25,000 Americans go to college abroad – that’s 0.16% of all American college students. They are usually affluent, have a parent from the country where they’re studying, or are U.S. citizens who lived there already. In practice, Amy from Des Moines never enrolls in a foreign university – not even in Canada.

This is partly because it’s not cheaper. Here’s where the confusion comes from: we think the cost of college includes food and housing, so when we hear that college is free in other countries, we figure that means another government is paying for the dorm and cafeteria. They never do, and they usually don’t have dorms and cafeterias anyway. So if your kid threads the needle and gets into one of the zero-tuition programs taught in English (in Germany, for example), you’ll only have to pay for an apartment, food, transportation and transatlantic flights. Northern Europe is a good deal more expensive than the U.S., so for around $20,000 a year, your kid can go to college for free. This is why nobody does it.

To be clear, I think more Americans should do this sort of thing - but it ain’t easy, and the few Americans who do it are almost always bicultural already.

The Longer Answer

The idea that we should send our kids to a foreign land for college comes from the belief that other countries have it all figured out. This is easy to believe if you pay no attention to other countries.

A common assumption is that other countries don’t have student loans, because outside the United States everything is magically free. Is this true?

Well - to take one example, Swedish universities are free for Swedes, yet they still graduate with $20,000 in student debt on average, because they have to pay for food and housing, and they aren’t cheap in Sweden. In English-speaking countries, all of whom charge some form of university tuition, student loans are big and growing. UK student borrowers owe £53,010 on average, or $70,600 USD. Canadian students graduate with about $10,900 (USD) in debt, and Australians with $19,000 (USD). As I laid out in “The college debt crisis is fake”, Americans generally can’t borrow more than $31,000 for college, average borrowing is around $25,000, and per-borrower loans have been falling for years. So the rest of the world isn’t so different from us, and the UK situation appears to be potentially far worse.

In Iceland, university is free – even for Americans, after they learn íslensk. This is the another barrier we tend to ignore: most bachelor’s programs are taught in the local language, and Americans are not renowned for our mastery of foreign tongues. Norway can offer free tuition for degrees taught in Norwegian partly because there’s no chance a herd of foreigners will break the bank by taking them up on the offer. The same goes for most free courses of study.

That said, foreign graduate programs are often taught in English because they enroll students from around the world — and, while they are almost never free, more Americans should probably avail themselves of this kind of thing.

Perhaps the bigger point here is that when it comes to it, Americans are not actually looking for a rock-bottom, Memorial Day Mattress Sale deal when it comes to college. My proof point is a genuinely great deal on higher education that almost nobody takes advantage of: for $18,000, including room and board, Minnesota residents can go to the University of Manitoba, a major research institution with 27,000 undergraduates. Manitoba is like Minnesota but colder and with a good deal more elbow room; Winnipeg is about as far from Minneapolis as Chicago. The University of Minnesota costs $38,000 and Minnesota’s state colleges cost $26,000 for residents, so as it stands, Minnesota’s cheapest in-state option is in another country. It’s totally normal; we’re international like that.

Except we’re not — nobody does it. The University of Manitoba reports enrolling 156 Americans total. If they’re all from Minnesota, that means 0.039% of all Minnesota college students are enrolled there. And it’s not because there’s some unseen barrier: Canadians speak a closely related language, and along with hundreds of other foreign schools, the University of Manitoba is eligible for Federal Student Aid – i.e., Pell Grants and student loans.

So even when it’s cheap, we don’t go to school outside the country.

But foreign students come here in droves. There are currently 357,000 foreign college students and 488,000 foreign graduate students in the United States. This isn’t because the American way of college is cheap – it’s because it is good. If you are skeptical about the last point - and I get it, there are concerns - it may help to note that foreign students usually pursue STEM degrees. And while we’re on the topic, I should note that it is a myth that foreign students pay full tuition. American colleges give foreign students the same discounts they give their American peers for the same reason - to get them to enroll. This can be seen in any school’s Common Data Set, section H6. For example, the University of Alabama discounts international students $33,786 on average.

Of course, many Americans “study abroad,” something only we could turn into a cruise. Study abroad programs are usually a semester or less, and while they definitely happen abroad, the “study” part is sometimes fuzzy. The top destinations for this sort of thing are Italy, Spain and the UK.

In sum, your kid is not going to college in Europe - but maybe they should.

***

Previous posts in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I Guess a Sports Scholarship is the Ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - “I bet expensive schools spend a lot on teaching students.” (Sometimes. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - “Ivy League graduates make the big bucks!” (Not usually - let’s look more closely.)

Other recent posts …

* Crazy Canucks … they admit students based on academic qualifications alone. What are they thinking?

* College Is an Identity Good – It’s the only way to explain how Americans treat these four years

* What Are Elite Colleges Looking For? (Whatever they want)

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

TCQ Foundation posts …

* Why The College Question?

* Why me?

* How I Got Here

* What I Believe

* What I Want

“Ivy League graduates make the big bucks!” (Not usually - let’s look more closely.)

This post will start with economics and end with sociology. Sociology was one of my two majors many years ago at Gustavus Adolphus College, and it’s behind much of what I do at TCQ. I only knew sociology existed because I took a high school class in the subject and loved it - thanks Mr. Leavey! (For the record, my other major was religion - which hasn’t shown up in TCQ much, at least not yet.)

Wealth Effects

A key thing to understand about the relationship between education and earnings is that people have a tendency to stop chasing money after they already have it. For this reason, subcultures with more than enough money produce some people who aren’t trying to earn much money. Ivy League schools pretty much define “subcultures with more than enough money,” so it’s no surprise that their graduates don’t earn quite as much as people think. But there are other forces in play here, too.

Selection Effects

Harvard graduates undeniably earn more, on average, than those who attend state flagship universities. That’s why we think Ivy League graduates make the big bucks.

This is not wrong, but it’s largely an illusion because we aren’t comparing apples to apples. The best studies take students with Harvard-level qualifications who nevertheless went to state universities and compare them to students who actually went to Harvard. When you do that, the income difference goes away.

So it’s not about Harvard, it’s about the students. It’s who Harvard selected, not what Harvard did with them after they arrived.

Leadership Outcomes

Case closed? Not quite. Anyone with two eyes can see that not attending an elite school is a barrier to certain kinds of jobs in certain places - most obviously the top jobs in New York and D.C. And the experts know it, too. Here’s the opening paragraph from the same study that shows an Ivy League education doesn’t increase your earnings on average:

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges. Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges. Yet those twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices.

Even though Harvard doesn’t increase average lifetime incomes, it increases the likelihood of national or global leadership outcomes. So the Harvard-quality student who attends UMass will have the same income, but she won’t work for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, go to a top graduate school, or hold a high leadership office. Notice that some of these outcomes are no way to get rich, but they are highly esteemed and they disproportionately go to graduates of elite colleges.

My first exposure to anything you could call elite was when I spent my junior year of college at Oxford. I was coming from Gustavus Adolphus College, which has long been the most elite school in Nicollet County and has produced its share of very successful people. But for reasons you can imagine, Oxford felt pretty different. Part of that was the academics, but what struck me most was the wealth and, we would now say, the privilege. The background music to the whole Oxford movie was, “You should probably know that someday you’re going to run the country, and maybe the world.”

But running the country is not lucrative in most cases. One Oxonian at a time gets to be Prime Minister, after which I suspect the income is just fine. But the more typical “run the world” path is founding an NGO or a museum, writing for a newspaper, working at the United Nations or in a government agency, becoming a judge and so on. (n.b., exactly half of all Prime Ministers - ever, since the thing was invented - went to Oxford, and a quarter went to Cambridge. Churchill never went to college at all, and the rest snuck in through a side door.)

Elite schools are wealthy, which makes careers like this — prestige, but no money to speak of — seem possible. If you’ve already got the money thing solved, you can turn to other stuff.

The relative wealth of American colleges can be seen using a New York Times interactive tool that has data on almost every school. Here’s what that tool has to say about the student body economics at Harvard and UMass.

Harvard: Fifteen percent of Harvard students come from households in the top one percent of incomes, which at the time was above $680,000 per year. Three percent of Harvard students came from top 0.1% income households - which is around $3,000,000 a year.

UMass: Less than one percent of students come from families with top-one-percent incomes, and a tiny fraction are in the top 0.1 percent.

The culture at elite universities values leadership outcomes a lot, in part because it can afford to. You can go make a lot of money, sure, that’s not so hard. But how about being Secretary of State? Ambassador to the Court of St. James? That’s a hard needle to thread, and if you’re already rich, you might as well give it a shot.

Here’s one example of how this sort of thing works. The top graduates of top American law schools, the ones who win the annual tournament of tournaments, spend a year clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court. After this, they commonly take up one of several interlocking paths: appellate lawyer, Department of Justice lawyer, law professor, or judge. These are all leadership positions, and none of them are the path to riches. (Appellate law pays just fine, but it is among the least profitable subspecialties in elite law firms.)

The point is that, whether or not they were rich to begin with, Ivy League graduates are formed in a subculture that to a great degree focuses on something other than money. This partly explains why affluent people disproportionately seek admission to Ivy League schools for their kids. It’s not so their kids can get a high-paying job, it’s so they can get what money can’t buy: prestige, power, or a place in the realm of ideas.

***

Tomorrow, the last entry in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Previous posts in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I Guess a Sports Scholarship is the Ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - “I bet expensive schools spend a lot on teaching students.” (Sometimes. Here’s how to find out.)

Other recent posts …

* Crazy Canucks … they admit students based on academic qualifications alone. What are they thinking?

* College Is an Identity Good – It’s the only way to explain how Americans treat these four years

* What Are Elite Colleges Looking For? (Whatever they want)

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

This is crazy, but it’s just one of the fruits from a poisonous tree that was planted 40 years ago when colleges started publishing high list prices to attract attention, then discounting them to enroll students. Since then, fake prices have ballooned and the poisonous tree is the size of a Redwood. It is the source of much that ails higher education.

Today’s post is about another fruit from that poisonous tree – #3 in Things We Get Wrong About College:

“I bet expensive schools spend a lot on teaching students.”

(Sometimes. Here’s how to find out.)

So - do expensive colleges spend a lot on teaching? It depends on what you mean by “a lot.” Well - perhaps they spend as much on teaching as they charge for tuition. If the system were sane, those two things would line up.

You can probably see where this is headed.

I pulled a list of brand name schools - the kind that have a decent number of students who pay the list price. I took their published tuition, then subtracted what they spend on teaching per student, which is public data.

Let’s start with schools that, we could say, operate “in the red” — they spend more on teaching than they charge, even counting full tuition. To take the first school as an example: full tuition at Princeton is $62,688, but Princeton spends $73,220 per student on teaching, so they “lose” $10,532 per student, per year. That’s the first bar in the chart. On a list of about 50 colleges, the seven below were in the red.

I should note that it’s hard to calculate the cost of instruction, since teaching undergraduates is only one of many things a research university does. As I learned as a consultant to big companies, a number can be accurate — but that doesn’t mean it’s right. Especially when I look at Stanford, I wonder how it came out quite that way. (And I’ll note here that Washington University in St. Louis’s number was so outlandish that I excluded it.)

For most brand-name schools, however, published tuition far exceeds what they spend on teaching. To take the first example, Southern Methodist University (SMU) has a published tuition of $67,040, but spends just $18,509 per student on instruction. The “profit margin” on full-pay students is around 70% - or $48,531.

Beyond SMU, you can see the full list below. It’s mostly research universities, as I plan to write a separate post about the economics of liberal arts colleges later.

If you’re interested in this kind of data, you might like this New York Times tool from 2017, which shows the rich/poor breakdown at every college in America. It’s incredibly entertaining, though nothing will ever compete with the baby name grapher.

So - how can you find this kind of data yourself? If you’re punishing yourself with big, confusing spreadsheets for Lent, you should use IPEDS.

If not, click here, look at the search bar, then fill in the name of the school you want information on. That will get you to a “Data Feedback Report” from the Department of Education, which will give you a snapshot of the school.

And I should mention another resource everyone should use: the U.S. College Scorecard, which is the Department of Education’s consumer-facing data reporting tool. Almost every college in the country is in there, too.

**

Tomorrow, we’ll continue Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with:

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks! (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

Previous posts in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I Guess a Sports Scholarship is the Ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

To come …

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Crazy Canucks … they admit students based on academic qualifications alone. What are they thinking?

* College Is an Identity Good – It’s the only way to explain how Americans treat these four years

* What Are Elite Colleges Looking For? (Whatever they want)

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

“Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket.”

(They’re mostly fake.)

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️🍀☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️

College sports brought me to Minnesota in the Fall of 1990 and I’ve never really left. Nobody remembers this detail because I was good at college and bad at sports – but it’s true. I’m still bad at sports, but I continue to play in the belief that my hidden athletic gifts could burst forth at any time. Some think this doesn’t happen after the age of 50, but I’m no sucker for that kind of pessimism.

What I have written below could make you think I’m against college sports. Au contraire. College students should do more sports, not less. Athletes do fine academically and later in life they perform better on Gallup’s core measures of wellbeing. For a generation with an anxiety epidemic, more exercise is a good prescription, and so is the social interaction that sports provide.

But Americans widely believe a Division I scholarship is the pot of gold at the end of the youth sports rainbow. Like the pot of gold, though, this prize is illusory, because most sports scholarships are fake.

Above - why I came to Minnesota

The Short Version

About 0.3% of high school athletes, or 15% of Division I athletes, start college with a full athletic scholarship. Another 42% of Division I athletes get a partial scholarship, and the rest get nothing. A full ride is a full ride - great. But when you hear that someone got an athletic scholarship, it’s usually partial.

Here’s the key point: the average discount for non-athletes is over 50%, so many “scholarship athletes” pay the same, and some pay more, than non-athletes. Proving the point beyond a doubt, a recent study shows that scholarship athletes graduate with almost as much debt as everyone else.

So what’s really going on here? We love sports, and we love to see our kids thrive in them. Since sports scholarships are rare, nobody does the math when one is offered. In truth, the scholarships are often worthless – but for many Americans, having a “scholarship athlete” in the family is priceless. And that’s what’s really going on.

The Slightly Longer Version

To believe that sports scholarships are a big deal, we first need to believe that college is unimaginably expensive. This is untrue, as I explained here. If the college cost problem were real, sports would be a surprising solution anyway in the era of the $400 hockey stick. (On this day of honoring the Irish, let me commend hurling, whose sticks are quite affordable and whose NCAA scholarships are as valuable as the others.)

Another thing we need to believe is that sports scholarships decrease the student’s total cost of attendance. This seems so obvious - what else could they be for? But they often don’t, which is why colleges can “afford” the scholarships. They’re just discounts that would have been given anyway.

Here are some more details on how the system works.

Who gets a full ride?

A full ride — officially a “full grant-in-aid” — covers tuition, fees, room, board, and books. These scholarships are what people picture when they hear “athletic scholarship,” and they overwhelmingly go to athletes in what the NCAA calls “headcount” sports. For men, that’s FBS football (85 scholarships per team) and basketball (13). For women, it’s basketball (15), gymnastics (14), tennis (8), and volleyball (12). Out of roughly 45,000 new Division I athletes each year, about 6,800 get a full scholarship. That’s the 15% I mentioned above.

Who gets a partial scholarship?

About 42% of Division I athletes get a partial scholarship. This happens when the coach gets a fixed dollar amount and divides it however she wants across the roster. A Division I baseball coach, for example, historically had 11.7 full scholarships to split among 35 players. In theory, a few players could get a full ride - but that’s unusual.

In practice, a partial scholarship might cover in-state tuition but not room or board. It might cover a fraction of out-of-state tuition. In some cases, it literally covers books — just books — and nothing else. This is technically an athletic scholarship, which is technically not nothing. It is also not what anybody means when they say “he got a scholarship to play ball.”

Who gets nothing?

The remaining 43% — about 19,500 incoming Division I athletes per year — are walk-ons. And, because discount rates are so high at most schools, there’s actually a chance that they aren’t paying more to go to college than their teammates. In other words, the baseball coach can give you a tuition discount - but so can Admissions, and they almost always do.

The math is a wash for many Division I athletes in part because athletic scholarships usually count against need-based aid. The math looks like this: a student qualifies for $20,000 in need-based aid, then gets a $15,000 athletic scholarship. He won’t get $35,000 off the cost of college – he’ll get $20,000 off, but now $15,000 is called an athletic scholarship and $5,000 is called need-based aid.

Why is all of this not a surprise?

Have you been to a college sporting event? I don’t mean a Notre Dame home game. I mean one of the roughly 300,000 college events that happen every year. There is almost nobody in the stands and the livestream is free. In other words, there is lots of cost and no revenue to speak of. Colleges do not have a magical pot of money to pay for all this, except at Notre Dame, which, OK – I admit it, the pot of gold is real, and it’s there. They have it. Of course they do. Who did you think had it? They keep it next to the Salmon of Knowledge. But nobody else gets to have it.

So why do people believe it?

People widely believe in the athletic scholarship for the same reason they believe college costs $99,000 a year: because it’s occasionally true; because we like to talk about extraordinary things; because we are drawn to large sums of money; because at some level we want to believe it. And because the belief in athletic scholarships drives participation, which drives applications, which drives revenue. The youth sports industrial complex is fueled, at least a little, by the belief that there is a payoff – and this is the payoff.

So what are sports really for?

Let me back up from the edge of cynicism to a better place. The payoff from sports is real, but it’s not financial. It’s the discipline, the friendships, the growth that comes from doing hard things with other people. Below, some members of the Gustavus Cycling Club in the 1990s. I’m on the left. I still ride with these guys, and they’re some of my best friends. That’s the payoff.

Tomorrow: “I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience!” (Sometimes. Here’s how to find out.)

Previous posts …

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

To come …

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Crazy Canucks … they admit students based on academic qualifications alone. What are they thinking?

* College Is an Identity Good – It’s the only way to explain how Americans treat these four years

* What Are Elite Colleges Looking For? (Whatever they want)

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A housekeeping note: through the end of Ten Things We Get Wrong About College I’ll keep all posts free for everyone, after which about half of TCQ’s posts will be for paid subscribers, and the other half open. Thanks so much to all subscribers, free and paid - I’m grateful. I want TCQ to get out to families who will benefit from it, so please forward any post to your friends!

Before resuming the Ten Things series, I’ll finish the sequence on testing and elite colleges. I started Friday with “Ugh! Perfect Daughter Has to Take the SAT (Really? Why?),” and continued over the weekend with “What Are Elite Colleges Looking For?” and “College is an Identity Good.” The last one looked at the difference between schools that are hard to get into and schools that are hard to graduate from. They aren’t the same thing. Yesterday’s post is worth a look even just to check out Webb Institute, a fantastic, free college in Long Island with a curriculum arguably more rigorous than anything else in American higher ed.

Today we’ll travel 30 miles outside the country (as the Canada Goose flies) to the University of Toronto to see how admissions works there. My choice of Toronto wasn’t random; my parents both went to the U of T, and I’ve visited the campus plenty of times on business trips. The main campus is in the city, closer to the financial district than Columbia but with more of a campus feel than NYU. Canadians might not think of U-Toronto as an “elite university.” I’m not sure that idea even translates, which is part of the point. But global rankings place Toronto higher than most Ivy League schools, so how do they handle admissions?

The passage that follows is from the NYT Opinion cutting room floor.

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Do We Have To Do This? Part II

The elite admissions rat race sometimes ends in a foreign country. Jeff Knox, an independent admissions counselor, has occasionally had students shut out of elite American schools who wind up at top Canadian ones like McGill or the University of Toronto. Getting into an elite American school is a complicated and opaque multi-year process, but Canada is different. “I don’t have to help much with the Canadian schools,” Knox says. “Students fill out an application, send a transcript and some test scores. The results are pretty predictable.”

The University of Toronto is just behind Princeton and ahead of the University of Michigan in the U.S. News global rankings, for what it’s worth. In 2021, Toronto hired Ryan Hargraves away from the University of Vermont to head Student Recruitment and Admissions. Ryan’s mandate is to lead a system that recruits and enrolls the best-fit students for a university whose matriculants each year are 70% Canadian and 30% global. I talked to Hargraves at length about the university and his role there - which naturally included a lot that is different in Canada.

For Canadian students, admissions decisions are based mainly on high school transcripts alone. This is possible because curricula and grading are standardized. For American applicants, SAT or ACT results are used to provide a neutral benchmark, since grades don’t necessarily convey anything reliable. And while certain programs have requirements beyond the high school transcript - theatre applicants must audition, for example - they are obviously relevant to the field of study.

All Canadian schools basically operate this way. Applicants are admitted based on high school transcripts, and in some cases other factors are considered - but not usually. In the U.S., elite-school admissions hinges critically on crafting an applicant persona, since every applicant has straight As and impossibly high test scores. But that’s not true in Canada, and there’s no point in crafting a persona since nobody will see it. The Canadian way of admissions just doesn’t have the capacity to flummox applicants and infuriate parents the way ours does. The University of Toronto rejects a lot of applicants, to be sure, but its reasons are pretty clear.

The Toronto example highlights two things at the root of America’s admissions anxiety. First, most American high school transcripts are a debased currency because of grade inflation - a problem Canada apparently has solved with standard curricula and grading rubrics. But an equally important difference is something the University of Toronto shares with every other university outside the U.S.: students apply to a program, which is to say they have to decide before enrolling what they will major in. This allows that program’s faculty to set admissions criteria specific to the field and decide who has satisfied those criteria.

American schools are unique in that we allow students to decide their field of study — what we call a major — after they are admitted. This partly explains why the American system has holistic admissions, since it’s hard to have objective standards of selection for someone who doesn’t know if they want to major in Anthropology or Architecture - and won’t have to decide for another year or two.

Thanks for reading The College Question! This post is public so feel free to share it.

As Hargraves pointed out, the Admissions department doesn’t decide who gets in - that’s the faculty’s prerogative. Admissions is there to recruit applicants, oversee the process, and support the faculty. It used to be a little more like this in American universities too, when admissions standards were more objective. If a known GPA and test score will qualify a student to attend, there’s no need for a dozen staff to pore over essays.

This difference also explains why the rest of the world doesn’t do “holistic admissions” and isn’t likely to start. If the engineering faculty sets the admissions criteria for their program, they aren’t going to admit a linebacker or hockey goalie to round out the entering class. They train engineers.

Yet somehow this does not render intercollegiate sports impossible. The University of Toronto has 21 men’s and 21 women’s varsity athletics teams – like Harvard, plus curling. In fact, the University of Toronto might be where the first college football game was played - anywhere, ever. But Hargraves confirms that today, athletics have little to do with admissions. Toronto’s coaches get the athletes its professors admit; its professors are not stuck with students the coaches would prefer.

By contrast, every Ivy League school’s professors are teaching a large number of students who have been chosen by coaches. Chetty, Deming and Friedman found that 89% of recruited athletes at Ivy-Plus colleges would not have been admitted on academics alone. It is long-received wisdom that Ivy League athletes are well-rounded and tend to be successful later in life. I don’t doubt this, and I further suspect that they may be happier people. But they are “substantially less likely to attend elite graduate schools and work at prestigious firms than their peers.” (See pp. 37-39 in the Chetty et al study here.) That’s not because they are athletes - it’s because 89% of them aren’t academically qualified to be at a super-elite school.

***

That’s the end of the cutting room floor bit. Some thoughts, now a couple years on from having written it.

Before I talked to Ryan Hargraves about Canadian admissions, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the flexible American approach to majors opens the door to our admissions shenanigans. There are other factors, too, like the importance of sports in early 20th century college culture, which set the initial precedent for admitting at least some students with a wink at their academics. (This wasn’t necessary in the earliest years of college football, when coaches would just hire ringers with little or no school affiliation. After that was banned, colleges had to enroll them.)

I’m quite in favor of the flexibility our system allows, and I think forcing applicants to commit to a field of study is a bad idea. How can a 17 year-old know to a certainty that he or she wants to be a nurse? I’ve spent plenty of time in a hospital bed - that’s a heck of a job, and high school isn’t going to get you to that level of career discernment. Arriving at college with options open is the right way to do it.

And that feature of the American system results in a bug: holistic admissions, which gives selective colleges a veneer of deniability even for the undeniable - and indefensible. At many (though not all) elite schools, if your parents’ net worth is in the billions, you’re in. If your mom is in Congress or your dad’s a CEO, you’re in. If you are a celebrity, you’re in. And yes, in all those cases you have probably gained life experiences of some value. But so has the first-generation American from Flushing. But she’s not getting in.

Tomorrow, TCQ returns to Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with #4 - “Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)”

Previous posts:

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

To come …

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* What Are Elite Colleges Looking For? Whatever they want …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

***

Holistic Chess: Nordic Ski Jumping

In Nordic ski jumping – the sport where tall, pale people throw themselves off the side of a mountain – officials judge competitors from a high perch above where they are expected to land. When the Winter Olympics remind people living south of Oslo that this sport exists, it is natural to think we are watching a sort of javelin where the spear has been replaced with a blonde person. But this is not true. Distance matters, but the soul of ski jumping is style. Judges award style points, and the longest jump does not always win.

Elite college admissions has never been purely about how far the skier can jump, so to speak. There have always been grades and test scores, and there have always been considerations of style. But as grades mean less and tests are mastered - even as they become optional - the skiers have maxed out the hill and considerations of style have taken center stage. It’s as if what started out as ski jumping had unexpectedly mutated into ice dancing, elevating style to the point where something that is clearly still athletic is resolved on an unknowable set of artistic grounds by judges whose reasoning cannot be sifted.

Covid-19 interfered with SAT and ACT testing, especially in places like California and Canada, but 1.5 million masked and distanced students took the SAT and 1.3 million took the ACT anyway. This was a 30% drop from 2020, but there were plenty of scores to be submitted by the 2.7 million students applying for Fall of 2021. Scores didn’t change - the average SAT went up a little and the average ACT went down a little. But colleges went test-optional in 2021, and the number of students who submitted scores collapsed - particularly at mainstream American schools. To take one example, in 2021 just 15 percent of Washington State University’s entering class had submitted a test score, even though most had surely taken either the ACT or SAT.

The skiers were still jumping, but the judges had no idea how far they had gone.

Students who didn’t get a near-perfect score on the SAT or ACT figure they are better off not submitting the score at all. At Cornell, about 70% of students submitted test scores before the pandemic. In 2021, just 41% did, and the scores were much higher. In 2023, the scores rose again - not because the average student who got into Cornell had a higher score, but because only those with perfect or near-perfect scores even submitted them. This is the idea of a “submittable” score: take the test, but only submit the score if it clears a rising bar. Standardized tests have begun to morph from a system of gradients to a singular accomplishment: did you get a perfect score? If not, move on.

MIT is an interesting and important case. In 2021, the percentage of students admitted without submitting an SAT score dropped only slightly, and the 25th percentile score didn’t rise because there was almost nowhere for it to go. For years, MIT’s 25th percentile SAT Math score was 780 out of 800. Yet in early 2022, MIT became the first elite school to reinstate the standardized testing requirement, stating that the SAT is the most accessible way for students with “less access to educational capital” to show their abilities. MIT’s suspicion was that low-income students from weak school districts who scored, say, a 760 on the SAT Math would decline to submit the imperfect score. But this would leave MIT’s admissions department with nothing but high school grades to go on - usually not enough to confirm that the student could succeed. With an SAT or ACT score, the student might have been admitted. This thinking is hotly contested, but in 2024, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown followed MIT’s lead.

Elite schools’ reported test scores make at least one thing clear: the tests aren’t hard enough. There are meaningful differences in ability among the thousands of students with a perfect SAT score. It’s not like they have probed the outer limits of human knowledge; they are, after all, applying to go to college. And it’s not like we lack the ability to write better tests. 99.91% of those who take the Law School Admissions Test don’t get a perfect score. Those who do each year would fill just half of Yale Law School’s entering class; the other half of the class, and every other law student in the country, would have lower scores. But colleges are deluged with perfect SAT and ACT scores, suggesting a false equivalence between candidates who are, of course, not the same. We may not have lowered the hoop, but if we are going to keep on with standardized testing, we might need to raise it.

The upshot of all this is that it is now impossible to be clearly qualified for admission to an elite school – but it’s also impossible to be clearly unqualified. This makes things awfully confusing for applicants, but gives colleges unassailable discretion over whom to admit. In practice, it works something like this: a perfect student gets one raffle ticket, and with as much sense as a raffle, she will be disappointed nine times out of ten. If her extracurriculars are just so, maybe she gets two or three raffle tickets. But the perfect applicant will get four if she’s a legacy, six if she’s an athlete, and nine if her parents are wealthy or famous. It’s rarely a guarantee; there’s still a raffle. But the chances that the child of a billionaire, ambassador or movie star will win the raffle are, by all appearances, very high.

***

Coming tomorrow … What if we just didn’t do this?

Previous posts in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

To come …

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

I have nothing against standardized tests, but they are very screwed up right now. I’ll cover this using some material from the NYT cutting room floor below and over the weekend, but here’s a summary of where it stands:

* Less than 10% of four-year colleges require the ACT or SAT for admission

* Probably only 5% are selective enough for the scores to matter

* Millions of high schoolers take the tests anyway

* Students who have taken the tests rarely submit their scores to colleges

* Revenues at The College Board and Educational Testing Service are higher than ever

What on earth is going on?

The Very Short Version

Because it’s easier to get into a good college than ever (see #10 in this series), a decent high school transcript will generally get you into college and SAT scores rarely matter much. The public discussion of test-optional policies started when elite colleges dropped the SAT/ACT requirement during the pandemic, but most schools had stopped requiring them many years before for a simple reason: a quick look at an applicant’s high school transcript was usually enough to make the admit/deny decision.

But there is so much cultural momentum behind the SAT and ACT that high schoolers take them by the millions, and of course the organizations that administer the tests aggressively sell them to states as a way to measure educational progress. As a result, quite a few states administer the SAT or ACT to all public school students in 11th grade. But is an aptitude test the right way to figure out if students are learning?

There are a lot of things that we do just because we do them. That’s largely the story of college entrance exams in 2026.

The Slightly Longer Version

The passage below is from the NYT Opinion cutting room floor – I was trying to unpack how standardized tests fit into elite admissions, and how regional variations showed up. I have lived my adult life with one foot in Minnesota and another in Washington, D.C. - but the whole time, my family has been in Minnesota. The most acute cultural difference is the eastern obsession with grades, test scores and college admissions. It’s a bit of an overstatement to say that nobody cares about this in the middle of the country - but only a bit.

Many colleges have been test-optional for decades, but in June of 2018, the University of Chicago went test-optional, the first highly selective institution to do so. Many observers were shocked that a school with Chicago’s storied commitment to nerdy rigor would make the move. Applications to Chicago rose only slightly in the following years, but when the pandemic interrupted testing, Chicago’s precedent meant elite schools could drop their testing requirements without qualms - and most have not reinstated them. Test-optional policies remain a focus of controversy, but one thing seems sure: as university consultant Ben Kennedy puts it, “The test optional move tripled the number of kids who said to themselves, ‘Hey, I’ve got a shot at admission there.’” Applications exploded.

Admissions officers at elite colleges now commonly say that they could fill their classes with students boasting perfect test scores and over-4.0 GPAs, yet every year we are told that American students are getting worse at math and reading. How is this possible?

It’s partly a story of divergence, where elite students separate themselves from their average peers until the two are living in different worlds. The national average ACT score dropped from 21 in 2000 to 19.8 in 2022, but perfect scores of 36 are more common than ever. In 2002, there were 134 perfect scores in the country; by 2023 there were 2,542 - a 1,900 percent increase. In 1984, just over 7,000 students scored above a 1,400 on the SAT, and there were five perfect 1600 scores out of a million students who took the test. In 2023, there were 128,000 scores above 1,400, and while The College Board doesn’t report how many perfect scores there were, a quick internet search reveals many students with a 1600.

Many testing experts believe the tests are as hard as they were twenty years ago, but preparation is just a lot more intensive among top students, with the kind of specialization we see in youth sports. “There’s a lot more out-of-school activity now, especially in the lower grades” says Christopher Norio Avery, a Harvard professor who studies college application patterns and college enrollment choices for high school students. “In the past, you could check out a book and maybe take a practice test. Now the College Board provides online tests; there’s a lot more test-specific information available. The question is whether we want people to be spending that kind of time preparing for one particular test.”

Perhaps we don’t - but it seems the SAT and ACT didn’t lower the hoop; students intensified their training, and top students have been dunking on standardized tests from a young age.

At the same time, grade inflation makes it hard for average students to see how far behind they are. An “A student” who likes math could be forgiven for thinking she’s a candidate for admission to MIT. In fact, she may have no chance at all. If she is not from an affluent, urban and probably coastal city, she may have no idea just how serious the elite admissions game has become. In 2023, with similar numbers of test-takers, Massachusetts produced 101 perfect ACT scores to Indiana’s 29. California produced 317 perfect ACT scores to Missouri’s 68 - even though twice as many students in Missouri took the ACT. So when Stanford goes looking for “perfect” students in Missouri, it’s like looking for elite hockey players in Texas. They’re there, but you have to look harder.

I’ll pick up the standardized testing and admissions story over the weekend. Have a great Friday!

***

Previous posts …

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)

To come …

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

#6: There’s a college debt crisis!

(No. But there are problems.)

Conventional wisdom is that college costs a fortune because students can just borrow the money to pay for it, leading to higher prices, and that’s why we have a college debt crisis.

This is appealing logic, but it’s wrong as far as college goes because undergraduates aren’t allowed to borrow very much. It does describe graduate school, where until recently there were no borrowing limits. As I laid out in article #9 in this series, the cost of college stopped rising a decade or more ago, partly because the money supply was pretty limited.

The Very Short Version

An undergraduate student can borrow $31,000 from the federal government for college. Not for a year of college - for all of college. Because people don’t seem to know this, it’s pretty common for families to be shocked when they learn that their child can’t borrow the full cost of college. The loan limits are detailed in the Federal Student Aid Handbook.

Source: https://youngamericans.berkeley.edu/2021/12/historic-trends-in-us-student-debt/

The Somewhat Longer Version

Over a standard ten-year repayment period, $31,000 in federal loans works out to a monthly payment of roughly $280 to $310, depending on the interest rate. Most students borrow less than the maximum, and the amount students borrow has been declining in recent years. The average undergraduate leaves college with about $25,000 to $29,000 in federal debt — again, for the whole degree.

This is why graduates of completely different schools have pretty much the same monthly loan payment. Northeastern: $257. University of Arkansas: $228. Lipscomb University: $207. That is not the crushing debt that got us into a national conversation about student debt relief.

Of course, federal loans aren’t the only way to borrow for college. There are three other channels.

Parent loans. Until recently, federal Parent PLUS loans had no borrowing limit, and some families would get themselves $200,000 in debt for an undergraduate degree. As of this year, the law caps these loans at $20,000 per year and $65,000 total. So now, combined with student loans, a family can take out a maximum of $96,000 for an undergraduate degree.

Private loans. Private student loans make up $140 billion, or 8% of the $1.8 trillion total student loan market. The other 92% is federal. Private loans are underwritten, so the lender will limit how much you can borrow based on creditworthiness.

State loans. Some states have student loan programs – here are examples from Minnesota and Texas. They are small – in total, perhaps $1 billion a year.

Where the Real Problems Are

So if the typical undergraduate leaves school with a $250 monthly loan payment, where’s the crisis? Three places:

* Students who borrow and don’t finish. 60% of borrowers who default on their loans never completed a degree. This is a matching problem (getting people into the right field of study) and a completion problem, but it’s not a debt problem, since it would be better for them to have a $200 payment and the right degree than no payment and no degree.

* Balances that grow. Interest rates are pegged to the 10-year Treasury note, so lately they have been high — 6.53% for undergraduates in 2024-25, and 7.94% for graduate students. When borrowers defer payments, enter forbearance, or make income-driven payments, their balances grow. This New York Times Opinion piece and infographic conveys this point very well.

* Graduate school debt. 57% of all student debt is held by households with at least one graduate degree. There was no cap on federal borrowing for graduate students until this year, so a law or medical student could borrow $250,000 or more — and many did. Starting this year, borrowing is capped at $20,500 per year and $100,000 in aggregate for most graduate students, or $50,000 per year and $200,000 for professional programs like law and medicine.

It’s worth noting that while doctors and lawyers with large debt balances get the headlines, they also tend to have the incomes to manage those payments. Truly academic Ph.D. programs tend to be funded, so students in those often graduate with little or no debt. But the troubling cases are graduate students in fields like education, social work, and the arts — where the degrees still cost a lot, but the jobs they lead to don’t command high salaries.

In sum, there’s a student debt problem, and arguably even a crisis, but it isn’t a college debt problem. Parent borrowing was a problem in certain cases, and massive graduate borrowing was by far the biggest issue. New limits on Parent PLUS, graduate and professional school borrowing may make a difference, and some schools will likely have to adjust their pricing as a result.

Tomorrow, we’ll continue Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with:

#5 — Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

Previous posts …

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)

To come …

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* You can listen to articles on Substack, and as of yesterday, if you hit the Play button, it’ll be me reading the article. Is it an improvement over the animatronic version? You be the judge.

* Second, I want your college questions! Click here.

Now, onto item #7 in Things We Get Wrong About College:

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Colleges are closing! (Yes — but none you’ve heard of.)

On several occasions I’ve had families say to me: “Our child really likes [school], but I’m worried it might not be financially stable. Is it going to close?”

Except in rare cases, the answer is no. This is surprising, since college enrollment has dropped by two million since 2010. Colleges could be closing en masse, but they aren’t. I’ll explain why below.

The Very Short Version

There are 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States, and around 20 of them closed in 2023. That is typical. And those 20 schools combined enrolled less than 0.2% of all college students. Unless you work in higher education, you haven’t heard of them: Finlandia, Holy Names, Iowa Wesleyan, and so on.

The likelihood of any given college closing is very small, and the schools at risk of closure are obviously at risk of closure: tiny schools with major enrollment declines in the last decade and no endowment to speak of.

Is there an easy way to tell? Sort of. Colleges with financial trouble tend to be on the Department of Education’s “Heightened Cash Monitoring” list. It’s mostly cosmetology schools and seminaries, though there are some four-year colleges on it. Very few families looking at colleges will see one that’s likely to close.

The Somewhat Longer Version

State schools enroll around 80% of all students and they almost never close. They sometimes close rural branch campuses; this has happened recently in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Penn State announced in 2025 that it would close seven satellite campus locations that collectively enrolled about 3,100 students. That’s 440 students per campus; the flagship campus enrolls 42,000.

This is why I say that no school you’ve heard of is going to close. Most Americans don’t even realize there are colleges with under 1,000 students, but there are hundreds. This review of the 15 or 20 colleges that closed in 2023 paints the picture pretty well.

To be clear, a 500-student school can be perfectly healthy. St. John’s College is doing just fine at 400 students, for example.

So why are we talking about this?

The “Colleges are closing!” conversation started in 2013 when Clayton Christensen, a prominent business professor, predicted that half of all colleges would close or go bankrupt in the next decade or so. When he said it, I thought — he clearly doesn’t understand how nonprofits work. But I also thought perhaps he knew something I didn’t. Christensen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, one of the few business books worth reading — a rare work of genuine insight. But as for colleges closing, he was just wrong.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, nonprofit colleges don’t merge, basically because their financial and legal mechanics are so inflexible. Two college presidents can’t just decide to join up and then get their boards to bless the transaction — which is roughly how things work in the private sector. By contrast, for-profit colleges can and do merge — but since they enroll only about 5% of all American undergraduates, I’m not getting into them here.

The lack of mergers matters because in the private sector, businesses usually wind up by selling the business or its assets to another business. This pays shareholders something and allows at least some of the employees to keep their jobs under new management. Since nonprofit colleges can’t really do this — because the nonprofit structure makes it hard, but also because they tend to be in possession of weird assets that are pretty hard to sell (anyone want to buy a dorm in Kentucky?) — they are faced with the option of either shutting down or fighting on. It’s always the latter.

It can sometimes be hard for a nonprofit to close even if it wants to. Sweet Briar College’s board decided to close the institution in 2015 for the usual reasons - declining enrollment and “insurmountable financial challenges.” A group of alumnae sued the board and won. Sweet Briar still operates today.

One of the things that can keep a college like Sweet Briar alive is that a college endowment is not a single account; it’s usually hundreds of funds restricted for particular purposes. If the board wants to use the endowment to support the orderly wind-down of the college - paying creditors, giving faculty departure packages and so on - they may not be able to. The fund for the maintenance of begonias in the college arboretum can’t just be spent on other stuff – at least not without legal wrangling. For this and other reasons, nonprofit colleges only close when the well is absolutely dry.

When Colleges Do Close

I don’t mean to diminish any of this. College closures come with real cultural and human costs. I have connections to two schools that have closed: Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, and Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan.

Dana was a historically Danish Lutheran liberal arts college, and it closed in 2010. After that, Midland University had a lease and first right of refusal on Dana’s campus. I was on the board of Midland, so I was familiar with the situation. I walked the Dana campus several years after its closure, and it was sobering, to say the least.

Finlandia ceased operations in 2023 after 133 years. For those with a particular interest in this issue, there was an excellent bit of reporting in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Finlandia’s closure — laying out the impossible situation of a new president and the many moves the school made to stay alive.

Dana and Finlandia were repositories for the Danish and Finnish Lutheran communities. Both were located in very rural settings, and both succumbed to the tectonic forces of declining rural populations, the inevitable ethnic melting pot, and the decline of the churches from which both colleges drew enrollment and support. Perhaps different decisions could have saved them, but they were deep in the danger zone.

Practical Impacts

A more likely risk than school closure is that a student’s major or program will be diminished or discontinued. This is at least as common at big public universities as it is at smaller privates, so it’s hard to predict where it will happen. But schools that discontinue majors typically grandfather current students in so everyone can finish what they started, and discontinued majors tend to be the smallest ones. As a result, even though these closures make the news, they affect relatively few students.

Overall, colleges are still absorbing the enrollment decline of the last 20 years – probably with more decline to come. That has inflicted pain, and it will inflict more – but state and nonprofit colleges essentially have no choice but to soldier on, competing for students on admissions and price (see, #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! and #9 - College is more expensive than ever!).

We end up with a pretty stable sector where the burden of declining enrollment is spread out across most schools, rather than a few blowing up. This results in looser admissions, lower prices, and eroding pay for professors and administrators.

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow we’ll pick up with:

#6 — There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

Previous posts …

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

To come …

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

The College Question is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Next up in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

* #8 - Ugh! We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is complex, so we’ll unpack it over time with help from Mark Salisbury at TuitionFit. He’s been doing a series over on LinkedIn about what the whole process produces - which is a lot of wacky financial aid offers.

Let me tackle the FAFSA as briefly as I can.

The Shortest Answer I Could Conjure

Orthodoxy says all families should fill out the FAFSA because there is no income cutoff for student aid. But only about a third of students qualify for need-based federal aid - so what gives? If we’re in the top 2/3rds, should we fill it out?

The system’s answer is yes. It is so baked in that last night I couldn’t get Google Gemini to concede otherwise, and I think I made it cry. I apologised. (I was born in Canada. It’s what we do.) The real answer is that it may not be in the interest of upper-income families to fill out the FAFSA, and it very frequently makes no difference to what a student pays.

Let’s start with what the FAFSA actually does.

* Pell grants. It determines if your income is low enough to qualify for a Pell grant of up to $7,395 per year. More below on what is “low enough.”

* Other federal aid. The FAFSA is required for federal work-study jobs (which about 5% of students take) and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which go to students with the highest need.

* Student Loans. It is required for federal student loans and determines if you qualify for loan subsidies. If you want a student loan but don’t qualify for income-based aid, you can fill it out to apply for that loan - i.e., in the spring, after you decide where to go to college.

* State aid. States use the FAFSA for state grants and loans. State eligibility differs from federal, but not that much. Depends on the state.

* College pricing. This is the key. It provides colleges with a financial picture of your family that the college uses to determine what price to offer you. Colleges call this need-based and merit-based aid, but a price is a price whatever you call it.

So who should fill out the FAFSA?

First, anyone who could get a Pell grant. Who’s that? The official answer is, “Nobody knows. Fill out the FAFSA.” But there’s an actual answer, and of course it is based on stuff you don’t want to read. Who could get a Pell grant?

* Yes: income lower than $75,000. Two-parent families making less than $75,000 a year are likely to get some amount of a Pell grant (it’s a sliding scale), as are single parents making less than $90,000.

* No: income higher than $110,000. Two-parent families making over $110,000 a year, or single parents making over $130,000, are not very likely to get one. If they do get one, it will be minimal - again, it’s a sliding scale. The lowest possible Pell grant is currently $740.

* Maybe: you live in a shoe. If you’re a single parent of eight children living in Alaska - well, God bless your cotton socks, first of all. And yes, you should probably just fill out the FAFSA. Number of kids is considered, and so is location – but only if you live in Alaska or Hawaii.

What does this mean?

Generally, if your income is above $130k, you won’t get a Pell grant and probably won’t get a subsidized loan, which is only relevant if you want a loan anyway. There’s an outside chance you could get state aid – you could look into that, but it’s not going to be wildly more generous than federal aid.

Which brings us to college pricing - #5 on my list above. Colleges use FAFSA data (and sometimes CSS Profile data, a more painful form) to predict what each family is willing to pay and make a tailored offer accordingly. This is not how anyone in the system describes it – they will say it’s so the colleges can determine need-based and merit-based aid. But economically it’s irrelevant why the college offers a certain discount. It doesn’t matter to the college, and it doesn’t matter to the student. The fact that need-based offers regularly vary wildly from one college to the next shows that this is about pricing strategy. The government has no involvement, and colleges generally use consultants to optimize pricing.

So, should higher-income families fill out the FAFSA? They can if they want to take out federal student loans, but they can cross that bridge when they come to it. There’s no need to fill it out before the spring. If a college’s offer is too high, see if filling out the FAFSA might help. In some cases it may.

Two closing notes.

First, some of my language above will annoy financial aid officers. A lot, actually. Official terms are precise but incomprehensible, and that’s no way to run a system. I think it’s important for us to shift to plain language, even if the cost of some precision.

Second, I’ve written about these issues at some length at The Dispatch, and in 2023 I created 39 Answers to Student Loan Questions because I truly couldn’t find a good source for simple answers. It needs an update, but many of its answers are still correct.

Tomorrow - we continue with:

#7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close. But yes, some colleges are closing.)

Previous posts in What We Get Wrong About College:

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

Still to come …

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Other recent posts …

* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?

* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans

* Launching The College Question

Message received! Here’s a Sunday Charticle on how bachelor’s degrees have changed over the years. And if you want to provide me with some words, I’d love it if you took the TCQ Survey! (It’s very short.)

Let’s start with high school degrees. The chart below starts in 1869 when the Office of Education first collected this data. Orange bars show the number of 17 year-olds and blue bars show the number of high school degrees conferred.

For the last 40 years, we’ve basically had four million 17 year-olds, as you can see above.

As the chart below shows, since 1970 the proportion of them getting bachelor’s degrees has risen from about a quarter to about half.

What do students major in? The U.S. Department of Education has that data here, but below I have calculated the change in each field of study from 1971 to 2022. Huge increase in students getting degrees in business and the health professions. Big decrease in Education. And yes, fewer English degrees.

That bar chart is pretty darn hard to read - so here’s a table with the same information:

During this time, the number of college degrees more than doubled, but the number of college-aged Americans was pretty level.

There is a lot more I could say about this, but the point of the Sunday Charticle is to go light on words. I’ll pick up tomorrow with #8 in my list of Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:

“Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA!”

dgc

****

Ten Things We Get Wrong About College

* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close. But yes, some colleges are closing.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Today and tomorrow I’m sharing some cutting room floor material from a feature piece I wrote for NYT Opinion claiming that elite college admissions had become a hall of mirrors. I gave them 11,000 words and they picked the 3,918 they liked best, leaving 6,082 words sad and alone on my Google Drive. Below, I offer A Potted History of Admissions – but before we get to that, two notes on sources.

First, as I worked on the piece, when I took a break to walk Shaggy, I listened to Gatecrashers, an excellent history podcast that chronicles the Jewish experience in the Ivy League. I learned a lot. The series was recorded over a year before the campus unrest in 2023-24, but it provided helpful historical context – particularly in the first episode, which is about Columbia. There are eight episodes, one for each of the Ivies.

Second, books. That project was moving faster than inter-library loan, and I love a $6 used book from Amazon or ABE – so here’s my pile related to admissions:

My favorites here - partly because of recency and relevance to the topic - are Ron Lieber’s The Price You Pay For College (the best stuff in that book isn’t about the price, though that’s Ron’s lane – his stuff about college is even better); Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets In and Why; Paul Tough’s The Years That Matter Most (published in paperback as The Inequality Machine); Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen; and Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test.

A Potted History of Admissions

In the beginning, supply and demand were in balance. If you were the kind of guy who went to Harvard, you pretty much got into Harvard. Or Dartmouth, or Yale or wherever.

Then, supply and demand got out of balance: too many guys thought they should go to Harvard. So Harvard invented a test and told some guys not to come. Crisis averted.

Notice that Harvard didn’t just sell its limited slots to the highest bidders. If they did, they would have had to deal with a bunch of rich idiots, and nobody wants that. As a result, the admissions market is complicated, which is critical to our story. Here’s roughly how it works: students offer the college money, social capital, and brains in varying combinations. In return, schools provide an identity good (“You are the kind of guy who goes to Harvard”), training in something or other, and a diploma that verifies the first two. Since elite schools get their pick of students, they can decide what mix of money, social capital and brains they want from each one. These three things are quite distinct and, as Rania’s story shows, uncorrelated. Poor people are often very smart; rich people can be idiots; middle-income people sometimes have an uncle in Congress. And so on.

Back to the story. A lot of guys decided to take the Harvard admissions test, and some alumni noticed that the ones who got in weren’t - well, they weren’t that sporty. Or affable, or tall. They were - you know, Jewish. Sometimes Catholic, and even Irish. Never that rich. It didn’t seem much like Harvard to them any more, so the people in charge of things decided to eat straight from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and judge applicants as whole people, not just based on their academic abilities. They dug into the really important stuff - like, is the applicant sporty, or affable, or (checks notes) tall? Other things were added - like being from somewhere Jews and Catholics didn’t live. The virtue of geographical diversity was discovered, kind of like the virtue of being tall. It was holistic admissions, invented around 1922 and practiced to this day.

Rivalries on the football field got top colleges in the mood to compete in other ways, and soon they were competing for the best faculty by paying them more - and hiring more of them. More administrators were needed in order to keep the faculty annoyed, and more money was required to keep everyone paid. Tuition rose - a lot - which was OK because by this point it seemed like everyone really, really wanted to get into Harvard.

But not everyone wanted to get into most other schools, which meant they couldn’t charge as much tuition. They responded the old-fashioned way: by making it seem like everyone wanted to get in. It worked. Identity goods, like fancy handbags, are valued in proportion to the number of people who don’t have them. Schools found that if they could reject a lot of applicants, they would get more applicants.

Part of that move involved ditching the very thing admissions had started with: tests. Year in and year out, standardized tests told exactly 90% of students that they had not scored in the top decile, so they figured there was no point in even applying to a selective school. Of course, there probably wasn’t - the schools wouldn’t have let them in. But the schools had become eager to reject their applications, now that they knew it would cause even more students to apply. Slowly, and then all of a sudden, schools dropped their testing requirements, which led more students to submit an application because - why not?

The college business was better than ever. The testing business was in rude health, too - more on that below. At this point the system had gotten crazy, and that’s where the story of 2024 begins.

A key point underneath the early part of this history is that the Protestant elite’s objection to Jews in the Ivy League was not mainly to do with their religious beliefs. Elites at the time were about as religious as they are at any time – i.e., not very – and many leading families had been Unitarian for a century or more, so they were not inclined to fight over the details. The “problem” was that most Jewish students were first-generation immigrants who came from a different culture and were not rich. The Ivies had always existed to educate children from a certain kind of family, so if a Jewish student looked and talked like a Boston Brahmin, Chauncey and Thurston could live with them. What they couldn’t live with was kids from the wrong neighborhood wrecking the vibe at their country club. (You are thinking of the pool scene in Caddyshack now, and you deserve to watch it. You’re welcome.) All of this is well covered in Episode 1 of Gatecrashers, which tells the story of how Columbia established an entire school away from the main campus to prevent “too many” Jews from going there.

This explains why the Ivies never banned Jews entirely – they were filtering for what “kind” they would take. That sent many of the world’s best minds away from the Ivy League, including notably the University of Chicago, which had accepted all comers from the start: Jews, women, students from China (who were all but illegal under the Chinese Exclusion Act), African Americans and more. A great many of the Nobel Prizes Chicago would later be associated with can be traced back to that openness, which probably stems in part from the fact that it had never tried to be a country club. There wasn’t much of a vibe to wreck at Chicago, unless you showed up and tried to be sporty and affable and tall.

More Mystery Content tomorrow. Then on Monday …

* #8 - Ugh! We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)

Followed by …

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close. But yes, some colleges are closing.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Today we continue with …

#9: College is more expensive than ever!

As everyone knows, college now costs $99,139 a year, which is the price at the University of Southern California, and that is representative of all American colleges. This is to be expected, because the median four-person household now earns $105,800, leaving fully $6,661 for the rest of the family to pay for Netflix and Uber Eats. Pearl-clutchers who think $99,139 is “expensive” haven’t factored in the barter economy, subsistence gardening, and selling your pets. It’s totally affordable. As for our handsome prince, it will be the most comfortable four years of his life as he studies in the lazy rivers and eats free-range sushi and vegan foie gras in the cafeteria.

The Very Short Version

Even at private schools, the cost of college is nothing like this. Sticker prices, while occasionally paid by particularly affluent families, are discounted around 55% on average and often far more than that. The tuition families actually pay has been flat or falling for around 15 years once you adjust for inflation.

Told that college is getting cheaper, most people react the way I do when someone tells me the McFlurry machine is working: I don’t believe you, and I suspect a trap.

Also, Oreo please. Two, actually.

I have written about these issues in the Minnesota Star Tribune with my friend Ken Harris, a financial advisor, and I wrote about them in National Affairs. I have gone deep on the structure and some of the oddities of federal student aid in The Dispatch and elsewhere – and even then I have only scratched the surface. I will have Mark Salisbury, the founder of TuitionFit, writing about these issues here at TCQ before long. So the Slightly Longer Version below will necessarily leave a lot out - and that can be dealt with in future posts at TCQ.

Slightly Longer Version

Let’s start with the thing that makes this whole topic confusing, which is that American colleges publish prices that used to be misleading and are now largely fake. Before we get judgy about this, consider that it’s standard practice at retailers, and the reasons are the same in both cases – more on that below. Also, I should say that nobody in higher education likes this state of affairs, but nobody is much in a position to fix it. It’s a market. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The net result is that nobody pays the sticker price at many private colleges, though at highly selective schools some do. At public colleges, sharp discounting is also increasingly the norm.

I’m going to start by just showing you the most recent data. It’s from The College Board’s 2024-25 pricing report. First, private colleges. The figure below lists “Published” sticker prices and “Net” prices that families actually pay. Then it breaks down the elements - because a full “estimated Cost of Attendance” according to the federal government must include costs that aren’t even paid to the school, like transportation and personal expenses. It also includes room and board, which may be paid to the school or not, depending. Notice below that the lowest line is “Net Tuition and Fees” - that’s the school part, since housing, transportation, and personal expenses were going to happen whether you were in college or not. (The issue of room and board cost increases is another post for a later time - and yes, at some schools it’s getting quite high.) And that lowest line, Net Tuition and Fees, was generally level in the decade from 2006 to 2016, then drops in the second decade from 2016 to now. Mechanically, this is because of inflation. Economically, it’s because of supply and demand forces: as I mentioned yesterday, there are fewer students than available positions at colleges right now, and that has been driving prices down for years. I believe that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Next, the same data for public colleges, which educate 73% of students. This comes from the same College Board report - and note that it only includes in-state students.

There’s a lot going on here, which is why I’ve drawn your attention to the bottom line - literally and figuratively: “Net Tuition and Fees.”

If you don’t believe The College Board – and let’s be honest, an organization that capitalizes the T in its name probably can’t be trusted – take it from Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley who has been hammering this point, too. Levine used the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study — a federal survey that tracks what students actually pay — and found the same thing. At private four-year colleges, net prices for low- and middle-income families stopped rising after 2007-08. In a separate analysis using net price calculator data from 200 colleges, Levine found that net prices have been falling across the board.

Those are averages, of course – and sometimes averages aren’t so helpful. Someone once pointed out to me that the average American has one testicle. I’m not sure a statistician would agree. And I’m quite sure the people with more than one testicle don’t want to think about this any more. But I do need to clarify one point: you can pay more than ever for college, even if very few families actually do.

Elite Colleges Are Expensive, Except When They’re Cheap

Prices are always a supply and demand thing. In the aggregate, as I’ve said, there are more college spaces available than college students, which is why college prices are falling overall. But some particular colleges are in high demand - for at least two big reasons.

First, there has been an explosion of families who can afford luxury brand schools, but no increase in the size of those schools. In particular, there has been about a 700% increase in the number of families with a net worth over $20 million in the last 30 years. This means there are just a lot of families who could pay effectively anything for college if they wanted to. And all evidence is that many of them want to.

At the same time, there has been an explosion of students who could attend elite colleges. To take one indicator, in 2002 there were 134 perfect ACT scores, but by 2023 there were 2,542. So while average educational attainment (and certainly average ACT scores) declines, top-end performance becomes more common. Add in grade inflation and there is a huge cohort of students who think they should go to an Ivy League school.

Another point on supply and demand - even more nakedly about the money. Consider that there are around 3,000 billionaires in the world, and they have kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews. If Harvard or Oxford simply auctioned off a few entering spots, what would the market bear? The Varsity Blues scandal suggests that it’s well into the millions, as it seems a family may have paid $6.5 million to get a child into Stanford.

There’s a lot more to be said later about the positional markets and the economics of the one-shot deal. For now, suffice it to say that plenty of people can and do pay a lot for college, and if anything, the most elite schools are leaving big money on the table by “only” charging around $70,000 for tuition these days.

That said, for low-income families, the most elite colleges are often the cheapest. Here’s the cost of attending Stanford broken down by family income - from the U.S. College Scorecard.

Stanford University Average Annual Cost of Attendance by Family Income

The costs above include tuition, room and board, and all the extras. At less selective colleges, lower-income families are generally paying a lot more than this – and even at public colleges they tend to pay more. What do low-income families pay at UC Berkeley, the world-class public university just a short helicopter flight away from Stanford? Here’s the data.

UC-Berkeley Average Annual Cost of Attendance by Family Income

Basically, super-elite universities have big budgets, and while they can command huge prices from affluent families, they can afford to have some people pay little or nothing to attend. That’s what some of them do.

The Able and Baker Problem

You might ask: if everyone knows this, why don’t colleges just lower their sticker prices?

Here’s the answer. Consider two colleges: Able and Baker.

Able College drops its published tuition to $25,000, which is the most even affluent students ever pay at Able. Meanwhile, Baker College keeps its published tuition at $55,000 — though nobody pays more than $25,000 there, either.

Now, your kid applies to Able and Baker, and gets into both. Great. Go Caleb. Both grandmothers can’t wait to find out which co-branded stretch pullover to apply for financing for, so it’s decision time. You get the offer letters.

* Able’s offer letter: “Come to our college. It only costs $25,000!”

* Baker’s offer letter: “Congratulations! You have been awarded a $30,000 Presidential Merit Scholarship! That’s $120,000 over four years! Your final price is only $25,000!”

Both offers are identical. But your family feels that Baker is more prestigious (it costs $55,000!) and that Baker wants your kid more (look at that scholarship!). Able brought a spreadsheet to a feelings fight.

And that, really, is it. Some would quibble that there’s more to it, and there is, a bit. But as I mentioned at the top, retailers have long known that people are attracted to high prices as a sign of quality and high discounts as a sign that you’re getting a deal. Here the discount is styled as a scholarship, though in most cases no money is changing hands anywhere - it’s just a discount. But of course it is styled as a Presidential Merit Scholarship, since Able college almost doesn’t exist in the real world - Baker has to compete with all the other Presidential Merit Scholarships. And so the market goes.

It’s Not Just Private Schools

State universities play the same game, especially with out-of-state students. The College Board data shows that out-of-state published tuition at public flagships ranges from $13,300 at the University of South Dakota to nearly $64,000 at the University of Michigan. Discounts for out-of-state students are hard to find in the public data, but talk to a few friends who have had kids recruited by out-of-state public universities – especially perhaps some schools in the south or southeast, who have been Hoovering up northern kids by the thousands for the last decade. It’s a competitive market, and schools compete on price. In many families’ experience, they discover that out of state universities cost the same or even less than their in-state flagships. And while this may seem weird based on how we think the world is organized, as a market matter it would be weird if it wasn’t this way. Running a college is like running an airline: you need to fill the airplane. It doesn’t actually matter where the passengers are from.

Who Gets Hurt

This whole thing is not without problems. The impression that college costs $60,000 or $80,000 a year has scared a lot of people away from college entirely. Some of those people are exactly the ones who would benefit most from going.

Worse, the list-price/real-price system often disadvantages lower-income students. You’d think the big “scholarships” go to the kids who need them most, and at a handful of very wealthy schools, that’s true as we saw at Stanford. But at many schools the largest discounts go to the students who are most attractive to the admissions office — and those students disproportionately come from affluent families. They have better grades and stronger applications.

And some families, believing the sticker price is real, take out crushing loans to pay a toll they didn’t have to pay. They finance a $200,000 fantasy when the reality could have been $100,000 — or less.

What You Can Do Right Now

My advice for families: ignore the sticker price. Don’t even look at it. It doesn’t matter.

Go to the U.S. College Scorecard. Look at colleges. Get a feel for actual paid prices. More on that soon.

And check out the Net Price Calculator - it’s on every college website.

And for the most accurate take on real costs, go to TuitionFit – it’s a system that tells families what they will actually pay, founded by Mark Salisbury who will be writing here at TCQ before long.

That’s it on the college cost issue for now - with a lot more to come at TCQ.

Next week I’ll continue the series on Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe, maybe not. Here’s what to know.)

This weekend - surprise bonus content. Stay tuned!

dgc

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Still to Come on Ten Things We Get Wrong About College

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* #5 - Ugh. Caitlin needs to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - Aidan should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

#10: “Getting into college is harder than ever!”

It’s just awful, isn’t it? As everyone knows, high schoolers have only half a chance of getting into college at all and the losers are sent to work at Panera until Social Security kicks in. There is wailing and rending of Hollister clothing. It’s basically Squid Game, because Nobody Gets Into College.

The Very Short Version

This is not true. Getting into a high-quality college has never been easier, and here’s why. Not too long ago the U.S. college system enrolled 18 million students. Colleges built buildings and budgets and departments to handle 18 million, but now there are 16 million. Any other industry in this situation would shrink (probably through mergers) until supply matched demand, but colleges don’t really do that. They just compete like crazy for as many of the 16 million students as they can get.

One effect of this competition is high admissions rates; another is falling average prices. The second one is tomorrow’s topic.

So in short, Caitlyn and Aidan are definitely getting into college, and will not be forced to sling Toasted Frontega Chicken Sandwiches at Panera until their autumn years.*

*Whether the conclusion here necessarily follows from the premise will be the subject of many later posts on TCQ.

The Slightly Longer Version

Confession: I’m guilty. On a dare, I once wrote an article for The New York Times that supports the College Admissions Doom narrative, “This Is Peak College Admissions Insanity.” It was basically about getting into the Ivy League, and yes, that is currently stupid. More on that this weekend. And if getting into an Ivy League school is The Only Thing That Matters to Makayla, well, Godspeed to her. But if we’re talking about getting into a good four-year college, it really is just the supply and demand story I told above. Here’s the enrollment data:

Here’s what it means for admissions. To take an example local to me, the University of Minnesota is a top research university, the sort of place where if you do well you’ll get a great job or get into Harvard Law or whatever. In 2010, when enrollment peaked, the acceptance rate was around 50%. Now it is just under 80%, which in practice means that Minnesota accepts every qualified applicant. This isn’t unusual; colleges accept 60% of applicants on average, and it’s not uncommon for high-quality schools to accept 80%.

Some of you are now thinking that my sense of quality must be off. Surely our impossibly handsome child will be surrounded by morons if he doesn’t at least go to Cornell?

Let me get into that a bit.

One point is that selectivity and quality aren’t necessarily related. If ten geniuses apply to a school that takes ten students, everyone will get in and the school will be full of geniuses. And if an unqualified student somehow gets into the University of Southern California (it’s a hypothetical - just go with me here), does that make USC a bad school? It does not.

Another point is about, you know, education. I hear chemistry textbooks say the same thing at Harvard as they do at the University of Alabama. I’m not a chemistry guy, but that’s what people say. Elite schools do not have any secrets, and because people who get their Ph.Ds at elite schools can’t all stay and teach there (to their great regret), there are hundreds of colleges with faculty holding elite Ph.Ds.

So am I saying it makes no difference if you go to Alabama or Dartmouth? Well … no. They’re pretty different.

But when experts compare outcomes for graduates of elite schools to outcomes for similar students who graduated from non-elite schools, they struggle to see a difference. One view, which you may have heard from Malcolm Gladwell, is that it’s worse to go to Harvard. That’s provocative, but a little hard to defend - though his talk at the link above is quite good. The simpler point is that success is really about the student, and the school doesn’t matter so much. That’s the point of a 2011 study by some folks at Princeton. The elite school isn’t the differentiator; the talent and drive to get into an elite school is. In nerdspeak, it’s the selection effect that matters, not the treatment effect.

More recently, researchers at Harvard confirmed that general point, but added a detail that everyone in New York and D.C. already knew: the fanciest jobs in those towns go to people from the fanciest schools. I have been to those places and I did not get there on a turnip truck, so I can tell you that this is true. Also, you may have noticed that the research was done by people at Harvard and Princeton. So yes - there’s some stuff you can do far better on elite college letterhead, like getting lots of attention for a study saying it doesn’t matter much if you go to an elite college.

Harvard Law School often posts a list of the colleges attended by their entering class, and while it includes Princeton and Yale and Stanford, it also includes schools like California Lutheran and Christopher Newport, both of which accept 80% of applicants. I went to law school at the University of Chicago, and it was the same way. My classmates came from Brown and Georgetown and … wait, how do you pronounce that? That state has colleges? And, in my case, Gustavus Adolphus College. (As for pronunciation, it rhymes with nothing. Forget it.) Top graduate schools know these places produce plenty of strong graduates.

And see this list of colleges whose graduates have won Rhodes Scholarships. A Rhodes is easily the most prestigious scholarship in the world, and on the list you’ll see loads of non-selective schools. Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, for example, has eight. (Our son goes there, which is why we know the place.) You’ll also notice a ton of Rhodes Scholars from elite schools. But keep in mind the selection effects - there’s probably an elite-school advantage, but it’s still mainly about the student.

So Why Do We Think It’s Hard to Get Into College?

There is a lot I could say about this particular hallucination, but let me make three points.

First, we focus on elite brands. Since getting into Stanford is basically impossible, we infer that it must be at least a little like that everywhere else, too. That is not true.

Second, some programs are genuinely hard to get into, even if the college that hosts the program is not. For example, the University of Illinois accepts 50% of in-state applicants, but just accepts 22% of engineering applicants and 7% for computer science. When a particularly smart kid gets rejected from engineering, people talk about it. When half his peers are accepted to the college, nobody notices.

Third, people are drawn to scarcity — and schools have figured this out. Most colleges just let people think they are harder to get into than they really are, but a few go right ahead and …

… well, with regret, let me return to the University of Minnesota. Below, an admissions page as it appeared about two weeks ago. The second sentence is missing something important, and the whole thing is - well, you can judge for yourself.

Here’s a clip from Minnesota’s public disclosures. They admitted 33,000 applicants. That is not “a competitive admissions situation.”

But the appearance of scarcity sells: they got 7,500 more applications this year, perhaps because students heard the news that it was a “competitive admissions situation.”

Some schools have ridden exactly this kind of false-anxiety train to the promised land – i.e., the belief that they are selective leads so many students to apply that they eventually become selective. More on that in a later post, too.

In Conclusion

Your kid is getting into college.

dgc

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This post was written under the watchful eye of Lavender, who was waitlisted at Tulane. Poor dear. She hasn’t decided where to go to college yet - but really wants my toast.

Coming up …

* Friday: #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* **Weekend Mystery Content!**

* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Probably not. Here’s what to know.)

* #7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close.)

* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* #5 - Ugh. Caitlin needs to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it.)

* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* #1 - Aidan should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

Here’s the background. I was a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education, I’ve written about college and the economy for The New York Times and other major publications, and my wife and I have put our own kids through college. (I have written more about why I’m doing this, my background, how I got here, and how I want the system to improve on the TCQ site.)

I’m launching TCQ because nobody is explaining college in plain English - and as a result, families are understandably confused. It’s a complex and often absurd system. People have more questions than The New York Times or other papers will let me answer, so I decided to just get after it on my own.

What college questions do you have? Click here and tell me. And if you like, answer a few more questions that will help me focus on the right things.

Here’s my plan for The College Question. I’m going to start with a series over the next few weeks titled 10 Things We Get Wrong About College. Here’s what’s coming:

* College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)

* College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)

* Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Probably not. Here’s what to know.)

* Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close.)

* There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)

* Ugh. Caitlin needs to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)

* Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)

* I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it.)

* Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)

* Aidan should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)

I’ll lay all that out in plain terms, including data and links so you can see for yourself.

After that, in late March, I’ll start digging into the full set of issues. I’ve got a list of 150 questions to answer on TCQ, but here’s a list of 20 to show you where we’re headed. About half the posts will be for free subscribers, and the rest will be for paid subscribers. One way or another - please subscribe, and please forward it to others who might be interested.

Admissions and costs

* How do colleges set tuition, and how do they determine financial aid? (with Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit)

* Is the price negotiable?

* Is the net price calculator accurate?

* What’s the deal with National Merit Scholarships?

* Why do some colleges reject the best applicants?

* Why does it seem like everyone has a perfect SAT?

How to research a college

* How do I figure out what a school will cost?

* Is it hard to get in?

* Is the school physically safe?

* Are the class sizes huge? How can I figure that out?

Careers, earnings, and majors

* Who makes the most money?

* Where should I go if I want to be a CEO?

* Who hires college graduates?

* Do technical skills still matter?

* Should I major in ______? (A never-ending series.)

Bits and pieces

* Why do college brands matter so much?

* Should I go to college in Canada?

* Why are students flying south for college?

* What do U.S. News Rankings actually measure?

* What do Ivy League professors make?

So that’s the plan for The College Question. Tomorrow I’ll start Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with “College is harder to get into than ever!” Thanks for reading.

dgc

Twenty years ago I wondered how we would pay for our two little kids to go to college in the 2020s. I had law school loans and college prices were skyrocketing. College was projected to be unimaginably expensive by the 2020s, so it seemed like a real problem.

Still, part of me didn’t buy it. If nobody could afford college, how would millions of students still go? Were colleges not subject to the forces of supply and demand? What was really going on?

My career was in management research, so my job was to analyze markets, dissect problems, and propose solutions for clients. I knew that intentionally distorted prices are often used to influence consumer behavior. Considering college prices in light of that, I smelled a rat.

I should say that I wasn’t just interested in the cost of college. I have always cared about education, and I was involved in it in several ways. Across the 2010s, I joined the boards of two colleges, worked as the pre-law advisor at my college alma mater, taught occasional classes at law schools while I was still consulting. Then I took a job in the U.S. Department of Education, and another in the Senate working on tech innovation in universities.

Along the way I concluded that it wasn’t just families who are confused about college. Nearly everyone – lawmakers, professors, administrators, high school counselors – knows their part of the system, but they rarely understand the whole. And because it has become such a hall of mirrors, nearly everything they say about how it works was partly or entirely wrong. No wonder people are so confused.

I decided to start writing. My first article was “The Truth About College Costs” in a little policy journal called National Affairs. It’s my favorite journal, read by a small circle of policy nerds, but the article got a lot of attention – particularly after George Will wrote about it in The Washington Post. Some time after that, I was asked to write about admissions for The New York Times, and now I write regularly for them on higher education with occasional detours into things like Disney. (That one is really about the economy - so it’s not as unrelated as it sounds.) I’ve written for The Dispatch, The Minnesota Star Tribune (we live in Saint Paul), and outlets like Newsweek and Inside Higher Ed, too.

But I think students and families need a single resource that explains college, so I created The College Question.

This post was crafted with the help of Lavender the pug, who will make occasional appearances on TCQ to reaffirm the following unassailable truth: you could be sleeping, and maybe you should be. It’s the best.

First, I want more truth.

American higher education is not opaque. Colleges publish Common Data Sets. The federal government maintains the U.S. College Scorecard. If you know where to look (e.g., TuitionFit), you can figure out what college is likely to cost. So there’s a lot of information. But there’s a truth problem.

First, a lot of the information is intentionally misleading. I’m not talking about schools that have been caught falsifying data. That sort of thing is going to happen and it’s hard to prevent. I’m talking about the open practice of presenting information that is “accurate” and totally misleading. One common example is schools that claim they cost over $80,000 but actually cost less than $40,000. Another is colleges that claim their admissions process is “highly competitive” – then accept 80% of applicants. Another is college financial aid letters that are accurate but impossible to understand. Further examples abound.

Second, most college information is buried in specialist vocabulary and scattered across disconnected systems. That’s a truth problem of its own. Useful information is a needle buried in a colossal haystack. Most people never even try to find it. To some extent institutions know this, and they rely on it. The result is a system of extensive disclosure of information. As I learned in consulting, this can produce a situation where the information is accurate, but it’s not true, because people end up thinking false things. And people think lots of false things about higher education. That’s the proof in the pudding.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Higher education is not complicated. Colleges teach students and, hopefully, form their character and values. The relevant questions are pretty simple:

* What does it cost? Not the sticker price, not the “scholarship” (i.e., discount). What will college cost?

* Who gets in, and how? The admissions process at selective schools has become a strategic game in which colleges hold all the cards. It affects very few students, but it deeply distorts the public perception of college. Schools should clearly state objective admissions standards and then adhere to them. To Americans, this sounds absurd and unattainable. And it’s standard practice in every other country.

* What do students learn? There is arguably a learning crisis in American colleges, and it’s about to become more consequential in the era of generative AI. Much can be said about this, but at a minimum, colleges should standardize and clarify grading. Harvard might be leading the charge. And colleges should document what students have learned in the course of their degrees.

But there’s a final question, and it’s about aiming higher. It’s more important than everything else. We all need to re-orient the college question away from what graduates earn to who they become.

Getting a job matters, but it’s not the whole picture. What students gain in thinking, judgment, and capacity for contribution matters far more than the starter job that they’ll have for a few years at most. Success in their second and third jobs won’t depend on their degree; it will depend on their character and capabilities. Even more importantly, their capacity as parents, colleagues, and leaders will rest on who they became in college, not what they learned. Colleges, students and alumni should hold themselves to that standard, from how they recruit to how they measure success.

I didn’t plan it, but I’ve touched all of the above and more. I’m a lawyer, management consultant, and former senior official in the U.S. Department of Education, and I’ve served on the boards of two colleges and several other education organizations. (Here’s my LinkedIn.) I spent years doing HR, legal, risk, strategy and operations consulting for large companies, and during that time I launched something called The Recruiting Roundtable to help companies optimize their hiring – a good deal of which was straight from colleges. I led hundreds of presentations to senior executives around the world, and I got very familiar with original source material, like Bureau of Labor Statistics and Federal Reserve data. I became an expert on professional services markets, i.e., why and how companies hire lawyers and accountants. I continued to be deeply engaged in various aspects of corporate and government-related law.

And I’ve spent much of the last decade studying, writing about, and working inside America’s higher education system. I’ve also gone deep on how AI impacts jobs and the demand for white collar work. (Here’s the four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) I write periodically on higher education and the economy for The New York Times, The Dispatch, National Affairs, Inside Higher Ed, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, and I’m a Senior Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason Law School where I focus on universities and national security. I’ve learned to read college-specific data at the source: IPEDS (a data source from the National Center for Educational Statistics), the U.S. College Scorecard, college Common Data Sets, and other sources like the National Student Clearinghouse and the Clery Act database.

I’m involved in education, too. I spent a few thousand hours teaching corporate strategy and operations research to senior leadership teams. Closer to college, I was the pre-law advisor at my college alma mater, and still regularly coach college students and others on legal career paths. I teach occasional classes at The University of St. Thomas Law School and serve on the board of trustees of Gustavus Adolphus College, where my wife and I met in the 1990s. We have two kids who went through college recently, one of whom is now in graduate school, and we have helped shepherd several others through college, too. That experience, as well as some of my government work, has sent me deep into the world of international students, one of whom is basically part of our family now.

College questions are innately multifaceted. It’s not enough to know how admissions works, or financial aid, or corporate recruiting, or AI, or AP credits or whatever. College questions are hard to answer because everything’s related. Someone needs to bring it all together. I think I can do that.

The United States has the most envied higher education system in the world. This isn’t just my opinion; it’s reflected in the hundreds of thousands of international students who come here every year, in global university rankings that are dominated by American institutions, and in the fact that no other country’s system produces the same combination of cutting-edge research, broad access, and institutional diversity.

Consider what the American system offers that others don’t:

* Institutional diversity. We have research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, technical schools, tribal colleges, HBCUs, religious institutions, and public flagships. No other country has anything like this range and scale. A student who doesn’t fit at one type of institution has many other options.

* Flexibility. American students can enter without knowing their intended major, change majors, transfer between schools, take gap years, and enter college at any age. Our system gives young people room to figure out who they are.

* Research excellence. American universities produce more world-class research than any other country’s system. This has enormous social, economic and national security implications.

* Access. For all its problems, the American system educates more people from more backgrounds than any other. Sixty-three percent of American high school graduates immediately enroll in some form of college. Community colleges accept all comers as a matter of policy. Nobody is getting shut out.

That said, the system has serious problems that have been building for decades and that, left unchecked, will erode public trust to the point where the whole enterprise is at risk. The pricing is deceptive. The admissions process at elite schools is absurd. Grade inflation has debased the currency of a transcript. Outcomes vary wildly by institution and major, and families have almost no way to evaluate them in advance. Student debt, while overstated in some areas, is a real problem.

These are fixable problems, but they will not be fixed by colleges on their own, and they won’t be fixed by the government. Schools respond to market pressure, and market pressure comes from prospective students, families, employers, college faculty and staff and more. I believe markets only work well when they are supplied with good information. That’s why I’ve written so much about higher education in the last few years, and it’s one of the primary reasons I launched TCQ.

So that’s the short answer to why I am launching The College Question. Here’s a longer one.

* I’ve spent decades understanding how colleges and job markets work and I see how much students and families struggle to get clear answers to questions they have every right to ask.

* Those are just the easy questions, like what a financial aid offer means. The harder ones matter even more: where to go, what to study, how to get in, how to pay for it, whether to take out loans, whether an expensive school is worth it, whether they will get a job, and whether that job will exist by the time they graduate. Right now, people largely get their answers from self-appointed one-eyed kings. The answers are bad.

* Colleges rarely explain things in plain English because it isn’t good marketing.

* The government never explains things in plain English because it’s the government.

* Most adults - including teachers and counselors - don’t explain things well enough because they don’t fully understand the system.

* College hasn’t changed much in 75 years – but its time is coming.

* Colleges should produce smart, healthy and constructive people, but we have reduced it to whether graduates get jobs. Now we have miserable graduates with jobs.

* The American college system is incredibly diverse but the popular image of it is narrow. Students need to know their options.

* “Getting into college” is irrelevant to most students - but they don’t know that.

* “Getting into the best college” is also irrelevant to most students - but they don’t know that either.

* AI is transforming the job market faster than you can say “frictional unemployment.”

* Colleges are in crisis - but it’s not the crisis people are talking about. (Very few colleges will close, but that doesn’t mean things are OK.)

I get new questions every day and I can’t keep up. I considered selling answers for five cents, like Lucy from Peanuts, but I decided instead to start The College Question.

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