College Uncovered

Ambience-graduation [00:00:05] Thomas Richard Downey. Richard Anthony Emmanuel Dorsey.

KIRK [00:00:15] T-J Dorsey is graduating from high school and like many teenagers, he's excited and a little nervous about his next chapter. After the ceremony, his mom hugs him and expresses her pride. It's a monumental moment in his life and hers.

Ambience-graduation [00:00:32] I just wish I could keep you at home in your room forever. But. Yeah, but I gotta let you go and grow and become the man that I see you becoming.

KIRK [00:00:50] What keeps you up at night? What are you worried about?

T-J [00:00:53] I'm beyond this. My doing my laundry. Doing my laundry, and, like, my roommate. That's really what I'm worried about.

KIRK [00:01:02] In the fall, T-J is heading to college for him and other students. Going to college isn't a question. It's part of the American formula for success. Get a degree, and in four years, get a job. TJ is now one of nearly 18 million college students in the U.S., and they're all trying to write their own successful life stories.

KIRK [00:01:23] Why did college matter? Why is it so important?

T-J [00:01:27] College matters to me, really. To gain in networking. Really learn a craft really well. I mean, trying to find exactly what I want to do. And once I find that thing, you know, executing on it. And I think it's a worthy investment when it's done like that, you know.

JON [00:01:41] Of course, we're all pulling for TJ. We hope he gets along with his roommate and that college pays off for him and his parents who are helping fit the bill. But the reality is that colleges make all kinds of promises just to convince students to enroll and to put down that hefty first deposit.

KIRK [00:01:58] 1 in 4 freshmen won't even make it as far as sophomore year. More than 40 million Americans have dropped out of college, ending up with no degree and debt, sometimes crushing debt. No one goes to college thinking this is what will happen to them, but maybe they should. This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. A podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I'm Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

JON [00:02:34] And I'm Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.

KIRK [00:02:36] Colleges don't want you to know how they operate.

JON [00:02:39] So GBH, in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

KIRK [00:02:44] Today on the show. Misleading you.

JON [00:02:46] That's you. As in university. Now, right up front, we have to tell you going to and graduating from college does pay off. People with degrees, on average earn way more over a lifetime than people without them.

KIRK [00:03:00] But it's also true that colleges operate in their own self-interest, selling students on a vision, not a reality. You might be surprised to learn how much of what they tell you isn't strictly true, and that people often don't get what they expect for their tuition dollars. So in this first installment of our podcast, we're going to run down some examples of colleges telling their customers half the story and sometimes things that are entirely untrue.

JON [00:03:26] For one thing, a big reason millions of U.S. Students go into debt is because colleges fail to tell them one basic piece of information. How much will this degree cost? You think you know? And in fact, colleges are required to disclose the total cost of attendance and put it on their websites, but often they simply don't. Or it's an underestimate.

KIRK [00:03:49] Economist Beth Akers studies higher ed. She says that when you buy a home, your real estate agent or lawyer usually helps make sure you know what you're doing.

Akers [00:03:59] When you sign your mortgage, you've got that huge stack of papers. And it's pretty hard to get through that without knowing how much you're paying and how much going to cost you on a monthly basis.

JON [00:04:08] But college students and their families, most don't even know how much they'll have to borrow because the process is confusing. Really confusing. And sometimes, Akers says, that's on purpose.

Akers [00:04:22] I did some research several years ago where we looked at first year students. We found out about half of them couldn't even guess within, you know, a reasonable margin of error, how much they were paying for college. A third of them had no sense of how much they were borrowing.

JON [00:04:36] The Gao, the federal government's Accountability Office, recently found that more than 90% of colleges understate what it cost to attend, which, remember, they are required by law to disclose.

KIRK [00:04:48] Yeah, and other studies have found that the info on college websites is out of date or the links don't even work. And while this violates federal law, no one is enforcing it.

JON [00:04:59] Okay, so the first step is that a student applies and gets accepted to a college. And then a few weeks later gets an offer of financial aid. But as a student or parent in this process, your education is only just beginning. Here's another place where colleges aren't necessarily upfront in their financial aid offer letters. Colleges bend over backwards to avoid using the word loan. One study found they used a 136 different other terms for the word loan, and sometimes they didn't use the word loan at all, even though the families would be borrowing with interest.

KIRK [00:05:36] So what did they call it instead?

JON [00:05:37] Well, they'd make up. Abbreviations like direct, unsub or unsubsidized or direct unsubsidized. Notice that none of these terms use the word loan. They're just ways to confuse and hide what is actually officially called a federal direct unsubsidized loan. Money that you have to borrow and pay back with interest and that anybody else would call a loan, even though the colleges are trying to distract you from that.

KIRK [00:06:03] Right. But you're this student who's been told from relatives and teachers from your earliest days go to college. College is good, right? So you sign on the dotted line and you enroll. But here's another not so little twist. Whatever financial aid they offer you as a freshman is likely to shrink after your first year. This, of course, is a classic bait and switch. And by the way, if you get a private scholarship from the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce, the college will often subtract that amount from its financial aid offer. That leaves you with zero net gain, but the college wins. Here's economist Beth Akers again.

Akers [00:06:40] People are just not having a sense of really how much college is even going to cost them when they're just about to sign on the dotted line.

JON [00:06:48] Okay, so we know this all can be overwhelming and disorienting, and a major goal of this podcast is to slow it down and dive into these obscure practices and help you, the consumer, cut through the fog, whether it's getting it to college, paying for it, or graduating on time. To me, Kirk, the single most basic promise colleges make is that you'll get a bachelor's degree in four years.

KIRK [00:07:14] And that's how long almost all freshmen think it will take them.

JON [00:07:18] But guess what? Do you know how many of them will actually graduate in four years? We'll give you a second to answer. Okay. Have you thought about it? Fewer than half of students graduate on time. Only 43% of them actually finish in four years. And that means most of them will have to pay for another year or two more than they expected. But good luck finding out the four year graduation rate of a college. Because the government only requires that colleges report the proportion of their graduates who finish in six years, not four. We'll have much more on why that happens later this season. Plus, we'll talk to insiders and experts in each episode who know how this game is played.

KIRK [00:08:02] So we're recording this here in GBH Studios in Boston, which is kind of a college town. And we have a real life college student here with us. Maura is our new intern. Hey, Mara. Hey. So I got to ask, what's your favorite podcast?

Mara [00:08:15] College uncovered.

KIRK [00:08:18] Okay. This is a paid internship. But to be clear, full disclosure. We are not paying you to say that, right? Right. Okay, so what's your actual favorite podcast?

Mara [00:08:26] I did just finish the Retrievals.

KIRK [00:08:28] What's that one about?

Mara [00:08:29] It's all about a nurse stealing fentanyl from a fertility clinic.

KIRK [00:08:32] Sounds uplifting.

Mara [00:08:34] It's definitely dark, but I really liked it.

KIRK [00:08:36] All right, so I'll have to check that one out. So you just went through this whole crazy college admissions process. You're a sophomore now, right? Yup. Is there anything that you wish you knew at the time?

Mara [00:08:46] Yeah. I'm actually helping my younger sister apply right now. And the one thing I've been telling her is that the process is not personal. It's so easy to get attached to certain colleges and programs just to have your dreams crushed when you open that admissions letter.

KIRK [00:09:00] Yeah. And schools are receiving more applications than ever before, which means an admissions officer has even less time to decide whether or not they admit you.

Mara [00:09:09] Yeah. That's true. I had my heart set on northwestern, and I was devastated for a long time after I opened that email.

KIRK [00:09:16] Oh, man. Sorry to hear that.

Mara [00:09:18] Yeah. It sucked. Honestly, I just wish I stress about it less. Spent more time with my friends and family because that time I'll never get back.

KIRK [00:09:26] That's good advice for students and their parents, too, I think. Maura, thank you so much.

Mara [00:09:31] Sure. Just one more thing. I'm really hoping that listeners reach out to us with their questions about how colleges work. I think getting answers would have been helpful to me when I was applying.

KIRK [00:09:41] So how can people find us?

Mara [00:09:42] You can find us on social at GBH news. Or you can email us at GBHnewsconnect@wgbh.org.

KIRK [00:09:51] Tremendous. Thank you. Mara.

Mara [00:09:52] Thank you.

KIRK [00:09:58] Okay, so everything we've talked about so far, all the praise hiding and shifting around of money, you could call it misleading, but there are also some downright lies. Columbia University was the latest institution found to be giving false information to the US news rankings that followed around a dozen other similar cases. At least 15 alumni of various law schools have sued over the years, saying the schools reported most of their alumni had jobs, even though they were counting jobs like convenience store clerk or pool boy.

JON [00:10:30] And it's getting a good job that students say is the second most important reason they pick a college.

KIRK [00:10:35] What's the first job?

JON [00:10:36] Well, the first reason, by a narrow margin, is still the quality of academics. But families are demanding a return on their investment, and colleges consistently make big claims about how many of their graduates get jobs.

KIRK [00:10:49] Yeah, it's somehow magically always seems to be around 98%, right? But how do they really know?

JON [00:10:56] Yeah. So here's the answer to that one. They conduct email surveys of alumni. And Kirk, I know that you respond to every single survey you get in your email inbox.

KIRK [00:11:05] I'm a zero email guy.

JON [00:11:06] In fact, colleges here back from an average of slightly more than half of their former students.

KIRK [00:11:11] And probably the ones who have good jobs.

JON [00:11:13] Exactly. So when they say that 98% of their graduates are working. What that actually means is 98% of half of their graduates are working. And that's a hugely different number. You know the old joke, right? How do you get the English major off your front porch?

KIRK [00:11:29] You pay for the pizza.

JON [00:11:30] Exactly. So. Economist Beth Akers says we should hold schools accountable, and that students and their families need to ask about all this stuff and read the fine print.

Akers [00:11:41] The truth is that colleges, like people, are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and we really need to get students and their families thinking about what it is they're signing up for, what they're hoping to get, and whether or not the college they're picking is going to send them in that direction.

JON [00:11:55] And people also sense when they're getting a raw deal, an arrangement that's misleading at worst and confusing at best. Distrust in colleges is mounting, and more and more Americans are starting to see going to college as a risky bet. Over the last decade or so, Americans feelings about higher education have soured. Just seven years ago, 70% of high school graduates were still going straight to college. Today, it's about 60%. That's nearly a ten percentage point drop.

KIRK [00:12:26] A survey conducted by Gallup finds only about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, in part because 4 in 10 recent college graduates are underemployed. That means they're working in jobs that don't necessarily require their degrees. Think barista or restaurant worker. Lisa Alexakos works as a dog walker on top of her jobs as a nanny and a classroom aide in a local elementary school. Not even working in the school requires the bachelor's degree that Leesa earned from an expensive private college in New York. So she's had to move back in with her parents. And now, on top of working almost all the time. She's investing even more time and money to go to graduate school, which was not her original plan.

Liza [00:13:11] I do have, two almost full time jobs, and I'm in grad school and I'm exhausted at the end of the day. And it's like frustrating because I see all these people who are my age, but they're also going out on like weeknights and having drinks with friends and hanging out, and I don't have that time or energy.

JON [00:13:29] We met up with Liza on the back deck of a house where she was dog sitting, a goldendoodle named Winnie. And I asked her, why did she go to college?

Liza [00:13:37] There was a very large promise of a job right out of college. They said that everybody worked with the career services, and the career services was so good and that they, like, made sure that other outgoing seniors got jobs and found what they were looking for and that they were all super successful, like right out of school.

JON [00:13:57] Liz's advisor said she wouldn't have trouble getting a job with her degree in Central American history and the College Career Center. Well, that didn't work out so well.

Liza [00:14:07] I went to career services and I was like, I'm not sure what I want to do. And they were like, oh, like, take this personality test or something, and we'll see what job would work best for you or fit for you. And I took it and I didn't hear from them. Didn't hear from them emailed back. And they were like, oh, like, you're gonna have to take it again. Took it again. Never heard back from them. Would make all these efforts to, like, reach out and see if I could meet with someone. Get resume updates. I think I met with someone and got a resume update once and then really never heard from them again.

JON [00:14:43] Do you think that happens to a lot of people?

Liza [00:14:45] I do, and I feel like I've seen it a lot from my friend group, especially because we all keep in touch all the time and see each other as much as we can, and we all just kind of went very different from where our majors were.

KIRK [00:15:00] So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that today, almost half of American parents say they'd prefer that their children not enroll in a four year College.

JON [00:15:09] Probably because they don't want to live with their kids forever.

KIRK [00:15:11] Good point. But American higher ed has its staunch defenders who say, warts and all, College is still worth the money. Here's retired Tufts University professor Saul Gettleman.

Saul [00:15:21] It is a terribly flawed system. Everything you read about is all true. We've dug our own hole. We've killed the goose that laid the golden egg. We produced many too much Ph.D.s. We are everything. We do a lot that's flawed in spite of all of the terrible things we're doing to ourselves. We cannot seem to screw it up enough.

JON [00:15:43] Wait, Kirk, this is someone who's a staunch defender of college.

KIRK [00:15:47] John, we're getting there, I promise you. Just stand by. Gettleman is the son of Jewish immigrants, and he was the first in his family to go to college back in the 1950s. He attended Tiny Drew University in New Jersey to play baseball.

Saul [00:16:00] United Methodist Seminary, the tiny liberal arts college. And they accepted me before I applied.

KIRK [00:16:05] What position.

Saul [00:16:05] You play? I was an infielder. Weak arm. I'd be happy now playing on the dirt. I couldn't make a throw from the grass, so, and I... But I wanted to be a ballplayer. Right. And I went to this little Methodist college, and it changed my life.

KIRK [00:16:17] Gettleman's experience on and off the field is the narrative American higher education loves to tell itself. Pick yourself up from your bootstraps, get an education, and then join the growing middle class, which John isn't actually growing anymore. Gettleman graduated debt free, and then he spent more than 50 years in the classroom.

JON [00:16:36] Okay, Kirk, I'm still waiting.

KIRK [00:16:38] Okay, so his argument is that American colleges remain the envy of the world because of their institutional diversity.

Saul [00:16:46] We got 4000 higher educational, degree granting institutions with a choice two year, four year, tiny, enormous, faith based. We've got everything that no other nation has in the world, and they can't replicate it because it happened by accident.

KIRK [00:17:03] But we also have huge workforce shortages.

Saul [00:17:05] It's a mess. It is absolute mess. Furthermore, the administrators are for the most part incompetent and the faculties ungovernable. So you got the incompetent leading the ungovernable. It's. It's chaos and still. There's nothing in the world like it.

KIRK [00:17:24] Despite the chaos and incompetence, Gettleman points out, throngs of foreign students still flock to the U.S.. More than a million enrolled last year, according to the Institute of International Education.

JON [00:17:35] Sure. But those numbers are starting to decline, Kirk.

KIRK [00:17:39] Yes, you hopeless skeptic. But Gettleman says American higher ed must be doing something right. And domestic students like TJ Dorsey, the graduating high school senior who we met earlier, he's keeping the faith for him and his family. This is a big investment. But TJ says he got a lot of reassurances when he went to campus for Accepted Students Day in the spring. It was before he made his college decision final, and he tells me administrators talked to him about certain things he'd get out of his education.

T-J [00:18:08] You're going to be there for four years, but you know, the connections and the relationships you make will last a lifetime, you know? So they spoke a lot about the networking events they hold every year and how, you know, all their professors and teachers are all like masters in the industry. And people go like, take time out of their workday to come teach. So that's really how I think they sold themselves to me.

KIRK [00:18:30] So there's a lot about jobs. It's like it's like, come here and we'll help you get a job.

T-J [00:18:33] Yeah. And it was like, if you want to work in any field, we have it here.

KIRK [00:18:36] So that's a promise. Fewer Americans are accepting on blind faith.

JON [00:18:42] Economist Beth Akers says that's why it's so important for colleges to be more transparent right now, instead of hiding behind tricks and gimmicks.

Akers [00:18:51] It's just no longer safe or appropriate to make this tremendous investment without really knowing what's on the line.

JON [00:18:59] We think so too, and that's why we created this podcast. This is College Uncovered. I'm John Marcus from The Hechinger Report.

KIRK [00:19:07] And I'm Kirk Harrop from GBH.

JON [00:19:09] Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don't teach you.

KIRK [00:19:15] Our show is created by John.

JON [00:19:17] And Kirk and edited by Meg Woolhouse.

KIRK [00:19:19] Jerry Mott and David Goodman are our mics engineers. Our audio advisor is Devin Robins.

JON [00:19:24] All of our music is by college bands. Our theme music is groundswell by left Roman out of MIT.

KIRK [00:19:31] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

JON [00:19:33] We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what matters to you and what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you're with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

KIRK [00:19:51] Thanks so much for listening.