ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Paul Tough, education journalist and author of The Inequality Machine, about the future of higher education. Even as many Americans return to college campuses this month, rising costs and a lower return on investment have raised uncomfortable questions about just what those classes are all leading toward. Can college be saved?

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Read our 2019 conversation with Paul Tough on “College, Calculus, and the Problem with the SAT.” Also check out WIRED’s education and college coverage.

Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Gideon Lichfield is @glichfield. Bling the main hotline at @WIRED.

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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Gideon: Today, we're just going to be super efficient. Uh, hold on a second. Have I got the doc? Where's the doc?

Gideon: Hi, I'm Gideon Lichfield.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Goode.

Gideon: And this is WIRED's Have a Nice Future, a podcast about how terrifyingly fast everything is changing.

Lauren: Each week, we talk to someone with big, audacious, and sometimes unnerving ideas about the future, and we ask them how we can all prepare to live in it.

Gideon: This week, our guest is Paul Tough, a journalist who's written several books on education. He's also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

Paul (audio clip):So the kind of public higher education system that we had 50 years ago, we could have again. It's really just a question of priorities.

Lauren: So Gideon, I don't know how comfortable you are with me aging you, but I'm just going to note—

Gideon: Oh I can be aged.

Lauren: OK, so it's been a while since we've both been to college, or as your people say, university. So what made you think, OK, now is the time we have to have Paul Tough on the show?

Gideon: A few years ago, Paul wrote this book, The Inequality Machine, and it kind of busts open the myth of college as the great leveler in the US. We think of college as opening up opportunities to a better career, a more lucrative career, you know, that whatever background you came from, it can make the American dream come true for you, and his book says that that's not actually true—that if anything, it exacerbates the existing social inequities in America. And then, early in September, Paul published a piece in The New York Times Magazine called “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College.” And it paints a rather scary picture. It shows that college enrollment is going down, and more and more people just don't think that college is a good investment anymore. And that seemed particularly relevant at the moment when hundreds of thousands of Americans are heading back to college.

Lauren: I read that article in preparation for this podcast, and, of course, I did the thing you're not supposed to do, which is I went to the comments. It has more than 3,500 comments. So clearly that article touched a nerve, and I think the sense I got from reading the article, which is very different from when you and I went to college, is that for kids today, there is a real risk that it just becomes a raw deal, and it's especially a raw deal if you are already in some way disadvantaged.

Gideon: Right. I mean, we're pretty privileged. We had our educations when it cost a lot less—or nothing, in my case—and we've managed to forge careers pretty much in our chosen fields, although I think I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Lauren: Yes, fair enough. I have some second act planned at some point. I just don't know what that is yet. But, you know, the thing that really struck me in the Times article as well, and you mentioned earlier, is this idea that at one point we were very high on higher ed here in America. Now something like 41 percent of young people are saying that college is important to them. Down from 74 percent a decade ago.

Gideon: That's a big drop.

Lauren: It's a huge drop. What is actually driving this change in sentiment?

Gideon: I mean, one of the big things, as you might expect, is the rising cost of college. But there's a whole bunch of other social dynamics, and even the politics of college, that are changing. And all of this is stuff that I get into with Paul in the interview.

Lauren: Oh, I can't wait to listen. Before we get to that conversation, though, I do have a small ask. So we've been getting some really great notes from our listeners, and we would love to hear more. So we have an email address. You can email us at nicefuture@wired.com. Like our previous guest, Cory Doctorow, we do still read emails. Or you can just leave us some notes on your favorite podcast app. Tell us what you want to hear more of. Tell us what you don't like. We can take it. We're grown-ups here, but drop us a line, because we love hearing from you.

Gideon: And with that, my conversation with Paul Tough is coming up right after the break.

Gideon: Paul Tough, welcome to Have a Nice Future.

Paul: Thank you. Great to be here.

Gideon: Are you having a nice future?

Paul: [Laughter] Yes, for the most part. It's always hard to see the future, but, um, the present seems to be going well.

Gideon: It's good to hear because one of the reasons we're having you on the show is that you wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine that paints a pretty terrifying future for higher education in the US. You've been writing about American education for years. You've written several books covering what contributes to children's success in school. But more recently, you turned your focus to higher education. Why was that?

Paul: The two things that have always interested me were education and social mobility. The way that kids go to school, where they go to school, what they learn in school, how that affects their ability to change their lives. I was writing about early childhood. I was writing about K-12 education for a long time and then came to understand that in some ways, the real action in education and social mobility is in higher education. That this was the moment after high school where the lives of children from different backgrounds were really diverging more than anywhere else.

Gideon: So this story that you published this month in The New York Times depicts this rather alarming situation. Enrollment has been declining. The number of people going to college has been going down in the US ,while it's increasing for other OECD countries. And also people's feelings about the value of college have turned a lot more negative in the last few years. And the key reason, broadly speaking, seems to be that there's no longer a reliable promise that college will be worth it financially in terms of your later career, but you point to several trends that are behind that. So maybe you could talk a bit about each of those.

Paul: Sure. Yes. So, the sort of straightforward story where a college pays off, where you make a lot more money, you're more likely to have a job. What I think both high-level economists, but also regular American families, have come to understand over the last decade is that in fact the equation is much more complicated than that, and what used to be a really sure thing, a very sort of stable investment, going to college is now a much more risky undertaking. There's much more variability in outcomes. And so there are some people who are continuing to do great as the result of going to college. It's really boosting their income. It's boosting their wealth, but there are others for whom it is not paying off in the same way. And so there are a couple of relatively new studies that I wrote about that are parsing this question of how much college benefits people financially in new ways that I hadn't seen before. And that sort of expanded my understanding of what's really going on in terms of the finances of college. One of these studies looks at, instead of what economists usually look at, which they call the college wage premium— the very simple number of how much more on average a college graduate earns than a typical high school graduate—instead, they look at the college wealth premium. So over a lifetime, how much more assets versus debts do you have at the end of your working life if you went to college instead of not going to college, instead of just stopping with a high school diploma? And what these economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found was that, in fact, for younger graduates, for people born in the 1980s and afterward, that college wealth premium, the idea that you'd have a lot more money at the end of your working life if you had gone to college, was starting to disappear. And for African American graduates born in the '80s and afterward, it had more or less disappeared altogether. For people who went on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was worse, and what it looks like that the reason for that is, is that it's all about tuition costs, rising tuition costs and student debt.

Gideon: It’s not only that it's more of a gamble whether college is going to pay off, but that gamble also really depends on where you're coming from.

Paul: Yes, exactly. And so this gets to the research of another economist at the Federal Reserve, a guy named Douglas Webber, who looked at the payoff of college through the lens of odds of how likely you are over the course of your life to come out ahead of someone who only has a high school degree. And what he found is, yes, that if you somehow manage to go to college and it's completely free and you're 100 percent certain that you're going to graduate in six years, then actually college still does pay off. You have a 96 percent chance of earning more than a typical high school graduate. The problem is there aren't many people who have that experience, right? And what he's found is that about 40 percent of young people who start a college degree in this country do not finish it—drop out before finishing it. For them, the odds are really ruinous. They are almost always coming out behind people who only went to high school, because of the debt that they have and the lack of a credential to increase their earnings. He also found that it matters a lot what you study. So people who study—take, take a STEM degree, they're still doing pretty well, their odds are, are still pretty good, even if they're spending a good chunk of money on college. It's the rest of us, those who are studying the arts, the humanities, the social sciences. If they are spending $25,000 a year on college, their odds are a coin flip whether they will do better than a high school graduate over their lifetime. And if they're spending $50,000 a year, their odds are worse than even. There's a better chance that the high school graduate is going to do better than them.

Gideon: And then there is nonetheless this paradox, which you pointed out, or at least to me it feels like a paradox, that you pointed out in your piece, that economists expect demand for American college graduates to keep rising faster than colleges keep up, and there are some projections you cite about a shortfall of somewhere between 6.5 and 8.5 million graduates in the labor force by 2030. Are there not enough spaces in college? Are they not recruiting the right people? Is it that the costs of putting people off?

Paul: Yeah. So that's a mismatch between the supply and demand. Supply is going down. The number of American undergraduates is going down. It was at about 18 million undergraduates a decade or so ago. Now it's at about 15.5 million. Some of that is changing demographics, but a lot of it is just students, young people making different decisions than they would have before. But the question of demand hasn't changed. And in fact, what these economists are saying is that, uh, the way that the economy, the technology, that the global marketplace is changing, we need more highly educated people in the workforce. And so those demands don't, don't change based on the decisions teenagers are making. Those are just sort of basic facts in the economy. The problem is, whereas in the past, the sort of higher education economy would respond to that by saying, look, there's this demand for people with degrees. It's reflected in the college wage premium that college graduates are getting, and so we need to get more graduates out there. I think the institutions still want to do that. They're desperate for more students, but it's the students who are saying, nope, it's not worth it. We, we believe you. The demand is there, but the costs are just too high.

Gideon: Let's look at the question of costs. So costs of college have roughly doubled in the last 30 years, even accounting for inflation. They've gone up even more, I think, for public education. Why is that?

Paul: Well, there's a big debate about exactly why college costs have increased as much as they have over the past few decades. Certainly part of the reason, especially when you look at the public side of the college experience, is that the question of who pays for public higher education has really shifted. So, 50 years ago, it was the public who paid for public higher education tuition at institutions like the University of California. It was really cheap or almost free. You could generally pay for a year's tuition at a place like Berkeley by working a summer job. And now that has shifted completely. And that's mostly been because of decisions that governments have made. To fund less and less of the cost of higher education. They realized, you know, students will pay for it anyway. They will, they will pay the tuition, they'll take out loans, and so the government pays less and less. So that's part of the answer, but it doesn't explain why private higher education is getting so expensive. I think part of it is this race that private institutions feel they need to be in for high-income students. The economics of private colleges are really a little bit crazy, because tuition does keep going up, but so do the discounts that institutions are offering students. So does the financial aid, and in this world of enrollment management, the question of how much you charge each student in order to get them to accept your offer of admission is like—it's nuclear physics. It's incredibly complicated algorithms that are used to calculate this. But what they've realized is that in order to get more wealthy students, which they need to make their budgets, they also have to offer more amenities. They have to actually spend more. So these colleges, some of which are losing money, are trapped in this real spiral where they have to keep spending more money to get the students whose tuition dollars they think are going to help them get out of deficit and make more money. For a lot of them, this equation is really not working, but it creates this world in which the sticker price, at least, is going up a ton.

Gideon: As you look across the education system today, do you see examples of what's working in terms of making it more fair, making it more predictable for students, whether their college education will pay off, and examples also of what's being done wrong.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I think it's easier to find examples of things that are being done wrong than things that are being done right. But I do think there are some institutions that are pushing back against the general trends of stratification, and the inequality. So there's one college that I wrote about in Chicago called Arrupe College. It's a two-year college that's connected to Loyola University, a Catholic private institution there. Unlike Loyola, which is a sort of traditional high-achievement, high-income campus, Arrupe is mostly graduates of Chicago public schools who are low-income, predominantly black and Latino, and don't have super high S.A.T. and A.C.T. Scores. And what Arrupe does—it's very cheap. It's just a couple thousand dollars a year in tuition. Most of that is usually covered by a Pell grant, if not all of it. But Arrupe by fundraising, by finding ways to pay for this sort of support, they do a ton of in-person face-to-face support of these students. And these are the sorts of students who across the country are not graduating from two-year or four-year institutions, but at Arrupe, they are, they are mostly succeeding. And I think that's the level of support that I think a lot of students who come out of high school, not really prepared for college, that's what they need. And what Arrupe shows, to my mind, is that there's lots of motivation out there among low-income students. There's lots of desire to overcome the huge obstacles in their life often to succeed, but what they need is an additional level of support. And so that's a model that I think is starting to get replicated around the country. And it feels to me like a really smart way to think about creating a more diverse pool of college graduates.

Gideon: So how much of this depends on colleges like Arrupe that are doing the work to try to make it easier for a more diverse range of students to succeed? And how much should it come from law and policy at the government level?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I think the way that laws and policies can affect higher education is mostly by affecting public institutions. So there's certainly interesting talk about the fact that, you know, there's a lot of Ivy League schools that have these enormous endowments that get huge tax breaks. When hedge fund guys give $300 million to Harvard, they get a gigantic tax break, and that goes to, you know, educating more rich kids to become hedge fund guys, which doesn't really seem like maybe the best use of our public funds. So there are interesting questions about how the public could influence that kind of stuff, but I think the easier lever is in public higher education, right? Each state has a higher education system. More students are going to public institutions than private institutions, and more low-income students are certainly going to those public institutions. Any state could be doing a much better job at improving its community college system, its public higher education system, not just the flagship institution, but lots of regional publics as well, which tend to have lower graduation rates. And that has to do with investing in those institutions, investing in student support, in, in more of the sorts of hands-on counseling and support that Arrupe does, but also investing enough that tuition can go down. Even those public institutions, even community colleges, sometimes the tuition is an obstacle to low-income, especially really low-income families. So the kind of public higher education system that we had 50 years ago, we could have again. It's really just a question of priorities.

Gideon: Speaking of law on policy, the Supreme Court just banned affirmative action. How is that gonna affect all of these trends?

Paul: I tend to think it's not going to affect them much. The institutions that I think were using affirmative action the most tended to be these super selective institutions. Ivy League schools, similar selective private liberal arts schools. and these are not the places that are educating a lot of low-income students. Right? And mostly they are not doing affirmative action by socioeconomics. They're doing it by race. And when I visit those schools, it often looks to me like it's a very kind of curated affirmative action. And so I think there might be small tweaks. My guess is that the racial makeup of those schools is not going to change that much. They have a ton of applicants. They can kind of choose whoever they want to go to their schools. The real place that the shift has to happen is in institutions that are not doing much affirmative action because they don't really have selective admissions. Only about 10 percent of American undergraduates go to an institution that only admits 50 percent or fewer of its applicants. Most kids are going to schools where most students get in, and so I don't think it's a shift in affirmative action is going to shift the lives of most of those students. There's still lots that these institutions can do both public and private to create more diverse classes.

Gideon: If the current trends continue—so declining enrollment, increasing college costs, increasing uncertainty for those who do get into college about whether it's going to pay off—what are the impacts of that five to 10 years down the line?

Paul: I think one thing that seems pretty clear is that it will continue the trend toward inequality that has been true for the past few decades in this country. You know, a lower college wage premium is not good for college graduates, but it's kind of good for the country. Like that's what we had in the years after World War II. That's what the GI Bill created. You know, we sent all these GIs to college, and we had a world in which a college degree actually wasn't worth that much. And so paradoxically, that's what we should hope for, right? We should hope for a world in which there's lots of opportunity for lots of different people from different parts of the economy. It's not what we have right now, and that is not where we're heading.

Gideon: Just to clarify, then the difference between now and a few decades ago when the GI Bill passed and when there wasn't, in fact, a big wage premium on going to college, what was that the difference between then and now, in terms of opportunity. Why was that a less unequal time?

Paul: I think it had a lot to do with what kind of jobs were available to people who only had a high school degree. There were a lot more good, well-paying jobs that you could do working with your hands. And so the question of sort of whether to go to college or not was partly an economic one, but it was partly a like, well, what do you want to do? Do you like reading books? Then you should go to college. Do you like working with your hands? Then there's a job down at the mill. And that I think has really shifted. And so as those jobs disappeared and that level of opportunity decayed and the wages for blue collar work went down comparatively, the gap tended to increase.

Gideon: So we usually end with two questions. The first is what keeps you up at night?

Paul: Good question. I mean, you know, lots keeps me up at night, but you know, a lot of it is the fact that I've got two sons. One just started high school. The other is still in elementary school, and I worry about them like any parent. But the more I read this kind of research, the more I worry about them as well. Sometimes I worry about them in a very selfish, competitive kind of way. Like if the system is rigged, are they going to be able to make the system work for them? But I also worry about them in my less selfish moments in a slightly more egalitarian way. What is it going to be like for them to live and work and vote in a country where these inequalities by background, by education, by race, by socioeconomic status are not improving and might be getting worse? What can we do to make the America that they're going to inherit more fair and have more opportunity for everybody?

Gideon: Yeah. I mean, if you think about them in the future being the age that you are now and having college-age kids of their own, what sorts of choices do you think they'll be facing?

Paul: I don't know. That feels a long way in the future. I mean, you know, I don't think that the need for more education is going to go away. I don't think we're going back to a world where 18-year-olds are going to be able to say I don't need any more education and mostly they'll be all right. That might look a lot different. I hope it does. I hope we create a system where there's lots of ways that you can get that education, where it doesn't have to be just sitting in a classroom, going straight from high school to college, there should be—I think everyone feels like there should be more different types of opportunity to reflect the fact that, you know, 18-year-olds are a complicated bunch—right?—who have different interests, different skills, different ways of learning. That's my hopeful idea—is that their kids will have more opportunities than the average 18-year-old has now. Not just more opportunity in the sense of being able to do what's going to pay off, but more opportunities, like more breadth of opportunity. So that if you want to learn in different ways, if you want to learn different things, there are ways that you can educate yourself. There are ways that you can find people to help you get educated. There are institutions that will help you get educated that are maybe more diverse than they are today.

Gideon: What makes you hopeful for the future?

Paul: Long pause. Um, uh. Uh. I think what makes me hopeful for the future is, is that all of this pressure that's out there, all of the collapse that seems like our country is sometimes on the verge of … You know, my hope is that people are getting upset about that in a way that I think could lead to real chaos, but it could lead to real change. You know, we have as a country dealt with serious crises in the past, a lot better than we seem to be dealing with this particular moment. And so, you know, when I look at American history, when I look at the GI Bill, when I look at moments before that, where we started building a lot of high schools, I can see like this country can come together and can deal with the sort of social change that has happened at other moments in our history and be really innovative and be cooperative and be patriotic and, and come together. There does not seem to be a lot of that going on right now. But when I feel most hopeful, it's when I think about that history and realize that we've met challenges bigger than this in the past, and we can meet this one too.

Gideon: Yeah, this is what I call the “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore” doctrine of social change.

Paul: Exactly.

Gideon: Well, Paul, thank you very much for joining us on Have a Nice Future.

Paul: Thank you.

Gideon: Lauren, after listening to Paul talk, how do you feel about college? I mean, how does what he's describing compare with the experience or the prospect of college that you grew up knowing?

Lauren: What is happening to the cost of higher education here in the United States feels criminal. I feel lucky to have been born and gone to college when I did. I honestly don't know what I would do now. And I really, really feel for the kids, particularly disadvantaged kids. who have to make these kinds of decisions now.

Gideon: You studied? Remind me. You studied English?

Lauren: I studied, I studied the very, very applicable-to-real-life English literature. My father really wanted me to go to law school. I mean, I had no means to pay for law school, by the way, even back then. I ultimately decided that wasn't the path for me. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to work in media, crazily enough. I'm still here.

Gideon: What would you study today if you were starting out again? Would it still be English? Would you go, “Oh no, I have to get into a STEM field?” Would you go and do that law degree? What would it be?

Lauren: I don't know if I would do STEM. I might minor in some kind of area of science or maybe computer science because of how valuable that is. I would do things slightly differently, certainly. You, as I recall, you studied physics. And philosophy. Would you still do, first of all, would you still go to college today? This is 18-year-old Gideon right now, would you go to college and would you study the same fields?

Gideon: Are we imagining 18-year-old Gideon in the US or in the UK? Because this is relevant.

Lauren: US. You're here, you're stuck here.

Gideon: Uh, Lord, um, I mean, I think that since I have, assuming this 18-year-old kid is still scientifically minded, I think yes, I would go to college and I might not study physics. I might try to do something in either computer science or biology or a mixture of the two at least if I were smart enough to figure out that that's where the world was going. But yeah, I think I would, but it would definitely feel like I should be thinking about what the earnings potential of my degree would be.

Lauren: So since you grew up in the UK and you've spent a lot of time living in different parts of the world, what would you say strikes you as the starkest difference right now between what's going on in other nations? Let's say specifically Europe and the UK versus the United States.

Gideon: Aside from the fact that the costs of college here in the US are so high, it is that trend that Paul points to in his piece, which is, partly because of the rising costs, enrollment in the US is going down. And in most OECD countries, it's going up. And that seems existential for a country that is trying to compete in the world economy. If you're having fewer and fewer graduates every year, when China is churning out more and more, and when other countries are also churning out more and more, what's the future of your country's economy?

Lauren: It sounds bleak.

Gideon: It does sound bleak.

Lauren: It really does. So as I mentioned earlier, I did the thing that you're not supposed to do, which is I read the comments on Paul's story in The New York Times. Not all of them, but the top few. And some of them were perhaps not surprising coming from the New York Times audience. But one person did make the point that higher education should have higher aims than just the accumulation of wealth, right? That the pursuit and provision of an education must include human and societal motivations that are not defined by material accumulation. Another commenter wrote that education is this essential pillar of democracy. That they're concerned about this rejection of higher education because the way that our country is headed—and I feel like this will resonate with you—we need our citizens to be educated and to protect and fight against the misinformation that creates fertile ground for authoritarianism, basically saying, like, there is this, uh, the, what is it called again? OK. It's the college wage premium and the college wealth premium. Those are the two terms that Paul uses, right?

Gideon: Mm-hm.

Lauren: Both of those are centered on money—the thing that keeps the world going 'round. But these people are also making the point, and I think it's well made, that, like, education and going away to college is actually about more than that, and it's not just about oh, yay, dorm life changed my life. I mean, it's really about learning how to think critically.

Gideon: I think the point that you and these commenters are making is that there is more to going to college than just getting a degree that allows you to earn more money. It's about making you a better citizen. It's about making the society itself better informed. It's about creating the groundwork for a democracy. And all of that is true, but you can't eat democracy. And so it all does come back down to the question, if you have to pay this much for college, and if that risks getting you into such heavy debt that you can't dig your way out of it, and it, it inhibits you from other opportunities in life, then of course, you're going to question whether or not you should do it.

Lauren: I just found the title for your new book.

Gideon: What's that?

Lauren:You Can't Eat Democracy.

Gideon:You Can't Eat Democracy. There you go.

Lauren: Although it sounds like actually that you'd be making a very capitalistic argument with the book titled that, but yes, when actually you are fighting to better democracy.

Lauren: OK. So like, how do we fix this? What did Paul—what was your takeaway from talking to Paul about what we actually need to do to fix our broken higher education system here in the United States? Aside from, OK, I'm just gonna marry a Brit and move to London. Gideon?

Gideon: Hint taken.

Gideon: Paul talks a bit about this in the interview. He points out in the article that 40 percent of people don't graduate, and so you need to do a lot more to figure out who is not graduating, often people from poorer backgrounds, and how to help them navigate college and have a higher chance of success. He also talked about states improving their community college systems, so that it's not just the flagship institutions but also the ones that serve the more general population that have a better standard of education and are better at helping students succeed so that fewer flunk out.

Lauren: I do wonder, though, even if we create a really great two-year college system or alternative college system and offer people different pathways to higher education, as long as the Ivy League exists as the Ivy League, as long as private donors are inclined to give money to these private institutions and balloon their endowments, as long as state governments and federal governments look at, you know, their budgets and say, “You know what, we're going to cut back again on giving money to public schools.” It seems like that's just going to continue to create a multi-tier system. Where the elite ultimately go to the elite institutions, and then someone else went to, like, the alternative school.

Gideon: So Paul did point out that back when the GI Bill was passed, which created a lot more, uh, college opportunities, it was also still possible to get a good, well-paid job that didn't require a college degree, and in fact the wage gap between white-collar and blue-collar jobs was not nearly as big as it is now. So today if you have a multi-tier system with vocational degrees and two-year degrees and so on that's great. As long as the job opportunities are there and that they pay enough to cover the cost of whatever education that was, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a multi-tier system and with having some schools that are elite schools that attract the best and the brightest and produce the cutting-edge research and bring in students and professors from all over the world. But you need to make those accessible to talented people from all the strata of society. And crucially, and that people from underprivileged backgrounds who come to those schools have as much chance of succeeding at those schools as the people from wealthier backgrounds. And that is one of the things that seems not to be happening right now.

Lauren: Right. Ensuring that they have enough support so that they can finish, which puts them in a better position financially afterwards. Well, unfortunately, I don't think we're going to solve our broken education system in a half-hour podcast, but I think we took a good stab at it.

Gideon: I mean, yeah, I think for me, what this conversation highlighted was, I hadn't realized just how broken the education system is in terms of how much it denies people opportunity. And it seems like it should really be a wake-up call.

Lauren: Right. And how down on higher-ed Americans are, which it seems like they should be, because it seems like a raw deal. And I'm still mad about it.

Gideon: That's our show for today. Thank you for listening. Have a Nice Future is hosted by me, Gideon Litchfield.

Lauren: And me, Lauren Goode. If you like the show, tell us. Leave us a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe so you can get a new episode each week.

Gideon:Have a Nice Future is a production of Condé Nast Entertainment. Danielle Hewitt from Prologue Projects produces the show. Our assistant producer is Arlene Arevalo.

Lauren: See you back here next Wednesday, and until then, have a nice future.