Interview with EM, History 150 Spring 2021, Conducted by Anthony Lawson, March 13, 2021.
Introduction to Interview
This is a recorded interview with EM, a journalist who has covered national and international higher education for roughly 20 years. At the time of this interview (March 2021), college prices have risen higher than ever before. Higher education has also adjusted to deal with the added difficulties of virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. College life in the United States has also adjusted to the political divide that has swept the nation following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In this interview, EM first discusses her own experiences with getting started as a journalist. EM then discusses numerous aspects of higher education: First, the role that it plays in the United States. Higher education is often a gateway to opportunity, but not everybody understands its significance in more poor, rural areas. Next, EM discusses the role that it plays internationally. The dynamic of higher education in other parts of the world can vary significantly, as the capitalist, commercial college experience that is normal in the US is not present in many other countries. Additionally, EM discusses changes to higher education in the past 20 years, the role of higher education in politics in the United States, and the way that higher education has adapted to a pandemic. Higher education is a keystone piece to a functional society, and EM conveys that through her discussion of the role of higher education in many different categories of social change.
Biography: EM is a senior writer for a publication that writes on higher education. She has been with her current publication since 1999 and has written about many different parts of higher education, such as campus culture, scholars’ influence on public policy, and the challenges facing religious colleges. She has been a finalist in (2015) and a winner of (2009) the Education Writers Association’s National Awards for Education Reporting.
Anthony Lawson 0:00
Okay, I think it’s recording. Alright, so thank you for doing this interview. The first question relating to your job is: When you first began reporting on higher education, what sort of questions did you have? Like what did you hope to uncover?
EM 0:17
So, I first became a higher education reporter in this town in North Carolina called Greensboro. And it was a small city, but they had five different colleges there, so they kind of had a disproportionate impact on the community. There was a large state school- there were two large state schools. One was a historically black school. And there were three smaller colleges, including a women’s college (it was historically black). And Greensboro, that was a sight of one of the first sit-ins in the civil rights movement. So you had two black colleges in this pretty diverse city, and both had a lot of history to them– because the people who were involved in the sit-in and were students at North Carolina A&T, which was a black university. So that’s all historical stuff but obviously, a lot of that still resonated when I was there in the 90s. There were still a lot of issues around race, and equality, and access to higher education, like, “Who goes to college?” and “Who gets into college?”, “What do they study when they’re in college?” How are they perceived, and you know, “How is education valued?”
I was also interested in how the universities themselves were kind of like economic engines in the community if that makes sense. I mean, they employed a lot of people– a lot of people came to Greensboro to study or work there. So I really wanted to understand these colleges and the role that they played in this one community.
Anthony Lawson 1:54
And how did that transition to when you changed locations and continued reporting on that stuff until today?
EM 2:03
Yeah, so then my next job (and the job I still have today) was to write for a national publication that covers higher education nationally- and at the time internationally. So all of a sudden, I went from being a local higher-ed reporter to being a national and international higher education reporter, because one of my beats, when I started, was international education. So all of a sudden, it’s like I had the whole world to cover, which was kind of daunting, but also pretty cool.
And at least in the early years, when I was an international reporter I got to travel to all these different countries and understand their higher education systems. And, I guess people think about it more and more now because of all of the social justice and racial justice issues that we’ve been talking about. And maybe we can talk about this in a minute, but just like the role of higher education in society- back then, to see this in other countries, it was really visible because a very small percentage of people in most countries in the world even get a college education. So it really is like a stepping stone to a better life, better jobs, more money, and a better life for your family.
But higher education is also a lot of times a target. And if you think about it, anytime there’s a country that has political turmoil, higher education is often one of the first things that’s targeted. It sounds really weird, but if you look at Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even China in a way, professors are often seen as a threat to the system, because they question everything, and because they’re probably more secular than a lot of people in the rest of the country. And they’re (obviously) clearly more educated than most of the people in the country.
So (I didn’t write the story myself, because I’d become an editor by this point), but one of the most powerful stories we ran was how Iraq’s higher education system during the war was basically near collapse. And in the 70s and 80s, at least until sanctions kicked in, they actually had one of the strongest higher education systems in the world, and they would send thousands of people abroad to study and get their PhDs and go back to Iraq. But then, with all the sanctions and the war and the fighting, you know- people were being murdered- the universities were being taken over by soldiers, and people were being thrown in jail or they just fled the country. And you can even see that today in a country like China, where university professors, if they speak out against the government, are often silenced. Sometimes they’re jailed. So I think I thought a lot about it. And I either wrote or edited a lot of stories that had to do with the really powerful role that higher education plays in social and political change in virtually any country in the world.
Anthony Lawson 5:18
Interesting. And do you have one single story that you covered that has the most relation to social change or inequality or anything like that?
EM 5:29
No, I mean, I was thinking about that question. And I could answer it a bunch of different ways. But no, I haven’t done any one story that I think like really rocked the world. And depending on what you want to talk about, like, you know, we could talk about some of the international stuff, but I was thinking too, about how after Donald Trump was elected, I think obviously a lot of people were stunned by his election, but I think a lot of people in higher education were particularly stunned because they couldn’t understand what was going on there.
And so I went to- after he was elected- I went to Terre Haute, Indiana, which is in Vigo county. And Vigo county has successfully (since like the 1800s) picked who the next president of the United States would be. And sure enough, Vigo county went for Trump. And so I went to this place that was pretty desperately poor, to try to understand why people there would vote for Donald Trump and to see what role higher education played in that county. And one of the things that I said in the story that I wrote was, a lot of times Trump supporters in particular, and Republicans in general, tend to be very suspicious of higher education these days. They tend to think of it as elitist and very liberal. But in places like Terre Haute, where you have Indiana State University, and you have some community colleges- they’re not islands of privilege, they’re actually lifeboats for people who live in that county. Only, like one out of five people even had a college degree in Vigo county. Manufacturing had just kind of abandoned the county and people were working at Walmart if they were working at all. Opioid addiction had kind of had run roughshod through the county, and there’s just a lot of poverty and a lot of struggle. And to get to Ivy Tech Community College or to get to Indiana State was kind of a big deal for a lot of students. And I met a lot of these students, I mean, people whose parents got pregnant when they were teenagers, people who… this one woman whose dad was illiterate and had been in and out of jail. And she went to community college, and then she transferred to Indiana State. And her goal was to be a social worker, so she could help the kind of people from the families that you know, the kind of families that she came from. And I thought a lot about the fact that people who lived there were very aware that they lived in a place of steep decline and kind of lost promise, and that better days were behind them. That their parents and grandparents had better jobs than they had. They had factory jobs and these people were working at Long John Silver, you know. And that’s kind of why they voted for Donald Trump because he said, “I will bring back manufacturing”. And you know, he sort of thumbed his nose at the elite, liberal elite. But when you actually looked at the colleges in that town, they were the best hope for people. And there was this disconnect between why people voted for Donald Trump and, and I think maybe what they actually needed. And I, to me, that was like a really powerful story to report to fully understand what it was like to live in a place like this. And then what role and what the college there was trying to do, because they’ve kind of worked miracles in ways that you would never see, honestly, you know, Harvard or Yale doing because they had, so, so much responsibility, and so few resources.
Anthony Lawson 9:15
And do you think these dynamics of like, in Indiana, like you’re talking about, to what degree were they similar internationally when you were reporting?
EM 9:26
Yeah, so um, I think I think the way in which universities again, are like a ladder to the middle class is universal. All the political stuff, yes. You know, there’s the political dimension, like I said, in countries that are in political turmoil. Higher education is often a political target. Conservatives sort of attack it, and liberals defend it, and I guess you could say that’s what’s happening in the US. But just more broadly, when you think of the role of higher education in any society, it’s usually the place where people can get the kind of education they need to secure a better life for their family and their future children.
So two of the places I did a lot of reporting on or oversaw as an editor, was what was happening (or what has been happening) in India and China. And those two have been historically extremely poor countries. And starting in the 1990s to the 2000s, the government started pumping tons and tons of money into higher education because they understood that if you’re only educating like 20% of your population, you’re never going to become a developed economy. So it was really fascinating. At a time when the US has been disinvesting in higher education that these two countries were just investing- China in particular- billions and billions of dollars and creating new universities and new colleges and pushing more students to go to college. Because of, you know, the potential that held for their countries.
Anthony Lawson 11:13
Interesting. On a more general note, how has college life, or the college dynamic sort of changed since the time that you started reporting on it?
EM 11:25
So I think this’s been a fascinating period of transition. I started reporting on higher education in the 90s. So that’s when millennials were going to college. And at that time, um, that was the beginning of when the cost of college started to spiral out of control. And every year we would be reporting about double-digit tuition increases at all these different colleges across the country, (mainly private colleges), but the conventional wisdom was, “Well don’t worry about it, because college pays for itself”, it doesn’t matter how much debt you have to go into. You get a college degree and that and the money that you make will more than pay off your student loans. And people didn’t really question it.
And that was also a period in which branding and marketing became a big thing. And so you’d see these regional colleges become nationally known, like places like Northeastern, you know because they would just really market very heavily to students. And so then it became like this game, this chase of you know, who’s going to get the most students to apply to your college? And so then you could sort of say, “Oh, we’re a very selective college, we don’t accept more than 10% of our students”. So there’s this race, you know, and it was also perceived that the more you cost, the better you are. So there’s just a crazy arms race amongst colleges to offer more, charge more, get more students to apply.
And then in 2008, the recession hit and everything kind of fell apart. And all of those students who took on tons of debt to get through college and struggled to find jobs were understandably really frustrated. And all those parents who took on all this debt were like, “What just happened?” It was like this big party had just ended and everybody had this huge hangover. And so all of a sudden, well, post-2008 people started really asking (not that they weren’t asking before), “Why does college cost so much?” “Why is it so expensive?” And I should say this doesn’t just fall to the colleges, because the government has been steadily disinvesting in higher education. States are the ones that fund colleges, basically public schools, and they disinvested and disinvested. And it represented this shift that we see now in our culture where higher education is considered a private good, pretty much now moreso than a public good. Back in the 70s, you know, it was dirt cheap to go to UC Berkeley, or UMass or UVA, or Chapel Hill, because the state-funded a good chunk of that. And then through disinvestment, it’s gotten more and more expensive. And the idea that “Well, it’s you who’s benefiting, and you know that the taxpayer shouldn’t have to shoulder it”, not really fully appreciating that a lot of people benefit when more people are educated. But at any rate, those are two of the shifts that I’ve seen.
And as a result, in recent years, you’ve got a lot of people questioning too the value of college, understandably. If it’s costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, what are you getting out of it? And you see, as related to that, fewer and fewer students are studying things like the humanities because they feel like they need to get a very practical education. And students have largely been practical through history, it’s kind of overstating it to say that there used to be a ton of English majors, but they’ve gotten more and more practical and their outlook. And you see a decline in students studying humanities, even in liberal arts colleges and Ivy League colleges, which I think is really interesting.
And then related to that there’s this whole question of fairness and equity. And so you can see this now in a lot of the social justice movements, like “Who gets to go to college? Where are they going to college? Why are there more students at Harvard who are legacies than there are students who are from underrepresented groups?” Right? Like, why is that? “Why are most black students going to open access colleges? Why (again looking at the Ivy’s), why do so many students come from the top 10% or the top 1%?” So all of those changes, social justice, cost, fairness, what people are studying (the value), disinvestment, higher education, those are all things I’ve seen in the 20 or 25 years that I’ve been covering higher education.
Anthony Lawson 15:55
And, of course, since the recession, one of the biggest changes in colleges and universities everywhere has been the pandemic. And I know you’ve been reporting on that as well. How have you seen that affect college and college life?
EM 16:08
Yeah, that’s interesting. So first of all, it’s been financially devastating, right. And that’s going to take not just to families, obviously, but to colleges that have lost millions, if not billions of dollars in tuition and room and board and having to invest millions in online education and health and safety protocols. So you’re seeing a lot of public institutions, and in particular a lot of nonwealthy colleges, just being kind of knocked sideways. That’s going to have a long effect.
I think, to me, the more interesting stuff (because I’m always more interested in cultural stuff) is, when classes moved online, it really started getting people thinking about “What is college?” right, because like I said, there was this growing movement of feeling like, “Oh, if you’re going to go to college, you’re basically just going to get a credential so you can then go out and get a job.” College is a very practical thing., right? It shouldn’t be an indulgence, it should be just, “You’re getting skills that you need to get a job”, but all of a sudden, when college just became a bunch of kinds of online classes, we could see that that’s not really what college is for a lot of people. I think a lot of people started saying, “Well, what does it mean to go to college? What is the college experience?” And there’s just been a lot of conversation about, “Well, it’s more than that.” It’s like, being together in a classroom, it’s being in social groups, it’s talking to your professors, it’s studying abroad, it’s doing internships, it’s doing all this other stuff, it’s hanging out in the dorms. I mean, college is so much more than just the classes that you take. So I think there’s sort of a renewed appreciation for the college experience now that we see how hard it is on students just to learn online and how hard and how hard it is on professors just to teach online.
That said, I think, like I said, because of the economic impact on families and on colleges, I think the college experience itself is probably going to suffer until, you know, the pandemic is fully over and everybody can recover from it.
Anthony Lawson 18:23
And do you think all of these changes with pandemic and before, do you think they’re very similar, like, internationally? Or would you say that these changes are largely specific to just college in the US?
EM 18:37
Probably the pandemic-related stuff is equivalent internationally. I haven’t actually looked at how colleges and other countries are dealing with the pandemic, so I can’t really speak to that in any depth. But I would imagine that if students are all online, all over the world, there’s a similar dynamic. The only thing I would say is, private colleges by and large don’t really exist in other parts of the world. Higher education is mostly funded by government and higher education is still pretty inexpensive in most parts of the world, and whatever is happening here with the privatization of education isn’t really happening in other countries. So that’s good and that’s bad. I mean, if a government is struggling, and it can’t put much money into higher education, that’s it. There’s no private philanthropy or private wealth that can prop it up, really. So in that sense of pandemic might be hurting other countries more than it hurts it here. But I don’t really know beyond that.
Anthony Lawson 19:44
And then jumping into more specifics, because I know you’ve traveled all over doing your reporting: Do you have any one, specific experience (or maybe a couple) – not even necessarily a story you were writing but maybe your travel to a place- that sort of highlighted some social difference between there and the United States that you found interesting?
EM 20:10
I can remember like, small moments that I think, just really hit me kind of hard. I remember going to this really elite University in New Delhi, in India. And I’m walking into an office there, and it was a small office, and they just had like wooden desks, and they had file cabinets – this is just a few years ago- file cabinets, where they kept all this paperwork in drawers. And I thought, “Wow, this is like one of the most elite institutions in the world”, actually, it was internationally known, and they had so few resources that one of their administrative offices was a bunch of desks and a bunch of file cabinets. And I was walking with our correspondents in India, (who was Indian so she really knows the system inside and out) and she would also talk about, you know, you’d go into these rooms, and there would be no working computers. And we would go into the cafeteria, and the students would take their tray and just go down you know, the path, and some lady would just take a spoonful of something and put it on their plate, right. You didn’t have like Chic-Fil-a, you didn’t have all of this stuff. And yeah, higher education was largely paid for by the state. But this, this was, I didn’t think it was sad or anything, I just thought it was amazing that they had so few resources, yet, they turned out some of the most brilliant students in the world.
And like, on the one hand, I wish they had more. But on the other hand, I was thinking they did so much with so little. And I guess if there’s something that I’ve just been thinking about I, it’s just always been in the back of my mind when I would talk to our correspondents in Egypt or, or Brazil, or Afghanistan or all these other places, that these countries often had so much less than we did, but they would still do these amazing things with so few resources because people were just really committed. The students were really committed to getting an education and the professors were really determined to help them. It’s just a really powerful reminder of how much privilege we have in this country, always everywhere. I mean, not everywhere. But you know what I mean, when you think of higher education, we have so much compared to so many other countries. And I, I wish people would appreciate that more.
Anthony Lawson 23:00
Yeah, it’s really interesting how, sort of, commercialized college marketing is in the United States. Like, when you pick a school, (like when I picked JMU) so much of it was about the campus and the dining options. It definitely seems like that dynamic is different in other parts of the world.
EM 23:19
Yeah, do you remember that story that I shared with you about the students in Nepal?
Anthony Lawson 23:23
Not entirely, No.
EM 23:24
Do you remember my co-colleague went to Nepal, and he interviewed students who were trying to get out of Nepal and study abroad, and how hard it was? It was almost like buying a lottery ticket. And parents would send their kids to cities to study with tutors and just study with nonprofits whose job was to help these students earn high enough grades on the tests they needed to take to get into a college in the United States. And these kids would be living in dorms by themselves when they’re 15, 16 years old, studying day and night, so they could get a good score on the SAT or the ACT so they can be one of, you know, one out of a thousand who might get into a college in the United States, because that was the ticket out, right? That was the way that they could make a future for their family and they were willing to sacrifice so much to do that.
Anthony Lawson 24:24
Yeah, that’s really interesting. And then to sort of wrap things up, oftentimes, the higher education aspect of your stories can kind of serve as a background for some sort of broader social issue being covered. Why do you think that is, like why higher education specifically?
EM 24:44
I think it’s because of everything we’re just talking about, about how higher education is a reflection of what we value. Right? It’s you know, what students major in how much people are willing to pay to get in how much the government is willing to invest in it. How professors are viewed, we haven’t even really talked about the culture wars very much. But, you know, the republican conservative culture wars are an indication of like, so much other stuff in society about the liberal elitism, or, you know, free speech, all this other stuff. I mean, so many of these battles, these cultural and economic and social battles are either played out on college campuses, or the college is seen as kind of a test of some of these battles. Do you remember the Varsity Blues scandal? That’s the one where all these families were caught paying bribes to college coaches and others to get their kids into these elite schools. And that story just exploded because it sort of reflected what people thought was wrong with our society and, and with higher education, the fact that you can basically pay your way into the University of Southern California, or Yale, or someplace like that. You know, it just captured the national imagination, like college is not a neutral place for anybody. And so I think when you think about what college is, and what it represents, you could just come up with like, a million different stories about it, which I find fascinating, because it’s like like I said, it’s, it’s an economic engine, right? Like all the research that that goes on there and all the jobs that get created, but it’s also like, it’s, it’s a Social Engine, like we were talking about getting kids out of poverty sometimes and into the middle class, or moving the elite kids into more elite positions in society. It’s you know, political football, it’s like all of this stuff combined.
Anthony Lawson 27:13
And with college being like, as tense of a platform as it is, do you ever have any sort of negative feedback from readers when reporting on all the different issues?
EM 27:24
I don’t only because (my group) is basically a trade publication, which means we are read by the people we report on, you know, so we’re read by professors and administrators, and aside from maybe criticizing a particular story and feeling like maybe something you reported or it wasn’t accurate. But when you look at heard stories, and daily newspapers and stuff, you do see a lot of reader anger over what is written about, you know, whether it’s like transgender rights or, you know, free speech controversy about whether or not conservatives are being shut down on college campuses, or whether or not you know, professors are indoctrinating students. Or again, racial and social justice issues, which are huge now, you see so many people just kind of rallying for and against some of those stories and really, sometimes attacking some of the reporters on social media. I don’t get that though, because that’s not my audience.
Anthony Lawson 28:27
Yeah. Well, I think that’s about everything I had prepared. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
EM 28:34
Let me check my notes. I think I said everything I wanted to say.
Research:
Since the early 2000s, the cost of college has shot up dramatically. The average published price of a 4-year education has more than doubled in the past 50 years. And there are many places to point fingers: The privatization of higher-education, economic turmoil (such as the 2008 recession), and the additional accommodations and accessories that have been tacked-on to what schools provide for their students. And while many of these changes can be seen in higher education across the world, a lot of it is uniquely American. Over time, American “approval” of higher education has dropped. Trust is lost in universities as both costs and controversies increase, with subjects like free speech, student loans, and more being very heavily debated on college campuses. Additionally, the values that people hold relating to higher education are often very split based on political ideology. No subject is left undebated as the right pushes one way and the left pushes another. College campuses play an undeniably large role in the political views that people have, and journalism relating to college life can often go a number of different ways. As I prepared for my interview with EM, I read a number of her articles relating to different forms of social change, and I also looked for some of the biggest possible influences on change in higher education such as the recession and this current pandemic.
Bibliography:
- https://stacker.com/stories/3861/how-college-costs-have-changed-last-50-years#:~:text=The%20costs%20are%20adjusted%20for,2018%2C%20after%20adjusting%20for%20inflation.
- https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/
- And various articles from EM on https://www.chronicle.com
- The photo attached to this interview post was taken from:
- https://www.jmu.edu/creative-media/index.shtml
The interviewee approved the transcript on March 16, 2021. No changes were requested.
This interview was recorded via zoom and transcribed via otter.ai. No technical difficulties were encountered.
This interview was transcribed with otter.ai software. Aside from minor changes to spelling, the transcription process was very simple. EM spoke clearly, and there was never any difficulty revealing the meaning behind any of her words or phrases. In regards to changes recommended by the transcription style guide, I tried to create paragraph breaks at natural-feeling times to avoid run-on chunks. I also made minor edits to the transcript when EM was hesitating on a word or when the software misheard what was said. Overall, I followed the recommended style guide and few edits were necessary.