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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary.
- [02:18]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Hope.
- [02:19]
John Podhoretz
For the expect the wor some preacher pain some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, September 4th, 2025. I'm John Porz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. I want to talk to you before we begin about St. John's College. As the school year begins and parents are now thinking who have seniors and rising seniors, that it is time to start looking at where they're going to go next year, let's talk about St. John's College. What kind of education does a free society require. At St. John's College, students study the great books of Western civilization, where they learn to think independently, hear each other's perspectives and understand the foundations of democratic society. It's an education for citizens, thought leaders and those who will carry forward the best of the American tradition. The St. John's BA is equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history of math and science and a double minor in literature and classical studies. It's demanding. It's not for everyone. It might be just right for your child. Learn more at sjc. Edu and this is a fortuitous subject for us to be beginning the podcast with today because we are going to be talking some about American education and the ways in which higher education has been trying to play fast and loose with the education of American kids. We have a special panelist who's going to join us to talk about that. But first, let me introduce our regular panel executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [04:15]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [04:16]
John Podhoretz
Matt Conetti is having trouble logging in. If he logs in, he will join us. If not, we will hear him on another occasion. And with us today, very excitingly, we have AEI senior fellow Naomi Schaefer Riley, Commentary contributor of Long Standing, author of many books, including again, I wrote down your latest book name. And in a scribble, I would show you guys my horrible scribble that I can't even read. And it was only 90 seconds ago.
- [04:49]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
No way to treat a child.
- [04:50]
John Podhoretz
No way to treat a child. We're going to talk about no way to treat a college. Someone trying to get into college. Naomi, Commentary and you had a triumph yesterday. You have the COVID story in the September issue of Commentary, which we called College Board Games, and it is about the ways in which universities might be seeking to get around the 2023 Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action in higher education. And you discerned in the behavior of the College Board, an $11 billion business that is nonetheless a nonprofit, sort of like Harvard, is a $52 billion business that's a nonprofit, that the College Board might be involved in coming up with tools to help universities get around the ban on affirmative action. And yesterday, that main tool that you discussed, the Landscape program. What happened, Naomi, to the landscape program?
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
It was eliminated, effective immediately with very little notice. A very small note on the College Board website, but apparently they have decided they don't want this fight. With Commentary.
- [06:06]
John Podhoretz
With Commentary, because the first major piece to be written about landscape, which is an effort to create A profile of a student that is not accessible, as you describe in the piece, to the student or the student's family, only to the university that subscribes for free to the landscape service to provide sociological information about said student.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah. By census tract.
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John Podhoretz
Right. Census tract, meaning census tract is an unbelievably specific. How would you describe it? Demographic. It goes. It divides America up into tiny, tiny pieces.
- [06:54]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yes.
- [06:56]
John Podhoretz
For the purpose of counting the census. And from this, you can discern all kinds of things. Since many neighborhoods are explicable by their racial content, by their economic content, we don't know what other tools that they are using. Anyway, your piece, which I hope everyone will read. This is a proud moment for any publication, I should say, and proud for Naomi, proud for us that we blew the whistle on something. And apparently it was so terrifying to have sunlight shown on this tool that the College Board had developed that they quickly threw in the garbage can.
- [07:46]
Christine Rosen
Can I just get. I want to ask Naomi, because I did not. We had talked about landscape off at one, because we both have, you know, we've had recently and continuing for Naomi, have kids applying to college. But I want her to detail exactly the kind of proxies for race they developed because it was extremely sophisticated and very sneaky in the way that it was described versus what it actually did. So. And I didn't even realize until I read your piece how much detail they could get from, like, simple things, like, and how much it was biased towards, say, urban, non white populations versus rural poor white populations.
- [08:24]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Right. So the problem that the College Board and colleges faced in trying to get around the 2023 decision is that, you know, they say they want, well, you know, disadvantaged kids, generally speaking. But as it turns out, although black people in this country are disproportionately poor, there are still a whole lot more poor white people than there are poor black people. So if the colleges said, oh, we're just gonna go by income, you would get a lot of white kids from Appalachia, not just, you know, black kids from the South Bronx, to. So put it bluntly. And so the question was, how do we sort of figure out what the race of the kid is based on everything we know about them from the census data? And the census has a lot of questions that I don't even think we think about. But the census might ask, for instance, might. Might know whether people in that tract are more likely to rent their home or own their home. So in poor areas of Appalachia, say, you might have, like, a trailer home but you own it. Whereas in the South Bronx, you're very unlikely to own your apartment if you're, you know, coming, coming from a poor family. Similarly, proximity to a medical facility. So, you know, if you live in the Bronx, you know, you're going to be close to a lot of hospitals, you know, and that will tell us that even though you're poor, you're living in an urban area and also that, you know, you're likely to share the race of the folks in that urban area. So there are all sorts of things, and then there are kind of funny things they don't ask that are sort indicative of the things that they, they don't want to know. Like, you know, whether there's, whether, whether your family owns a car or something like that. Because again, you know, that would tell you that the family, excuse me, from Appalachia, you know, might, might seem more, more privileged because they own a car. But of course, nobody living in West Virginia doesn't own a car, whereas almost everybody in the South Bronx doesn't own a car. And then finally, I would say, you know, they, they, they could look at things like per pupil spending at your local public school. So New York City, as we all know, spends, you know, wild amounts of.
- [10:33]
John Podhoretz
Money on $36,000 a year per pupil as of, as of this year.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah, that would get you a good private school education. But, but, so they would, there would be a lot of per pupil spending, but they're not actually using that as a proxy for wealth, even though one might think that that would be something you'd care about. So it's very specific what they're interested in and what they're not. And that's was very clear that this was a deliberate effort to circumvent the Supreme Court decision.
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John Podhoretz
You point out, you begin the piece by pointing out that diversity as an end in itself in higher education has become so axiomatic over the last, say, two generations that it's a selling point. Again, you. Christine, I, we have been through the college process now. I've been through it twice. Christine, you've been through it twice. You've been through, you're about to have your second go around with it and you go places. And they are very committed to the idea, as you go for your informational interview or the informational session before you get your tour on campus of showing just how wonderfully diverse they are. And they must know that this is a selling point for a great many parents, because I'm not sure they would focus on it to the Extent that they do in the way that they do. So when the Supreme Court. And diversity, of course, is a. Is a euphemism for race, since, of course, having a lot of Asian kids doesn't count diverse, but they don't count in this regard. So when the Supreme Court blew the whistle on and said, this is a violation of the 14th Amendment. You cannot count this way, it upended an almost religious commitment to the idea that what makes a school great is the diversity of its student body.
- [12:38]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Absolutely.
- [12:39]
John Podhoretz
And they can't get rid of it so easily. And then it turns out, hey, you know what? Maybe we can outsource again. This is all associated. You don't have memos. You don't have, like, documents that say, help us figure out how to have a diverse class. College Board. But the College Board is right there and had decided six years ago to start looking into this as a method for them to help colleges determine that they could have a diverse student body. And that was a previously discarded the adversity score.
- [13:17]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yes. I think a lot of people. The adversity score. And a lot of people objected to that. And then the College Board sort of made this public announcement about scrapping that, because there are lots of objections to that, but everyone is just whining about the terrible things that have happened to them in their lives. And the College Board decided, okay, fine, no. But then they came up with this, I think, much more euphemistic term, the landscape tool. And I think that really flew under the radar for the public for a long time, and they didn't really realize what it was doing. But to just echo your point about the way that colleges were using diversity to sell their school to students and parents. I mean, I cannot tell you the number of college tours I've been on in the last few years. And I would estimate that probably a third of the presentation was about diversity. They would show pie charts and bar graphs, and then they would, you know, make sure that whoever was giving the presentation came from that particular group that they wanted to emphasize. And then they. That person would go on about the diversity in their dorms and their extracurricular activities in their classrooms. And I have to say, there was this actually shocking moment because I. Since I have two kids who are close together, I actually visited some of the same schools before and after the Supreme Court decision. I could have run, like, a randomized controlled trial here, but it was shocking how quickly those pie charts disappeared. Like they were. The admissions people were running out of things to say because they had focused so much on the racial quota system and how many, you know, black people or how many Hispanics they could brag about having to the point where I will, I will share this story, which is not in the, in the piece, but I was at Harvard and they actually gave out booklets with your admissions tour and they were not, apparently Harvard is so cheap that they can't actually just print a new booklet. They actually put a piece of tape over certain parts of the old booklet. So one piece of tape went over the test optional. As you know, a lot of schools decided to reinstitute the SATs. So one piece of tape said, now testing is required. And then the other piece of tape was just affixed to the back and it says, Harvard does not discriminate based on race or ethnicity. And it's just, it's so funny how quickly this happened. And it was, wasn't just, of course, the Supreme Court decision. It was also everything that Trump has been doing that really, I think, scared the bejesus out of these colleges and now apparently has done the same for the College Board. But, but now you have to convince all of these upper class parents who have been sold this bill that diversity is the best thing about any school, that actually they can't promise diversity. Or maybe diversity isn't such a great thing after all.
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Christine Rosen
Well, and it's, it's great because the, it's going to force the schools to, to define diversity individually on each campus. And I mean, I've, as you know, my hobby horse is economic diversity. And you go in into some detail in the piece about how this landscape system does everything it possibly can to minimize bringing in kids, maybe first generation college kids or poorer kids. But I was, I was a senior astonished with the facts at the beginning, which I think conservatives have known because we've followed the affirmative action roller coaster for decades, but that a lot of sort of average Americans might not realize, which is the immediate impact on racial diversity on campuses as a result of the Supreme Court decision. At some of the places that clearly stopped tipping the scales, like mit, the number of African American and Hispanic students plummeted because they were no longer getting that boost on their entrance exams. I wonder if that shock hasn't really settled for college administrators. And do you think that's why they.
- [17:11]
John Podhoretz
Sought to add on to that? Because this is also, at the beginning of the piece is you say, okay, MIT class of 2024 or the class of 2028, which entered in 2024, was very clearly affected by the Supreme Court decision. But astonishingly the same cannot be said of Princeton.
- [17:32]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah.
- [17:33]
John Podhoretz
Which having lost its capacity under the law to count by race, you know, we're like, to, to put the finger on the scale, say using SAT scores as a differential or something like that, has a class with exactly the same ethnic and racial makeup as how did they do that? Since they themselves said, or everybody said, if you do this, if the Supreme Court finds this, it is going to destroy the educational opportunities of minorities in the United States. And somehow Princeton magically, mysteriously had exactly the same class with exactly the same kind of ethnicity.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
This was their plea to the Supreme Court. It was, if you guys decide this way, we will never be able to make sure that we can educate the same percentage of minority students that we were in the past. And magically they came up with a way to do it. And so, you know, it's interesting, you know, a lot of times colleges sort of operate as like, you know, as a group. They're really moving in sync. And I think that there is a lot of, you know, backroom talk among these different admissions offices. What's interesting about what's happened here is that a lot of colleges have kind of chosen to go their own way and they're trying to feel it out because they're very worried about getting in trouble. And certainly coordinating with each other would be one way that they could, could be getting in trouble. So I think they're, they're each trying to make their own decisions, but in, but ironically, I think those decisions are actually letting everybody see, you know, what should have happened under this decision and which colleges are cheating.
- [19:14]
John Podhoretz
Let's talk about myths. Okay? You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains. That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know, from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bolin Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are Bolin Branch people and we are. Because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bollen brand sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said with every wash comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make. With Boland branch, get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A N D B R- A N C-H.com commentary to save 15% and unlock free shipping exclusions apply, let's talk about myth. Okay? You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains? That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know, from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bolin Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are Bolin Branch people and we are because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bolin Branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said, with every wash comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make. With Boland branch, get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets@bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A n D B R a n c h.com commentary to say 15% and unlock free shipping exclusions apply.
- [22:15]
Christine Rosen
It's like the prisoner's dilemma for higher education.
- [22:17]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Exactly, exactly.
- [22:19]
John Podhoretz
But you know, there's also, it brings up these schools. They're not only so ideologically committed to the idea that diversity is the supreme good and they have been committed to this for so long. But there's also this reality where there's an industry that's sprouted up to ensure this. Right? I mean, there are people who are trained to, you know, diversify institutions and it's like now where do they go? They have to try to keep this alive, you know, to, To. To. To. To sustain this industry.
- [22:58]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
I mean, yeah, some of the colleges claimed, you know, oh, we just did more outreach. I mean, frankly, you know, if you could have done before, you would have done it before. Nobody really believes that, but absolutely, there is a whole industry of people who are getting paid to try to figure this out. It's like people who are jury selection consultants. How do we sort of target these particular students? And as we've seen for years, the problem with the whole affirmative action arrangement is that there aren't enough of these students to go around. And so you're ending up taking in less qualified students in order to meet your diversity goals.
- [23:40]
John Podhoretz
This is a very important point because the affirmative action as it was originally. The term was originally laid out in the wake of the Civil Rights act and complaints about the possibility of counting by race as a result of the Civil Rights act of 1964. The Johnson administration said, that is not how this is going to work, though. How this is going to work is that schools are encouraged to make aggressive recruitment efforts to get minority students onto campuses where they had previously either not been allowed or had access. And that that was what affirmative action was. It was an anti quota, it was opposed to quotas. It was how you do this without resorting to quotas. And almost instantly, the world of people who were being pressed to explain how it was that they were diversifying their campuses racially understood that if they really wanted to get bang for their buck, they needed to use quotas. If they knew they needed the population. The Black population was 12%, and what they needed was 12% of their students on campus to be black so that they could say, we mirror the rest of the population. Then they have to do it that way. And that was complicated in, in. In the 1970s by the Backey decision, which said that you cannot, it is not permissible to take students of exactly equal qualification. If you can prove that they have exactly equal qualification and say that the kid who has melanin in his system gets the jaw, gets the spot, and the kid who doesn't, doesn't. You got to find another way to do that. That's, you know, an individual case where you have some kind of a weird control where every. Everybody is. Is equal. So, so from then on, that was the late 70s, the gyrations and hoops and things that. That universities have had to jump through so that they can say, we don't actually have quotas. Quotas are. But we don't actually have Quotas. But guess what? Amazingly enough, our student body is now 47% diverse. But there's happened mysteriously and magically.
- [26:06]
Christine Rosen
There's another factor that was introduced, I think, in the last 10 or 20 years, which is the presence of foreign students on campus. And I was surprised to read yet again in the news today with the Trump administration losing this case, the Harvard case, federal judge said, no, you can't take the money away, and obviously they'll appeal. But the little factoid in there that struck me was just the high percentage of foreign students on these elite campuses. Obviously, they're huge buckraking opportunities for the schools. They pay a huge amount of money to come there. They pay full freight. They're often the children of very wealthy foreigners and including literally the. The premier of China's child, who's, I think, studying at Harvard or one of the Ivies. So you have these extremely elite kids who take up, in some cases, you know, 20, 25% of the, of the campus on these elite institutions. And so they, they don't want to talk at all about those students, but those students are taking the spots of. Of potentially economically diverse.
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John Podhoretz
No, they count them.
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Christine Rosen
Well, they count them as diversity.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah. They can't. Well, right. Depending on where they're from, if they're.
- [27:10]
Christine Rosen
Not Asian, they count them.
- [27:13]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
If you're from Qatar, you can count as part of the diversity contingent. But that's the other thing that changed too, which is that the Supreme Court eventually arrived at this idea that diversity in and of itself is a good thing and that that benefits. You know, just sitting next to a black student in class is a great benefit to my education, despite the fact that the research for that was very shoddy and remains pretty shoddy.
- [27:38]
John Podhoretz
So that was, I mentioned the backing decision. You're now talking about the Grutter v. Bollinger, which. 2003, which was the case that affirmed the right. Affirmed the right of colleges to use. To use race as a measure, as one tool in the toolkit to make your. But in that famous decision, Sandra Day o', Connor, the justice said, but only for 25 more years. You can do this for 25 more years, and that's not fair anymore. So in the end, it turned out that it was 20 years, not 25 years, because the Supreme Court overturned Grutter and all the previous affirmative action decisions. But, yeah, that diversity, I mean, I remember I took a course at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in 1979 or 1980 from a constitutional scholar named Philip Kurland, and he was teaching us the Great Supreme Court cases of the last 25 years. And one of them was Brown, Brown before. And so this class was taught at the University of Chicago Law School, though it was mostly for undergraduates. And Curlin said, okay, what is the legislation? What is the logical problem with this decision if you were just to take it out of there? So there's a central flaw in the Brown v. Board. It's not desegregation. It's not a central flaw. What's the central part? So we all raise our hands and say, you know, well, it's this, that maybe it's that you will. And, you know, he let this go on socratically for 10 or 15 minutes. And then he said, show me a single piece of evidence that says that it matters what the race is of the person sitting next to you in your classroom is for your ability to get a better education. Because that was a central tenet of, of Brown v. Board that, that, that the diversity was necessary for the education of all. Not that desegregation was necessary to free people who were getting unequal and unfair educations, but also that there was a positive element to this. And he said, I've looked at this for years. There is no evidence adduced by any study anywhere that says that what the guy next to you is like, affects your ability to. Affects your capacity to do well or poorly.
- [30:09]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
And, and that should be. That should be offensive to people to think that that's true. I mean, when you, especially when you look at the evidence from, you know, from schools that were entirely black and even now from schools that are almost entirely black. I mean, just, you know, look at Eva Moskowitz's, you know, success academies. It's 94% black, and they're you performing Scarsdale. So apparently you actually don't need white people sitting next to you in order to learn better. And I think, you know, that. But what then they then convinced people was that white people needed black people sitting next to them in order to learn better. But either way, there's no evidence for it. And, you know, it's. It's kind of just amazing how long we bought into that, that concept. But, you know, the other important thing to understand about Brown is that, you know, know, in, in our current moment, I think what we're experiencing is what happened in the wake of Brown, which is now we've had this important decision. What is the enforcement mechanism and what is enforcement going to look like? And it's, you know, obviously having Trump in office now means that you have this Kind of enforcement that you have a Department of Education, a Department of justice that cares about these things, that they're demanding that schools be transparent about their admissions processes. But it is going to be like, you know, pulling teeth every step of the way to get these institutions comply with the decision.
- [31:31]
John Podhoretz
And that's where the College Board comes in. Because this is a piece about the College Board. It's not. It's about university admissions, but the piece about the College Board. This is, I think, the second or third piece you actually written for us about the College Board. And the College Board is a central institution in American life that is completely, almost completely invisible to everybody. Unless you have, unless you're in this particular period of two years before your kid goes off to college, in which case the College Board suddenly, or at least in most cases, I think we're getting back to it, plays an outsized role in your life because it administers this test that one of the two tests you take, right. The ACT is not administered by the College Board, but the SAT is administered by the College Board.
- [32:19]
Christine Rosen
And well, AP Advanced Placement exams in high school are also administered by the.
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John Podhoretz
College Board and the psat, which is a pre SAT test test. And that they're, they're. And that. So this institution, which generates this astounding amount of money from parents who are trying to make sure their kids get ahead and want to go into higher education is astoundingly opaque. It is, it. It is as though we send our kids future into a black bot. They develop this task. We don't know how. We don't know what standards they're using. We don't know the educational theories. I mean, they release all kinds of gobbledygook statements about what the test is and how it functions. And we don't know how many questions on the test are. Are not the questions that you have to answer in order to succeed. Half the students get long. You know, some astonishing number of kids get more time rather than to. As opposed to other kids because they have learning disabilities or they're. Do they have. Claims have learning disabilities and all that. But it's, it's a black box. And this test is designed to test intellectual capacity rather than knowledge. And they make $11 billion. And they are clearly a handmaiden of the admissions departments of the American university system because it is. That's whom they are serving. We pay that. We pay for the test as parents. But what they are doing is providing a tool, providing a necessary tool to admissions officers. So who's their audience? Who Are they serving and what are they getting out of it? They're getting $11 billion.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
And. And a lot of that is.
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John Podhoretz
Have no. And the people who pay for it have no. Have no say as. As customers or consumers do not know what it is that they're getting for the money that they're paying for the test.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah. And the College Board also, you know, has arrangements, as Christine said, with AP classes and also with. Now, more often than not, schools are administering the SAT during school days because that's supposed to, again, get. Get kids more access to the test. But as you were talking about, my last piece about the College Board talked about changes that they've made to the SAT recently, shortening it. It's all online now. If you get a certain number of math questions right, then you get a harder test for the second half. A lot of it, I think, is not transparent, and it seems to be coming less transparent. It's not 100 questions, and you fill in the bubbles, and whoever gets the most right wins or gets the highest score. I think it's becoming transparent rather than more. And it should be frustrating to parents. I mean, I think they're. They're also in this difficult situation because I think the College Board was probably worried that testing, in some sense, was on its way out. I mean, you know, it's. It's not. It's just a couple of years ago, everyone went test optional, and who needs tests? And we're all, you know, we're all at home during COVID and, you know, we can just read some essays and figure out who belongs at our school. And then especially the elite institutions looked up and realized is, oh, no, we have admitted a lot of kids who are seriously unqualified to do the things that our professors want them to do. And so what does the College Board then, you know, want to pivot to? How does it. How does it keep making all those billions of dollars in an environment where the role of testing is unsure? It has to resell what tests are. Obviously. It's always, you know, for a long time, been engaged in this battle about what should be in AP curricula, and it wants to seem sort of most relevant or most politically correct or what. But then it has to sort of decide what is the SAT really going to measure. And then you get something like the landscape tool, which, you know, for them probably seem like, aha, we've hit the jackpot. We don't even need to rely on testing. We could sell these kinds of tools which use algorithms and use census data. In order to tell colleges, the students that they want to admit instead of having to worry about whether the SAT is popular or, you know, or helpful.
- [36:37]
Christine Rosen
Now it's. The other component of this too is Educational Testing Service, which is a separate non profit, but also completely in bed with, with the College Board because they contract them to develop the test. I once did a, I was, I did some reporting on how ETS develops the AP History exam. And it was the thing I thought I'd go in and, you know, see if they had any political debates about the kinds of questions they could ask how they changed the test. But the only thing I came away from it with is just what a massive bureaucracy this is and how much investment both by high schools and by parents and by obviously academic administrators in higher education have in these massive bureaucracies. And to get an answer required me signing all kinds of papers that I can do this. I couldn't say this. I couldn't see this. It is, it's, it's politburo level of kind of opacity. And that was, was probably 10, 12 years ago. So that, like that. I think parents actually have a role here in demanding some transparency from these institutions. And with Trump putting pressure on them, now would be the time to do that.
- [37:42]
John Podhoretz
But the power imbalance is astounding.
- [37:45]
Christine Rosen
Yes.
- [37:45]
John Podhoretz
Right. You are a supplicant when you enter the pool of, or your kid. You with your kid, you enter the pool of possible admit people admitted to university in any given year. You are a supplicant. You don't want to piss anybody off. You don't want to get the admissions office mad at you because you say, I'd really like to see X, Y or Z. Then you figure, okay, there's going to be a big, someone's going to take a Sharpie and put a big X right through your kid's application. You don't want to say anything to your high school guidance counselor about how this is going to work, because then you're a troublemaking family and who knows what the letters that have to come.
- [38:29]
Christine Rosen
From the school, okay, so I'll be the troublemaker. Once your kids get in, you should become a troublemaking parent.
- [38:35]
John Podhoretz
That's my argument exactly right. But on the other, nobody has an incentive to do that afterwards because you got, you just went through this hellish process and you would rather put it in the rearview mirror and never see it again. So there is a conspiracy against the parents in which we are supplicating these institutions to which we are about to transfer yeah.
- [38:59]
Christine Rosen
Who then mug us for a lot of money.
- [39:01]
John Podhoretz
Could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And you're like, it's like if you went to buy a car and they're like, no, you don't get to know what the engine's like. No. You don't get to know what the chassis was made of. No. You don't get to know how this car performs on the road compared to other cars. Cars. And if you ask, don't worry, you're not getting in here anyway, so you're not going to be able to drive this car. So that's. It is a very peculiar power imbalance that there is no parallel to in American life.
- [39:31]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
I think that's one reason that the ACT has actually become more popular. You know, a lot of us like who grew up in the Northeast, nobody around here ever took the act. When I was growing up, it was much more of a Midwest thing. But the, you know, the act, I think, you know, their leadership has made clear that I think they are more transparent about the kind of tests they've been, and I think they're pretty consistent about the kind of tests they've been. But they're also like really interested in helping schools find out which kids will succeed. And so they have done a lot to sort of figure out what kinds of scores on the different part of the ACT you would need in order to do well at a particular, in a particular major or at a particular kind of school. And I think they're even really getting into a more kind of skills based, you know, even for kids who are not going to a four year college who are interested in going into, you know, vocational education or something like that. You know, they're trying to expand this and they're, you know, their audience beyond just the elites. And I think they are more transparent. And I think that, you know, I talked to, for the last piece, I talked to a bunch of different tutors and folks sort of in this world who said that more and more kids and families are sort of attracted to the act. For a lot of these reasons.
- [40:52]
John Podhoretz
I had this experience. You said you had the pre and post Hobbs decision experience of how schools were handling it. I had a daughter who went through the college admissions process during COVID And so we did these tours of campuses where you could literally not go inside a building. So you had no idea what, what the dorm room was like, what the library was like, what the classrooms are like, what it was like you could only be outside. So that was a interest that was interesting. Because like, that's like, no, you don't even get to see what it looks like in here. And then I had a daughter last year after, after, after Dobbs. So the big distinction was that even in 2021, I guess, when I was touring around with my, my older daughter, and you go to these liberal arts schools and various other places and they're talking about George Floyd, they're talking about Black Lives Matter, they're talking about, you know what, what social justice and stuff like that. But it's still a kind of intellectual framework. What I found last year was you go to these colleges, they can't talk about diversity anymore in the same way. And they're not going to talk about, it's four years after George Floyd, so they're not going to talk about, about some of that stuff now. They talk about jobs. We are going to get your kid a job after college. Don't you worry. You know how many kids, 93% of our kids get jobs after they graduate. That's the number. 94%, 92%. All. What is missing, what was missing then, what's missing now, and what is astounding to me me is they don't say, you are sending your kid to my school. And I'm talking here about, you know, elite schools. Not I, I, we didn't apply to any. I mean, state schools weren't really in the picture for us, for example. Not that state schools aren't elite. I mean that they have a, they have a different model. No one's saying when your child leaves here, your child will be an educated person who will understand, as we said in the ad, as being the show, the fundamentals of American civilization. You know, the nature of what it means to be human, what it means to be an educated person.
- [43:17]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Yeah.
- [43:17]
John Podhoretz
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- [45:21]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Well, you have to go to, you have to go to a religious school. I'll tell you the one school that stood out. And I went to this school for both of my kids, Boston College, because they still actually sort of have like a Catholic mission, even if it's watered down in various ways. But both of my kids walked out of that presentation thinking like, oh, I understand what this school is for. And I think it's very hard, as you say, for other schools to do that. They're trying to be all things to all people or nothing to anyone really. But the religious schools still have a little bit of that mission. And I just want to add one other kind of funny thing that they're adding to substitute for the diversity is they like to talk to you about every extracurricular activity that they have under the sun. Three different schools mentioned to us that they had a cheese club club. Did you get that?
- [46:15]
John Podhoretz
My daughter was obsessed with the cheese club. The cheese club must be an algorithm club.
- [46:23]
Christine Rosen
Can I, can I add one, can.
- [46:24]
John Podhoretz
I add one other thing when I was 19? Go ahead.
- [46:28]
Christine Rosen
I'm sorry, I, I do want to push back a little bit because we are largely talking about elite colleges here. And I will say that the discussion of jobs. I never took a college campus tour in my life, but when I and I went to a huge, huge, pretty mediocre at the time State University on a scholarship. And when I, and I was known by my Social Security number, no one knew my name until like my very last year when I became a history major. But you would go into the, into these classes and they were all about the practical efficiency of why you were there. You were, you knew you got to get through this system. So you have a degree and then you go out into the world and get a job is very, not exactly consumer oriented because there weren't any perks. But it was, you are here for a reason. We're not going to coddle you in any way, shape or form if you, you know, you had to do everything on your own, but you could still get a good education and you needed that to move forward. So I think for a lot of people who still want their kids to get a college degree, and that is also changing because I think AI has really created even further ruptures and whether, you know, kind of basic white collar work needs a college degree, but that's a separate question. But that idea of being a consumer of a service has been something that a lot of people have criticized for years. But returning to that instead of this whole kind of, of ridiculous diversity is our strength, you know, BS might actually be a first step towards getting away from that. But we still need that educated person problem.
- [47:52]
John Podhoretz
I absolutely and totally agree with you. Like, I found it refreshing that they said, okay, it's kind of like, let's drop all the crap.
- [48:02]
Christine Rosen
Okay, exactly.
- [48:03]
John Podhoretz
You're going to come here and pass a lot of money and you don't want your kid moving back in your house and living in the basement because they can't get a job. Our focus is in preparing them for adulthood. That was once at the elite level about being an educated person because it was presumed they would find employment and be so that they would have a leg up in the elites because they knew more than other people did and they were more exposed to ideas and things like whatever, whatever you want to call it. And I am here talking largely about liberal arts schools anyway, which aren't supposed to be practical per se, but they're like, no, no, no, we're now about jobs. You know why? Because we're. You're spending a huge amount of money and we're going to promise you that your kid will be employable when your kid gets out of school. And it's not that they're going to like get a major in batik weaving and, you know, or basket weaving or boutique making and then they won't know, but here's what the hell to do. But, but here's the other part of this, which is that even if you, you know, you. You crack down on the diversity in admissions for liberal arts schools to talk about what your child would be educated in, it's in the diversity gobbledygook. I mean, that is what they would be, you know, laying out for you. Right?
- [49:26]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Well, the other. I think the other thing to think about here is that when the colleges talk about this, your kid is going to get a job. Are very explicit about their alumni networks and how thick and helpful their alumni networks are. And in some sense, I think this is sort of the acknowledgement of what we are really providing when we say we want to serve underprivileged kids, whatever race they are, and we want to sort of bring them to this school. It's not that we want to give them this knowledge necessarily, or that we even think that they're necessarily qualified to get all the knowledge we're giving. We're just sort of letting them into our club so that they can get a job afterwards. And I almost feel like this is sort of the. This has become the bottom line now. Everybody just can acknowledge that this is a school where you're gonna meet lots of other people who are gonna get good jobs and are powerful and know other people who are powerful and they're gonna be able to get you a job. And, you know, we can dispense with the rest of this nonsense, I guess.
- [50:26]
John Podhoretz
And I, again, I'm bizarrely sympathetic to that. That idea in the sense that if the idea is that you go to university and it means that you get a key that unlocks the door to the middle or upper middle class, either you need that key even if you're in the upper middle class, because you can only stay in it at a certain income level. So you. You need a key. Key. If you're not from the upper middle class or an educated background, you need a key simply to get in the door so that you can learn what the rules, regulations, norms, mores are of being a person who can survive and thrive in a very different atmosphere. Like, that's the immigrant Jewish experience of what my father wrote about in his remarkable book, Making it what it was like to rise from being the son of a milkman into being a member of the intellectual elite in the United States and what that journey was and how his presumptions and expectations as a poor kid with parents who didn't even speak English totally fluently had to learn and be in order to make his way. So I'm sympathetic to, to all of this, including the job stuff. I think it's interesting that schools now, 40 years after, 45 years after I graduated from college, are not interested in telling people that their purpose is to create a class of educated Americans. They do not think it is their purpose, they do not feel it is their purpose, it is not their purpose. And they are therefore now much more practical. Their purpose became diversity, their purpose became social justice. Now their purpose more vocationally would be give us the money and we'll be an employment agency for you. And maybe after 10 years that employment, that money you spent will pay off, you'll pay off your debt and then your kid will make enough money. That money you could have just given to that and said, here, maybe buy a, you know, Arby's franchise and then maybe you can make a living instead of going to college will pay off. But the inestimable. But the, but the, what do you call it, sort of like the abstract virtues of being a university educated person are no longer part of the writ of the university in America, as far as I can tell.
- [53:08]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
But once you start thinking about it that way, you realize, just to get back to our earlier conversation, how much of a problem affirmative action has become, which is to say, if you, your goal for, let's say, you know, a black kid from the South Bronx is to make sure that they are able to get a good paying job and step into the middle class, you want them to go to a school where they could major in something that is, you know, practical or something that they want to major in and succeed at that. And what all these studies show is that black kids who end up going to schools where their SAT scores are too low, many of them, them who start out in STEM fields, engineering, all of these things that will get them well paying jobs, then end up having to either drop out or switch into majors that are not going to be as well paying. Whereas if they went to a school that matched where they were academically, they would actually have quite a bit of success. And it turns out that when you look at the salary differential between like a mechanical engineer who went to an elite school and a mechanical engineer who went to, let's say a lower down state school, the differential is not there. So all you've done is prevent that kid from reaching the middle class and.
- [54:21]
John Podhoretz
Conceivably create a moral, spiritual and personal crisis in which they are made to feel lesser than if the whole purpose here is to Create a more egalitarian society in which people should not feel as though they are judged by their skin color or by the socioeconomic nature of their upbringing bringing you, you reinforce. This system has created the perverse incentive of reinforcing it and deepening it and making them feel war, feel less self esteem, more, more self loathing, more sense that they are unequal to the challenge of being one of these people. It's a terrible burden. It's like, it's like again to tell, to get solipsistic. I went to the University of Chicago in the late 70s. It was very easy to get into the University of Chicago because it was in a really bad neighborhood, it did not have good pr. People didn't really know much about it. And so they kind of thought it was a state school or whatever. And so kids from downstate Illinois went to the University of Chicago. It had like a 35, 40% acceptance rate, but it was really, really, really hard once you got there. It was two years of a common Core and you had to do bio and math and physics and like, and read Aristotle and Thucydides and God knows what else. And I watched as these kids who were pretty good high school students in rural schools, let's say, or you know, sort of downstate Illinois schools found themselves in torment because yeah, they got in, but that's just the beginning. And the school did not lower in its standards for them. Maybe it should have. I mean, in other words, if you're going to, if you're going to do this to somebody, maybe you make it. And they do this now in colleges. They have these, they have these weird introductory courses. They're called connections or they're called advisories or something like that, at which they gently teach the people who have never written an essay in high school how to write an essay before. They actually have to write essays in classes later on or something.
- [56:30]
Christine Rosen
This is actually, Can I just. I just want to say this is a remedial education, as at the college level and even now at law schools and other programs. Graduate level is becoming a larger and larger share of what these campuses are finding themselves having to do. And that's a huge. It's a lot of resources for them. But it's also, I think for the kids, you're right, that it starts them out on a sense of like, I really wasn't prepared. The flip side of this, obviously with affirmative action is it also calls into question the remarkably talented non white people who did get in on their own merits. Their merit is also undermined by affirmative action. And we don't talk about that enough. But the veil of suspicion that affirmative action policy casts on all of those people is also bad. That's. That's the other part of it.
- [57:17]
John Podhoretz
So it's all bad.
- [57:18]
Naomi Schaefer Riley
It's all bad.
- [57:20]
John Podhoretz
There's not much. And we should point out a couple of things. In the last 24 hours, the judge in Boston, Allison Burrows, found that Donald Trump's effort, cancellation of Harvard's federal grants and things like that was. They can't do it. I don't even know. I don't even know if she said it was unconstitutional. It's like, no, because if you did.
- [57:49]
Christine Rosen
Say it was a violation of Harvard's constitutional.
- [57:51]
John Podhoretz
Harvard's constitutional rights. Right, okay, so this is Allison Burroughs. This is a person, by the way, who found that Harvard's affirmative action policies were constitutional and was overturned by the Supreme Court. So my presumption is that she is the. She is the judge. You shop, if you're Harvard, you go Alison Burrow shopping, because she's gonna find for you. Because when you open the door to her chambers, you know, there is a poster of Love Story and, you know, a copy of, you know, one L and every. And, you know, a Harvard banner, a Harvard. What do you call those pennant and all of that. That's what she. That's what her stuff reads like, how dare you criticize Harvard? You know, something like that. But, so Harvard is now in a stronger position as it battles. As it battles the Trump administration. Columbia, of course, which ceded to the Trump administration and made all these deals and rules. Rules. Guess what? Turns out that they appointed as someone to oversee their efforts to combat problems, somebody who wrote a. Signed a letter in 2021 and wrote an op ed in 2016 about how Israel was an apartheid state and that, you know, resistance was called for. Uh, his name is Jonathan Khan. I'm now going to landscape him and presume he is a professor at Vassar. I'm going to presume that he is of Jewish origin. And so some idiot at Columbia thought, well, he's Jewish, so he can't say that he might hold views that will be hostile to Jews, whom we are supposed to be protecting from Title 6 violations of their civil rights. So Colombia, having made the deal, has now hired somebody who clearly is somebody who is going to look to figure out ways around. Around that, just as colleges are looking for ways around the affirmative action rulings. And that's where we are as college begins for the class of 2029. So Naomi Riley, it's great to have you. Please read college board gamescommentary.org or if you're a subscriber and have the program print magazine read read read the article because you will see a rare instance in which the as I said in which the exposure of a highly problematic and morally somewhat depraved policy has has been has been reversed by again the exposure of sunlight by by Naomi Riley. Very proud that we did this and that this has happened and if I had a pennant like Allison Burrows that said commentary on it I would hang it up and hold it hold it.
- [60:52]
Christine Rosen
For you but oh that's a new merchandise opportunity.
- [60:54]
John Podhoretz
I'm keeping a list a commentary pennant. Yeah for every for every kid's south as kids as kids go to the south for for for college so thanks again and for Christine and Abe. Matt was obviously not able to sign on to the Internet. I'm John Pothor. It's keep the candle bur.