READ: 4 MIN
When Paul Tough released his book The Years that Matter Most, How College Makes or Breaks Us back in the Fall of 2019, we devoured it, nodding in agreement throughout. The original name was a bit of a mis-step and hard to remember, and so it has now been renamed to The Inequality Machine - How Colleges Divide Us. I think the new name isn’t quite as descriptive and prioritizes the social-justice side of the story, which is less interesting to those who want to get their kid into an elite school. But make no mistake, this is really about how college admissions works and is worth a read. And although we also enjoyed Jeffrey Selingo’s more recent book Who Gets in and Why - A Year Inside College Admissions - reading it made us pine for Tough’s thoroughness and personal touch.
What keeps the pages turning in The Inequality Machine are the details in the lives of Tough’s subjects, those participating in the college admissions madness, from the advantaged kids in rich suburbs, to the poor, often unknowing kids in rural America. But the stories of individual students really serve to frame some key themes that everyone going through the process needs to understand. Here are the big three takeaways for the team at Union Hall:
...almost everyone in our industry bends over backwards to let families and students know that it doesn’t matter what college you go to, and wants you to stop trying so hard to get into an elite school. Turns out, it does matter.
This is probably our favorite take-away from the book, since almost everyone in our industry bends over backwards to let families and students know that it doesn’t matter what college you go to, and wants you to stop trying so hard to get into an elite school. Turns out, it does matter what college you attend when it comes to earning power. Tough highlights research that Raj Chetty (of Stanford and now Harvard) did about social mobility and how likely one is to end up in the Top 1% of earners based on the selectivity of college they attended. We won’t reveal the stats because we think you should read the book - but suffice it to say that you are far more likely to end up at the top of the earnings chart if you’ve gone to an elite college. This directly refutes some previous research that never really passed the sniff test but was quoted by every high school counselor on earth as a means of assuring kids that they don’t have to worry about their college’s brand name. We’ve never believed it and seeing the proof in cold hard facts made us smile.
We don’t normally work with middle school students, but this book has caused us to think twice about that decision. As Tough points out, the kinds of activities that impress college admissions officers are typically set in motion well before a student sets foot in high school. Setting yourself up for honors and AP courses, the kind that elite colleges crave - in high school? That typically happens because of the math courses you’ve taken in middle school. If you start as a freshman in Algebra 1, can you make it to AP Calculus, which has become a marker for academic rigor at elite colleges? Probably not. How about being a recruited athlete? Can you join the fencing team as a freshman and end up being recruited to college for it? Almost certainly not. The kids getting those coveted spots on college teams have been traveling internationally to compete from the time they were fourteen-years-old. And what is said between the lines is even more revealing - what high school you go to plays an enormous role in what college you’re likely to get into. We plan on writing more about this in the future since, in the advent of test-optional admissions, the brand name of your high school plays a huge role.
It’s hard for parents not to get caught up in the scarcity of admissions at the country’s most elite colleges. Every press mention of college seems to mention how much harder it is getting to gain acceptance to a handful of really elite places. And that is true. But many parents don’t know that most schools still need to recruit students (as opposed to wanting to recruit them, the way the Ivies and their ilk do). Even schools right outside of the elite - especially those elite liberal arts colleges - want to fill their ranks and worry about doing so. We know that sounds a bit crazy given the high stats of the kids going to schools even outside the top 40. Paul tells this story through the business side of college admissions (how colleges receive names of kids to go and recruit), but the takeaway for families is that there is an alternative to going all in at an Ivy-League school in the ED round. If you are willing to use your ED bullet at a school just outside the top echelon of colleges - and you can pay full board - you have a much better shot of being accepted at an elite college, even if your stats are not sky high. Do you want to take a long shot at Brown (ranked #14 on the US News National College List), or do you want to take a higher probability shot at Middebury’s 45% ED Acceptance rate (ranked #9 on the US News Liberal Arts College List)?
Paul also spends a good bit of time on the inequalities in the college admissions process and they will make you sit up and take notice about how just broken this process can be. We highly recommend it as a read for everyone interested in just how the college admissions process works in the US.
