The College Question Podcast

I’m taking a weekend break from Ten Things We Get Wrong About College - where I’ve covered “#10 - College is harder to get into than ever! ( It’s never been easier.)” and “ #9 - College is more expensive than ever! ( Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)” Today and tomorrow I’m sharing some cutting room floor material from a feature piece I wrote for NYT Opinion claiming that elite college admissio...

Yesterday I kicked off Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! ( It’s never been easier.) 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, be...

I’m kicking off The College Question with a countdown called “Ten Things We Get Wrong About College.” It’ll be one a day for ten weekdays, with detours on the weekends. Let’s go! #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 S...

Welcome to The College Question , a Substack newsletter for parents and students trying to figure out how college works. If you’re a student or you have kids, I’d love for you to subscribe. If you have friends with kids, please forward this email to them. It will help them. Here’s the background. I was a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education, I’ve written about college and the econom...

I created The College Question because millions of people have good questions about college and they’re getting terrible answers. I can answer most of the questions, and I’m going to do that here at TCQ . If you have friends with kids I’d love for them to subscribe. Just forward them this email. So that’s the short answer to why I am launching The College Question . Here’s a longer one. * I’ve spe...

In some corners of our public conversation it has become fashionable to dismiss college as overpriced or unnecessary. I don’t believe that. I believe college should be a challenging and deeply formative experience for most of our future leaders - which is to say teachers, parents, presidents, coaches, journalists, doctors, general managers, and a lot more. College should broaden the mind, develop...

The College Question isn’t about just one question. It’s about a tangle of uncertainties — admissions, cost, financial aid, majors, career options, where to live, what risks to take, which to avoid and more. Most of the experts on these topics know one piece well. Admissions consultants know admissions. Financial planners know money. Professors know their disciplines. Policy people know policy. Ca...

The college system has a truth problem and an aspiration problem. People inside it won’t often disagree with these points - but they can’t change it themselves. Here’s what I want for the system. 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., Tuitio...

My career was in legal and management consulting for big companies. How did I get here? 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 aff...