The College Question Podcast

The Question A friend and TCQ reader wrote with a question from his daughter: If I’m legally an adult at 18, why do my parents’ income and assets determine my financial aid? It’s my education, not theirs. Three Answers * Why consider parental income? Nearly all 18 year-olds have the same income and assets – i.e., very little. Federal student aid is designed to help lower-income students pay for co...

It’s June, so high schoolers are out visiting colleges. Lots of questions come up in this process, and I’ll touch on many across the summer. I’ll start with something where I see a lot of confusion: faith on campus. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecollegequestion.substack.com/subscribe

Q: My child was accepted to the University of Miami, but not for the fall - they want him to start in January. What’s the reason for that? A: It’s an increasingly common practice among a certain kind of selective school. It’s about manipulating statistics and smoothing out the school’s programming and revenue. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get ac...

In Part 1 of the Gustavus Keynote, Knowledge and Strength , I considered the college motto, e caelo nobis vires , roughly “from heaven come our strengths.” In Part 2, I talk about the conditions necessary for building strength, and discuss what it feels like to be beckoned by a device at all times. I dip very briefly into Habermas and his ideas about lifeworld and system-world in connection with o...

Last week I delivered the keynote at a staff retreat at Gustavus Adolphus College, where my wife and I met in the 1990s and I am on the board. I’ll split it up into a few pieces. Today, I confess to a crime and consider the college motto. 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. An...

It takes a lot of work to get kids to the point where college is even possible. Moms have a certain tendency to do that work. This was our Christmas letter in 2009, describing what - if you read between the lines - was a lot of work. 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 l...

AI is a formidable automation and labor-saving tool, so the going assumption is that it will wipe out millions of knowledge workers’ jobs. Automation always kills jobs because it changes the nature of work, but it doesn’t always result in fewer jobs when the dust has settled. That’s what we care about when we’re deciding whether to study accounting, or computer science, or become an actuary. Shoul...

Let me tell you about a children’s board book called Robbie the Robot Learns to Read . Robbie the robot wants to read, so he visits a teacher named Ms. Snead, a bespectacled turtle who insists that “rules are what make language tick!” Robbie learns the rules, but when he opens a book, it doesn’t work: “new situations here, conflicting rules there, Robbie could only stare and stare.” Robbie then vi...

As we assess how AI works, we get a better sense of how our own brains work. To be clear, even the people who create AI don’t quite know how it works, and nobody knows how our brains work.* Today, I want to look into what we mean by exercising “judgement”, whether and how AI can do it, why we’re able to do it, and how we can educate for judgement. I sometimes teach a course on presentations at the...

Consider a profession your kid might aspire to: being a doctor. 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 d...

The question many parents are asking right now is more fundamental than how to get into college or how to pay for it. It’s whether the career their child is considering will exist in four years. 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 wha...

A friend’s son is choosing between three colleges. They’re all of the same general type, but the differences still matter. It’s not about distance or money or sports or the size of the school. It’s really about the schools themselves. So - how do you figure out what’s best? I asked a few friends who know the schools in question, and ended up talking to them about college choices in general. One of...

Atul Dighe has been a colleague and friend for two decades, and he’s as thoughtful as anyone I know on questions of education, career, and personal formation. Atul nudged me to pursue The College Question, and without that I probably wouldn’t have done it. But I wasn’t going to let him just wind me up and send me out into the Substack world alone, so I brought Atul onto the TCQ podcast to talk abo...

Colleges hate the word "negotiate” - but it’s what we’re doing. 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 Tui...

Happy Friday! We’ve made it to the last entry in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College: [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 count...

We’re almost to the end of Ten Things We Get Wrong About College ! Here’s #2 in our countdown … “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...

Yesterday’s post, “ Sports Scholarships Are Fake ,” was really about the college economic model. Tuition pricing is so distorted that many scholarship athletes pay just as much as other students do - and sometimes more. Most of them are on partial scholarships, but so is everyone else, so the fact that they are “scholarship athletes” has no impact on how much they pay. This is crazy, but it’s just...

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! We’re continuing Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with #4: “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 a...

Happy Monday! 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...

Below is a passage from my NYT Opinion cutting room floor. I was trying to explain why top students stopped submitting SAT scores even though they all took the test, and it seemed to me that the system had morphed into one of those sports where objective achievement was mixed with more subjective factors. I settled on ski jumping … *** Holistic Chess: Nordic Ski Jumping In Nordic ski jumping – the...

It’s Friday, and TCQ is continuing Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with: * #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% o...

Today we continue TCQ’s series on Ten Things We Get Wrong About College with … #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 und...

A couple of notes for TCQ readers: * 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 re...

Hello! The College Question took an unscheduled break yesterday so I could enjoy an entree of food poisoning followed by - well, you know. Eek! ☹️ I have recalibrated my gratitude meter and I return with a new perspective: it’s good to be alive! 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 Feder...

In the week since TCQ launched, several people have noted that it has included a lot of words. One of them made this point while drinking her coffee in our kitchen and wondering aloud if anyone really needed that many words. 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 T...