60 Minutes - 9/2/2018: The Data Miner, The Shooting, The Price of Admission

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Last year, Congressman Steve Scalise was shot when a gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball game. The events of that day brought legislators from BOTH sides of the aisle together. Norah O'Donnell has his story. Lesley Stahl hears from the man who gave the data of millions of Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica. And -- for nearly 20-years -- Bill and Melinda Gates have sent 20-thousand disadvantaged students to college. Scott Pelley talks to some of the students who benefited from the Gates Millennium Scholarship. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side. Or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at

visa.ca slash fintech. He's at the center of the Facebook scandal. Facebook says that you lie to them. And Mark Zuckerberg blamed him for selling the data of millions of unwitting users. People have a right to be very upset. I'm upset that that happened. But not everyone believes Facebook's explanation either. You've got a company that has repeatedly had privacy scandals. You know, if your partner was cheating on you and they cheated on you 15 times and apologized 15 times, at some point you have to say enough is enough. It was just after 7 a.m. on June 14, 2017,

when a team of Republican members of Congress went from shagging balls to dodging bullets. I've been shot. Are you okay? That guy was Congressman Steve Scalise. He'd been hit in the left hip with a bullet from a rifle. He crawled until his arms gave out, and in his first interview, told us what he was thinking on that ball field. You know, the first thing that came to mind, I prayed, God, please don't let my daughter have to walk up the aisle alone.

There's a new kind of affirmative action happening on college campuses, and students from low-income families of all races are the ones who are benefiting. I feel like a lot of our peers knew from the jump how to navigate college. Their parents were like, you need to do this, you need to do this, and a lot of us did not have that privilege. I was having this discussion, and it's like, oh, well, we're going to go to New York for the weekend. Let's all go to New York. It's like, I can't go to New York. I got to stay here. I have to do my job. This is literally my job. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. When does fast grocery delivery

through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Later this week, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are due to testify again on Capitol Hill

on the subject of foreign countries using their platforms to interfere with U.S. elections. It's been a tough few months for Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. In July, the company's valuation dropped $124 billion, the largest single-day plunge in U.S. history. This in the wake of a cascade of disturbing revelations. As we first reported in April, we now know that during years of essentially policing itself, Facebook allowed Russian trolls to buy U.S. election ads, advertisers to discriminate by race, hate groups to spread fake news. And because Facebook shirked privacy concerns, a company called Cambridge Analytica was able to surreptitiously gain access to personal data mined from as many as 87 million Facebook users.

The man who mined that data for Cambridge Analytica is a scientist named Alexander Kogan. He's at the center of the Facebook controversy because he developed an app that harvested data from tens of millions of unwitting Facebook users. The main infraction, the main charge is that you sold the data. So, I mean, at the time, I thought we were doing everything that was correct. You know, I was kind of acting honestly quite naively. I thought we were doing everything okay. Facebook says that you lied to them. That's frustrating to hear, to be honest. If I had any inkling that what we were going to do was going to destroy my relationship with Facebook, I would have never done it. If I had any inkling that I was going to cause people to be upset, I would have never done it.

This was the blindness we had back then. For someone implicated in the biggest privacy scandal on earth, Kogan seems incongruously guileless. Before all this happened, what was your job and what was your field of study? So I was a social psychologist. I was working as a university lecturer at the University of Cambridge. In England? In England. And I ran this lab that studied happiness and kindness.

Happiness and kindness. Yeah. That's a far cry from the adjectives lobbed at him now. Sinister and unethical. Here's what he did. He asked Facebook users to take a survey he designed from which he built psychological profiles meant to predict their behavior. He failed to disclose, one, that what he was really after was access to their friends, tens of

millions of people he could not otherwise reach easily, and two, that he was doing the survey for Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used the material to influence people on how to vote. The company's then-CEO bragged about their prediction models on stage. By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey, we were The company's then-CEO bragged about their prediction models on stage. By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey, we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America. Did you get to the point where you were predicting personalities?

And you gave that to Cambridge Analytica? Correct. What did you think they were going to use it for? I knew it was going to be for elections, and I had an understanding or a feeling that it was going to be for the Republican side. As political consultants, Cambridge Analytica was hired by campaigns to analyze voters and target them with ads.

In the 2016 presidential election, Cambridge Analytica worked first for the Ted Cruz campaign, then later for Donald Trump, though his campaign says they didn't use the Kogan data. The Republican benefactors Robert and Rebecca Mercer were Cambridge Analytica's financial backers. Steve Bannon was on the board. So did you ever meet or hear about Steve Bannon at Cambridge Analytica? No. The Mercers? Nope. Jared Kushner? Nope. Nothing. And those names would not even have like rung a bell for me, to be honest. Tell us what you did. So I create this app where people sign up to do a study. And when they sign up to do the study, we would give them a survey. And in the survey, we would have just this Facebook login study. And when they sign up to do the study, we would give them a survey.

And in the survey, we would have just this Facebook login button. And they would click the button, authorize us, we'd get their data. Authorize us to do what? To collect certain data. We would collect things like their location, their gender, their birthday, their page likes, and similar information for their friends. And all of this was... But did you say you collected information on their friends? We did. But they didn't opt in. So they didn't opt in explicitly. No, no, no. They didn't opt in, period. They did. The friends did not opt

in. And that's part of the... And it seems crazy now, but this was a core feature of the Facebook platform for years. This was not a special permission you had to get. This was just something that was available to anybody who wanted it it who was a developer. How many apps do you think there are? How many developers who did what you did?

Tens of thousands. Tens of thousands? Tens of thousands. And Facebook obviously was aware. Of course. It was a feature, not a bug. The feature was called Friend Permissions, which Sandy Parakilis, who used to work at Facebook, explains. The way it works is, if you're using an app, and I'm your friend,

the app can say, hey, Leslie, we want to get your data for use in this app, and we also want to get your friend's data. If you say, I will allow that, then the app gets my data, too. What you're saying is, I give permission for the friend. The friend doesn't give permission. Right. It doesn't feel right when you say it out loud. No, it doesn't feel right.

Right. Facebook should have been aware of how this could be abused, because they were repeatedly warned, including by Parakeelis, who used to be a manager in charge of protecting data at the company. He says he raised concerns years before Kogan built his app. I think they didn't want to know. You know, the impression that I got working there is... They didn't want the public to know.

Well, they didn't want to know, in the sense that if they didn't know, then they could say they didn't know and they weren't liable. Whereas if they knew, they would actually have to do something about it. And one of the things that I was concerned about was that applications or developers of applications would receive all of this Facebook data and that once they received it, there was no insight. Facebook had no control or view over what they were doing with the data. received it, there was no insight. Facebook had no control or view over what they were doing with the data. Once the data left Facebook, did Facebook have any real way to find out what

happened to it? No. Or was it just gone? It was gone. Wow. They could put it on a hard drive and they could hide it in the closet. Would you say then policing this was pretty impossible? It was very frustrating. Did you bring this to the attention of the higher-ups, the executives? Yeah, a number of folks, including several executives. So were the executives' hair on fire? Did they say, oh, my God, we have to fix this, we have to do something? I didn't really see any traction in terms of making changes to protect people. They didn't prioritize it, I think is how I would phrase it.

So would you say that they didn't prioritize privacy? Yes. I would say that they prioritized the growth of users, the growth in the data they could collect, and their ability to monetize that through advertising. That's what they prioritized because those were the metrics and are the metrics that the stock market cares about. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned down our request for an interview. Eventually the company did change its policy so app developers can no longer gather data from users' friends without their consent.

Facebook's years of failing to protect users' privacy by allowing covert harvesting of so much personal data became the center of congressional hearings this past April. In his defense, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed the finger at one particular app developer. If a developer who people gave their information to, in this case Alexander Kogan, then goes and in violation of his agreement with us, sells the data to Cambridge Analytica, that's a big issue. I think people have a right to be very upset. I'm upset that that happened.

You're a villain in many eyes. The guy who stole data from Facebook and then sold it. The idea that we stole the data, I think, is technically incorrect. I mean, they created these great tools for developers to collect the data, and they made it very easy. I mean, this is not a hack. This was, here's the door, it's open, we're giving away the groceries, please collect them.

Your point, though, I think, is that they're singling you out. I think there's utility to trying to tell the narrative that this is a special case, that I was a rogue app and this was really unusual. Because if the truth is told that this is pretty usual and normal, it's a much bigger problem. And he says he wasn't hiding anything from Facebook. When Alexander Kogan built his app, he posted its terms of service. That's what users agree to when they download an app. His terms of service said this, if you click OK, you permit us to disseminate, transfer, or sell your data,

even though it was in direct conflict with Facebook's developer policy. It says plainly in the developer policy, clearly, that you are not allowed to transfer or sell data. It says that. Come on, this was as clear as can be. I understand that now. You didn't understand that then? I'm not even sure if I read the developer policy back then.

He says that nobody read these privacy sign-offs. Not him, not the users who signed on, not Facebook. This is the frustrating bit, where Facebook clearly has never cared. I mean, they've never enforced this agreement. And they tell you that they can monitor it, and they can audit, and they can check, and they'll let you know if you do anything wrong. I had a terms of service that was up there for a year and a half

that said I could transfer and sell the data. Never heard a word. The belief in Silicon Valley, and certainly our belief at that point, was that the general public must be aware that their data is being sold and shared and used to advertise to them. And nobody cares. Facebook did shut down his app, but only after it was exposed in the press in 2015. The company didn't start notifying the tens of millions of users whose data had been scraped until years later. And they didn't take any action against this man, Joseph Chancellor, who was Kogan's co-worker.

And where is he today? He works at Facebook. Wait a minute. Did he have anything to do with the study you did for Cambridge Analytica? Yeah, I mean, we did everything together. So they've come after you, but not someone who did exactly what you did for Cambridge Analytica? Yeah. I mean, we did everything together. So they've come after you, but not someone who did exactly what you did with you.

Yes. And he actually works at Facebook? Correct. Are you on Facebook? No. They deleted my account. You can't be on Facebook. You're banned. I'm banned. And the partner works for them. Correct. What's wrong with this picture?

I'm missing something. Yeah, I mean, this is my frustration with all this, where I had a pretty good relationship with Facebook for years. Really? So they knew who you were? Yeah. I visited their campus many times. They had hired my students,

and I even did a consulting project with Facebook in November of 2015. And what I was teaching them was lessons I learned from working with this data set that we had collected for Cambridge Analytica. So I was explaining like, here's kind of what we did and here's what we learned. And here's how you could apply it internally to help you with surveys and survey predictions and things like that. Facebook confirmed that Kogan had done research and consulting with the company in 2013 and 2015. But in a statement told 60 Minutes, at no point during these two years

was Facebook aware of Kogan's activities with Cambridge Analytica. Kogan has testified before the U.S. Senate and British Parliament. He says he's financially ruined and discredited. Through his ordeal, he says he's come to see the error in the assumptions made by the tech world about Americans' attitudes toward privacy.

Now we all know what you did. Was it right? Back then, we thought it was fine. Right now, my opinion has really been changed, and has been changed in particular because I think that core idea that we had that everybody knows, nobody cares was fundamentally flawed. And so if that idea is wrong, then what we did was not right and was not wise. And for that, I'm sincerely sorry. It turns out Kogan has something in common with Mark Zuckerberg. They're both suddenly contrite. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.

And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. Mark Zuckerberg says that he cares about privacy now. I think the real problem is not what he feels in his heart. I think the real problem is that you've got a company that has repeatedly had privacy scandals, that has repeatedly shown that it doesn't prioritize privacy over the years. And, you know, when you think about that, it's like, you know, put yourself in the position of, you know, if your partner was cheating on you and they cheated on you 15 times and apologized 15 times, at some point you have to say enough is enough. Like, we need to make some kind of a change here.

After the initial broadcast of this story, Cambridge Analytica announced it was dissolving as a company and Facebook no longer employs Joseph Chancellor. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Congressman Steve Scalise did something last year that's rare in Washington. He brought Democrats and Republicans to their feet to cheer for the same thing. Members of both political parties welcomed him back to Congress with a rousing ovation and with good reason.

On June 14, 2017, he was nearly killed when a gunman armed with a rifle and a 9mm handgun ambushed the Republican Congressional baseball team. In his first interview after the shooting, the extent of his injuries, what physical challenges were in his future, and just how close he came to death. It's a miracle. You know, if you look at what happened that morning, you know, gunmen came out with a lot of artillery, you know, just hell-bent on killing a lot of us. And we're just out there playing baseball, sitting ducks. And he started firing away. If he would have said at the end of this,

the only person that would be dead would be the shooter, nobody would believe it. It was just after 7 a.m. at a suburban ballpark in Alexandria, Virginia, when a team made up of Republican members of Congress went from shagging balls to dodging bullets. That guy's been shot. Is he okay? That guy was Congressman Steve Scalise. He'd been hit in the left hip with a bullet from a rifle. This cell phone video was among the first images of him that day.

The last was him being wheeled on a gurney to a helicopter, clinging to life. He spent most of the next four days unconscious. I found out later just how much damage was done internally. You know, I mean, My femur was shattered. The hip and pelvis had serious damage where the bullet went through and did some damage to areas that had to be shored up with steel plates. And they did a phenomenal job of rebuilding Humpty Dumpty. There was a lot of damage inside that had to get fixed.

They put you back together again. They put me back together again. You're known as a man who loves politics and baseball. Have either of those things changed? Not a bit. You know, I love the job I have as a member of Congress, represented in southeast Louisiana, and I love being the House Majority Whip.

This is morally wrong. As the Majority Whip, Steve Scalise ranks third in the Republican House leadership, usually counts votes, not balls and strikes, unless he's playing second base for the Republicans. And that's where he was at practice the day before the annual congressional baseball game, one of the last bipartisan activities in a polarized Washington. Scalise was fielding balls when he heard what he thought was a tractor backfire. And then he was on the ground. I knew I was shot. Didn't know how bad it was. You know, In a weird way, your body kind of goes numb.

As bad as the wounds were, and obviously I know now how severe it was, at the time, I guess my body had been shutting down a lot of the real pain, and I was just thinking about what was going on at the moment. Did you see the shooter? Never saw the shooter. The shooter was 66-year-old James Hodgkinson. According to the FBI, he'd posted anti-Republican views on social media and had a piece of paper that contained the names of six members of Congress.

We've learned they were all conservative Republicans. Scalise was not on the list, but two of his teammates were. Do you believe you were targeted as a Republican? I think it was clear he had a political agenda, if you want to even call it that. It's a sick, twisted agenda. I don't think he could have been in the right frame of mind, but it was clear what his intentions were. You were shot when you were in second base. You tried to crawl, right?

Well, when I went down, my first instinct was to try to get away from the gunfire. So I started crawling, you know, and that's when my arms gave out. And then what did you do? At that point, I just went in a prayer, and it gave me a calmness. It was a weird calmness while I'm hearing the gunfire. You know, the first thing that came to mind, I prayed, God, please don't let my daughter have to walk up the aisle alone. That was the first thing that came to mind. That was the first thing.

Yeah. And obviously, after that, I prayed that I could see my family again. I could see the fire coming from the barrel of his rifle. When the shooting started, Congressman Brad Wenstrup of Ohio was near the batting cages. He had one eye on an injured Steve Scalise and the other on the shooter. My fear was that he was going to get more people and but I was also encouraged because we knew that we had somebody to return fire. Because of Scalise's detail. Exactly. The Capitol Police that were with him.

Correct. Steve really took a bullet for all of us because if he's not here, he doesn't get hit. But if he's not here, there might be 20 people laying out there. Because he's a member of the leadership, he has security detail. Correct. It wasn't just a shooter at that point. It was literally a shootout going back and forth. And I could hear it. You

know, the sound was as clear as day. I knew what was happening. And it sounded like a lot of shots. Your colleagues that were out there, they knew you were down and they wanted to get to you. But the shots were still going on. Yeah, while the shooting was going on, you know, Mike Conway from Texas was playing first base, and he was able to get right behind the dugout. And he was the closest one to me, and I just kept remembering him whispering, you know, Stevie, don't worry, we're going to get you, we're going to get you. And he just kept whispering, and it was really calming.

You know, I could just sense that the other members were in the dugout waiting. You remember that? So it was over. Yeah. The shootout lasted about 10 minutes, and around 100 shots were exchanged with the gunmen. Five people were injured. The shooting ended when the two Capitol Police officers, joined by three Alexandria police, mortally wounded the shooter. Once I saw him drop, that's when I started running and making my way out to the outfield. So you ran from behind the bathrooms here right through this gate?

Right. To Congressman Scalise? Correct. And several people started running from the dugout, too, once they knew he was down. Steve Scalise was bleeding to death, but his prospects for survival were about to improve. Brad Wenstrup isn't just a congressman, he's also a combat surgeon and a colonel in the Army Reserve. As soon as the gunman was down, the cavalry came pretty quickly. Yeah, it just seemed like a true cavalry.

I mean, you know, I heard the words gunman down and Brad Wenstrup was, you know, immediately right there by my side, starting to actually administer care. As an Iraq veteran, you've dealt with a lot of trauma. Sure. When you saw the wound and you saw that it was essentially what, the hip, and there was no exit wound. How worried were you? I was very worried, actually. It reminded me of a case in Iraq where it didn't have a good ending. Transpelvic gunshot wounds are known for heavy internal bleeding that's very difficult to stop.

Congressman Wenstrup improvised a tourniquet out of a belt. And put pressure on the wound. And then later, tourniquet came. We put on a regular tourniquet. I found a clotting bandage that we put into the dressing as well. And we waited for the helicopter, basically. It's nice to see you again. Nice to see you, sir. Under better circumstances, for sure. Dozens of first responders rushed to the scene. One of them was paramedic Rick Krimmer of the Alexandria Fire Department.

He made the call to get Congressman Scalise onto the next available helicopter and helped load the congressman on board. You know, the only time I really started to worry was when they were getting ready to put me on the helicopter. And to me, it seemed like forever. And I know it was probably just minutes, but I think I told some of the paramedics, don't let me bleed out on this field. I met the pilot of the helicopter later. He said, I flew that bird like I stole it. A seven-minute flight away across the Potomac River, the trauma team at MedStar Washington Hospital was ready. Dr. Jack Sava led the team.

What condition was he in? Well, when he left the trauma unit, he did not have a blood pressure that anybody could find. So that's obviously sort of hovering on the border between life and death. To keep Scalise alive, two minutes after he arrived, they began something called a massive transfusion protocol. Dr. Sava says it's a method of delivering blood that's been improved by hard lessons learned on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The blood bank will just start sending blood in all the right combinations, the blood cells, the platelets, the plasma.

It all comes in a cooler, and a cooler comes every 15 minutes until you call and say stop. How many units of blood did Steve Scalise use in the first day? I think he got roughly 18 to 20 units of blood in the first day. How much blood is that? That's a lot. That's more than you have in your body. Doctors operated to stop the bleeding, then employed imaging technology to find and seal the leaking blood vessels they couldn't get to in normal surgery.

At what point did you think, okay, he's going to make it? I don't know that I ever thought in those terms. I think that there was a point in the first operation when we got some semblance of control when I thought, you know, maybe this guy's got a shot. After 20 days in intensive care and nearly six weeks in the hospital, he was transferred to an inpatient rehabilitation facility. There was plenty of work to do.

We'll stretch the hip flexors and then we'll get up and stand. Since the shooting, he's undergone nine surgeries. A little bit more, that's enough. To stop the bleeding, fight infections Dr. Sava says are common with these kinds of wounds. That's it. And to repair his upper left leg, hip, and pelvis to help him get back on his feet. It's working well. He'd lost 50 pounds and at 51 years old needed to learn how to walk again. Nice job. To start the process, he needed the help of a special machine to hold him up.

It feels a lot better. When he attempted some steps on his own for the first time, his physical therapist, Megan Minzy, was there to make sure he didn't fall. You're basically learning how to walk again. You really are. You have to build the muscles back up. The muscles really deteriorated. And to be able to walk like this, it's got to be psychologically like a real milestone. It feels real good. I mean, you can see the progress.

And it's something we've been trying to do for a long time, and it's nice to finally be there. Yeah. Jennifer Scalise thought so, too. Oh, man. Describe what that meant to you to see your husband on his own walking. It gave me hope. Hope for what? It's hard not, you know, seeing him not be able to do things on his own and walk on his own. So when I saw that, it was just a huge sigh of relief that he can do this.

Like, he's got this. I'm ready to go both. All right, we made it. After three and a half months in two hospitals, on September 28, 2017, Steve Scalise made his return to Capitol Hill and with the help of crutches, walked back into the house and his role as majority whip.

You have no idea how great this feels to be back here at work in the people's house. He says his doctors are optimistic that he'll be able to walk without help and perhaps even run again. But hundreds of pieces of that single bullet will remain inside him for the rest of his life. America, built on the dream of upward mobility, has become a country of deepening divide between rich and poor.

The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. As we first reported in April, major universities, including Princeton, are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status. It began with two of America's wealthiest parents, Bill and Melinda Gates. They spent more than a billion dollars putting low-income minority students through college. But before they tell you what they learned, come meet some of the Gates Millennium Scholars. Imagine having a couple of billionaires walk into your life and make the seemingly impossible possible. That's what Bill and Melinda Gates did for these students at the University of

Central Florida. They're among 20,000 nationwide whose tuition and expenses were paid in full. When you were notified that you received the scholarship, was that a letter, an email, a phone call? How did that come to you? Letter. It came as a letter. Snail mail? Really? I think it was priority. The founder of Microsoft and you got a snail mail acceptance letter.

When you got that letter, what did you think? My mom, she opened my mail, and then that's when she broke the news to me that I got this car. I'm sorry. Nearly 70% of Americans don't have a degree, and Kyra Kelly was destined to be one of them. She grew up in poverty, and even today she wastes nothing, because as a child she often had only one meal a day, the free lunch at school. I guess I never really dreamed of going to college. I just knew I just had to do what I could do to make sure that my family and I could survive.

When you started the scholarship, what were the big questions that you wanted to answer? Well, one was whether a group of minority students could have very high achievement, go to the toughest universities if there was no financial constraint. You assume that minority students would do as well in higher education, but what you were looking for was data, hard facts. You bet. What's proven itself out now with the scholarship programs, you remove that barrier, they not only do as well as their white peers, no matter what zip code they're from,

they often actually do better. The Gates program looked for good students, but not necessarily the top of their class. The results have been remarkable. Nearly 90% of the Gates scholars have earned a degree, and that's life-changing. Because, on average, graduates earn a million dollars more in their lifetimes. Now it's Kyra Kelly who's doing the teaching after earning a bachelor's and master's degree in education with her Gates Scholarship. As college becomes more expensive and student debt rises, what's at stake for America? Well, it's a huge problem. We'll have a two-class society where the richer families are able to support the scholarship, and you'll have an

inner-city, mostly minority group that's no longer going to those elite colleges, and therefore a lot of the high-paying professions are out of their reach. So that's really bad at an individual level. It's also very bad for the country and our basic founding credo of equal opportunity and our economic strength. Bill Gates's warning echoes on the quad of Princeton University. We have to be a place where people can come together from lots of different backgrounds. President Christopher Eisgruber is leading the nearly 300-year-old school through a radical transformation. You know, the 20th century activist Upton Sinclair described Princeton as, quote, the most perfect school for snobbery in America. We look back and we see those kinds of quotations about us,

and we have been working to produce a very different Princeton. And this commitment we have to be a real leader on socioeconomic diversity is a big part of taking the next step for us and making the right kind of difference in the world. To make his point, Eisgruber showed us yearbooks going back 100 years. This one's from way back in 1915. And you can see, obviously, we're all male and we're all white. 68 years later, Eisgruber graduated from Princeton. So we've run the clock forward pretty rapidly. Now we have women. Now we have women. And here's an African-American

student. But only occasionally in 1983. Over the next 30 years, minority representation more than doubled to 40%. But it wasn't enough. 60% of its students were still from the top 10% income bracket. So Princeton decided to start recruiting students based on socioeconomic status. We realized we had to train our readers in the admissions office to look for different things in these applications. A kid who's working two jobs to help bring money home and achieving great grades isn't going to have the same kind of extracurriculars as a kid from an elite private school in New York.

But if two applicants with the same test scores, the same GPA apply, are you going to prefer the first-generation low-income student? We do think those students supply something special on this campus, so yes, we're looking for that. It's a new kind of affirmative action, it sounds like. Yes, it's a new way of making sure that we have the diversity on our campus to deliver on the kind of education that we care about and that the world needs. Last fall, we met some of Princeton's chosen ones. Toyin, Mason, Kelton, Jackson, and Jalen are first in their family to go to college.

With Chris and Tyler, they're considered low income. At Princeton, that means household income of less than $65,000 a year. Be honest, how many of you stepped onto the Princeton campus for the first time and thought to yourselves, I may not make it? Almost immediately, like two seconds in, there it was. What intimidated you? The school looked like Hogwarts. It's true.

And I had never been in an institution that looked so expensive and old in my life. It just seemed like everyone was so much more capable, and it made me feel very small. But Jalen figures she's part of a new community, the Flies, that's short for first-generation low-income. You're sitting here wearing a Fly is fly t-shirt. What does the shirt mean? So fly is fly is a campaign educating Princeton students on the resources available to first-generation low-income students and also working to destigmatize this sort of first-generation low-income low socioeconomic status. Princeton helps these students succeed with summer

programs and seminars on public speaking, resume writing, and networking. We really want to develop your fluency in what's essentially relationship building, right? I feel like a lot of our peers knew from the jump how to navigate college. Their parents were like, you need to do this, you need to do this, and a lot of us did not have that privilege. Then it felt like they already had a leg up and that we're struggling to catch up. I was having this discussion and it's like, oh, well, we're going to go to New York for the weekend.

Let's all go to New York. It's like, I can't go to New York. I got to stay here. I have to do my job. This is literally my job. Last year, 28% of Princeton's freshmen were first-generation or low-income. 60% of the student body received financial aid. Your student body isn't infinite by accepting some of these first-generation, low-income students.

You must be turning down some highly qualified kids, maybe kids who have Princeton in their family history. Scott, one of the things that is so tough about our admission situation right now is we're turning down 93.5% of the kids who apply. So as we've taken up our low-income students who are still underrepresented in our population, we've had to make other tough choices about other students. Is this idea of bringing up the lower socioeconomic class into higher education a movement in this country? I think it is a movement right now, at least among college and university presidents.

I think there's a recognition that in this country right now, some of the divisions that we need to heal are around economic class, and we need to be paying attention to that. Among those paying attention are the presidents of some of the largest public universities. In 2013, backed by the Gates Foundation, they formed the University Innovation Alliance, headed by Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. Within each school, what's worked and what hasn't worked? In four years, Alliance schools have increased low-income student graduation by nearly 30%. How did you do it? We did it basically by innovating our culture.

We changed our culture from faculty centrism, that is we're there for the faculty, to student centrism, we're there for the success of the students. Now that might sound like we should have been doing that all along, but the academic culture is often built around the academic as opposed to being built around the student. They've lowered tuition costs by making it easier for students to transfer from community college and by increasing online learning so students can both work and stay in school. Bill, we've talked a lot about the needs of the students, but what are the country's needs going forward in terms of a workforce and education? Well, the economy is constantly changing,

and automation is taking away a lot of the jobs that you could do with only a high school degree. And so if we look at the current trajectory of how many kids are going to college, we're going to fall over 10 million jobs short of being able to fulfill the demand. Also, as we're competing with countries, China and many others, they will get ahead if their education level gets beyond ours. And so it's great for the individual, but it's also important for the strength of this country. A country that, if their dreams come true, can expect from these low-income students a future lawyer, entrepreneur, president, and professor.

What do you think the class of 1970 would think of this group? lawyer, entrepreneur, president, and professor. What do you think the class of 1970 would think of this group? Diverse. They wouldn't be able to believe that you were at Princeton, their Princeton. I hope they wouldn't think it's their Princeton. It's kind of like our Princeton now. Like that's the good thing about it is like we're so diverse and like that's the best thing about this whole change that's happening.