Revisionist History - Food Fight

Episode Date: July 14, 2016

Bowdoin College and Vassar College are two elite private schools that compete for the same students. But one of those schools is trying hard to address the problem of rich and poor in American society—and paying a high price. The other is making that problem worse—and reaping rewards as a result. To learn more about the topics covered in this episode, visit www.RevisionistHistory.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The first week I arrived, I was met at the back door by local folks who were bringing in flats of blueberries. And it was just, it was remarkable. That's Ken Cardone speaking. He's the executive chef at Bowdoin College in Maine. In the world of American colleges, Chef Cardone's food He's the executive chef at Bowdoin College in Maine. In the world of American colleges, Chef Cardone's food holds a special place. So you've consistently made the top number one spot on the lists of best college food. What are a couple things that you think sets Bowdoin apart? And that's Jacob Smith, one of my producers. He went up to Maine for Revisionist History's first culinary investigation. Can you just describe what we're looking at here?

Directly below us is the salad bar, and you'll notice in the center of the salad bar, there's several prepared salads, entree salads, and then you have your make-your-own areas to the right and left. There's homemade soups and vegan options. There's fresh fruits and desserts. And then you'll see there's condiments and toppings. And we actually make our own peanut butter and bake our own breads. And that's all available at every meal. My guess is your college wasn't like this. Mine certainly wasn't. And as you can see, we always have a vegan and vegetarian item on for our hot soups.

And today, a favorite for lunch is a hot turkey sandwich, an orzo and tofu salad. I worked in my college cafeteria as an undergrad. And just remembering that fact now is bringing the smell of the dining hall wafting back. Grease, disinfectant, aging mayonnaise, cold fried eggs, all in some horrible combination. That was the 1980s. I don't think that anyone properly understood back then how crucial healthy eating was to a positive learning environment.

Bowdoin is in a whole different class. It sounds like paradise. The deli special today is a smashed chickpea, avocado, and pesto sandwich. And we have a farro salad with asparagus and parmesan. Cool, so can we take a look at the kitchen? Are we able to go back there? As you can see, if you look down right here at this area,

we're preparing fresh rosemary as one of the ingredients in tonight's dinner. And they're cutting chicken. So everything really is done from scratch. It has that personal touch. Fresh rosemary and the personal touch. But here's what I want to talk about. The food at Bowdoin is actually a problem, a moral problem. I don't mean this in any way as a criticism of people like Ken Cardone. He's very, very good at what he does. Jacob, my producer, is a massive foodie, and he was impressed. It takes a lot to impress Jacob. Nor do I mean that people, students in particular, shouldn't eat properly. They should. My point is that every choice we make, even if it's the right choice at

that moment, has larger consequences, some of them unexpected and paradoxical. And Ken Cardone's amazing food is one of those things. My name is Malcolm Glaubow. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood. This is actually episode two of a little three-part mini-series I've dropped into the middle of Revisionist History. It's a re-examination of one of the most fundamental ideas in American life, that if you have some ability and work hard, you can make it to the top. The episode before this was about a kid named Carlos, a brilliant kid, and just how many obstacles stand in the way of his making it out of South Central Los Angeles. This episode is about

what it takes for a poor kid to get a good college degree, and strange as it may sound, campus food at a place like Bowdoin is a big part of that problem. Best way to understand this is to compare Bowdoin with one of its competitors, Vassar College. Vassar is in Poughkeepsie, just north of New York City. It's a lot like Bowdoin in many ways. They're both small, elite, northeastern liberal arts colleges. Lots of students apply to both schools. They're in the same category. But there are also some differences. Vassar is a little bigger and edgier, a lot more dyed hair and tattoos. Bowdoin is smaller and preppier. Bowdoin also has more money.

Not a lot more, but enough that it matters. And then there's the issue of food. How's the food at Vassar, would you say? Food? It could be better. There's always room for improvement. The salad bar always makes me kind of sad. One time I was eating a spinach kale stir fry that was prepared, and I may or may not have found an industrial-sized staple in it.

The president of Vassar College is a woman named Catherine Hill. She's an economist by training. Tall, gracious, distinguished. A touch of gray. The president of Vassar College is a woman named Catherine Hill. She's an economist by training, tall, gracious, distinguished, a touch of gray, what you would expect from an academic leader. We met in her office on the Vassar campus, which is full of lots of gothic gray stone buildings and creaky oak staircases, huge double-sash windows, ancient rugs, all very 19th century. Before she was at Vassar, Catherine Hill was at Williams College, about two hours north of Poughkeepsie.

She was the provost. While she was there, Princeton dramatically expanded its financial aid. And suddenly, every liberal arts college in the country felt it had to examine its policies as well. We had to figure out what we were going to do in response to Princeton announcing that they were going to move away from loans. So Hill teams up with another economist and starts digging around in the data from the admissions office. A colleague of mine, Gordon Winston, and I asked the question,

do we know what we're actually asking families to pay to come to Williams? So we'd always assumed that we were doing just, you know, a great job with talented kids from all different economic backgrounds. And what we found out was that we were asking students from lower income quintiles to pay an awfully high share of their family income to come to attend. And we were also finding out that we weren't getting many, not surprisingly. You know, I think we were finding that we were asking families in the bottom 40% of the income distribution to pay, you know, about 50% of their family incomes pre-tax.

Hill's saying that at that time, if the family of a poor, smart kid wanted their child to go to Williams, they'd have to spend half their income on tuition. Half. That's why there were so few poor kids at Williams. So while she's at Williams, the school starts making its financial aid a lot more generous. Then Hale becomes president of Vassar. Vassar was an institution that was committed to these kinds of issues. And when we looked at the actual data, it turned out that compared to some of our peer schools, we in fact weren't all that diverse, either in terms of socioeconomic diversity or racial diversity.

So she decides to change Vassar's priorities. Students from the poorest families in the United States get a small $5,000 grant from the federal government called a Pell Grant. He'll decide she wants to accept way more Pell Grant students at Vassar. So what are you spending on financially? We're spending about $60 million. $60 million? Yeah. And when I started in 2006, it was about $25 million.

Oh, I see. So it's basically more than... It's about double. And we have about 23% Pell Grant recipients, which makes us, I think, the highest amongst a very large group of schools and the lowest income kids. And Pell, when you started, what was it? I think I read 11% when you started? Yeah.

I'm not even sure we were tracking it, but it was in the low teens. That was 10 years ago. Since then, Hill has discovered two things. The first is exactly what we talked about in the last episode. There's a ton of smart, poor kids out there. You can easily double the number that you accept at a school like Vassar and not compromise your academic standards. Okay, that's the first thing, the good news.

Then there's the bad news. I think a lot of schools said, okay, so yeah, they're out there. Let's see if we can find some and recruit more. I think over time, I've come to realize that the main constraint, despite commitments on the parts of schools to do this, the reality is if you take a talented low-income kid, you've got to offer significantly more financial aid. And every dollar that you spend on financial aid is a dollar that you don't have to spend on something else. And that is ultimately the real challenge. Tuition at Vassar, including room and board, is $62,000 a year. You let in some poor kid for free, you're out somewhere in the range of $62,000.

Give me an example of the kind of trade-offs you've had to deal with because you wanted to increase your financial aid package. It would be spending more to renovate old dormitories and bathrooms. It would be better food in the dining hall. You know, many of those things are really good things, and you're always making trade-offs on the margin. Did you catch that? Better food in the dining hall. Right after my producer Jacob went to Bowdoin

to check out their food, he went to Vassar. How often do you eat there? About twice a day. Jacob is talking to a sophomore at Vassar named Amanda. So lunch and dinner? Usually I do like a quick breakfast and then dinner because breakfast is notoriously their best meal. And what about dinner? What's dinner look like? Pretty terrifying sometimes. It's weird. It oscillates between sometimes they have really good ethnic food actually. They'll surprisingly put together a very good meal and then there's other nights where you get there and it's kind of like pasta, a very sad like meat sandwich thing

you're not really sure about and like pizza and usually I end up with soup that night. It's, yeah. What would you say are, like, the most common complaints about the food from students? Usually lack of variety of taste. Also, some people, it's kind of gross to talk about, but, like, claim it really gives them indigestion. Like, they're not happy with the quality of the food. By indigestion, do you mean it has like a laxative effect is that the complaint because i've heard that elsewhere yeah that's 100% what i'm talking

about um if you could step in and make like sweeping changes to dining at vest or what would you change um sweeping changes i mean my thing is like i know i'm kind of spoiled because i'm from california so i'm used to just a higher quality of food in general, because like the salad bar always makes me kind of sad, like, or like the nights where they're like, we have guacamole. And it's like, literally just like this pasty, disgusting, like, just, you know, they've obviously just pureed some like, unripe avocados. Vassar has terrible food. Bowdoin practically has a Michelin star. Two otherwise almost identical schools that on this one measure couldn't be more different. And why?

Because Bowdoin doesn't spend nearly as much on financial aid as Vassar does. Now, I don't want to single out Bowdoin as some kind of moral villain. There are lots of private colleges in the U.S. that do a far worse job than Bowdoin at educating low-income students. But just listen to these numbers. 23% of Vassar's undergraduates are on Pell Grants. That is, they come from the poorest part of American society. At Bowdoin, just 13% of students are on Pell Grants, so just over half as many as at Vassar.

The New York Times does something called an Access Index, which measures how good a job a college does at opening its doors to low-income students. The way the index works, an average score is 1. If you do better than average, your score is greater than 1. Among all American universities and colleges measured, Vassar comes in eighth with a score of 1.36, behind only the University of Florida and the big schools in the University of California system. It is the most

open and accessible private school in the land. Bowdoin is 51st, at 1.05, just above average. If you want an example of a school that does really badly in the New York Times Index, New York University. NYU is at.65, which ranks at 156, which is appalling. Now why does this matter? We don't want all schools to be the same. What's wrong with a system where one school spends its marginal dollar on gathering the most interesting and diverse group of undergraduates possible, and then another school spends its marginal dollar on artisanal cheese? It shouldn't matter, right? But if you dig into the way the university system works in the United States,

you discover that it matters a lot. Bowdoin and Vassar are connected. I'm back at Vassar. I'm sitting in a small conference room in the main administration building. In front of me is Robert Walton, Vassar's vice president of finance. Vassar might be the home of the edgy and the tattooed, but that's not Robert Walton. He's a numbers guy, white hair, carefully trimmed beard. He's got the school's budget open in front of him. So if we look at our total budget, sort of what we actually spend, it's about $175 million. And if you think about it in just big groups, about two-thirds of that are fees that

we collect from different sources, and about a one-third of that budget comes from the endowment. Yeah. Now, the tuition bucket, how does that break down? You know, we are, like many schools like us, we have sort of a barbell effect. That's a slightly inelegant metaphor, but it works. We tend to have a grouping at each end, those who have a full ability to pay and those who have low ability to pay. The math looks like this.

There are 2,450 undergraduates at Vassar. 1,000 of them are on the wealthy end of the barbell. They pay full tuition, or close to it. That comes to $60 million a year in revenue. The rest of the students at the other end of the barbell pay about half that much. They're the ones receiving some kind of financial aid. There's way more of them, but they contribute much less to the bottom line. So Vassar makes up for that lost revenue with money drawn from the endowment.

I've grossly simplified matters to the point where if Robert Walton hears this, he'll cringe, but that's basically how the finances at Vassar work. A couple of questions. Before you went, you made this shift, which was, what, roughly 10 years ago? Roughly 2007. It happened mid-year, sort of, so it's a little hard. That's Marianne Begum, Vassar's head of strategic planning. She's sitting next to Walton, formal business suit. What would your percentage of full pay have been back then in the earlier era, roughly?

We were around 80, no, 75 to 80, let's say. 75 to 80% of students paid full tuition back then. This is an important point. The barbell used to be heavily weighted on the high, full-paying end and have almost nothing on the other end. When President Hill transforms Vassar a decade ago, she basically switches that. She replaces hundreds of full-paying students with students who pay very little. As a result, Vassar goes from a place that quite

comfortably supported itself on tuition revenue to a place that has to rely really heavily on its endowment to make the numbers work. Now, Vassar is wealthy enough to pull that off. It all adds up, but barely. They have no wiggle room. So the 1,000 kids who pay full tuition, Vassar needs every single one. Without them, everything falls apart financially. I asked Walton what would happen if the number of full-paying students dropped, if even 50 of that 1,000 went elsewhere. That would be bad. That would be bad. No wiggle room. Okay, now about the endowment. Once again, Bowdoin College is a good comparison.

Bowdoin starts 2015 with an endowment of $1.4 billion. They make a healthy return on that, which they divide up. A quarter of it goes to pay for financial aid. Three quarters of it goes back into the endowment. That three quarters, incidentally goes back into the endowment. That three-quarters, incidentally, comes to $120 million. So to put it another way, Bowdoin had a $120 million cushion last year. What I've just described explains how endowments at elite universities keep getting bigger and bigger. They earn way more on their endowment every year than they need to balance the books.

This is a bit of an aside, but here's a really extreme example of the endowment cushion. Princeton. They start 2014 with $20.6 billion in the bank. Let me repeat that. $20.6 billion in the bank. They make $2.1 billion on their investments over the course of the year. After they've covered their costs and paid for all their financial aid, they had $700 million left over. And after you add in all the other money they raised, Princeton ends the year with an endowment of $22.7 billion. Princeton is a perpetual motion cash machine. There is literally no way they can ever run out of money.

If they wanted to build a half-a-billion-dollar dormitory with marble staircases, mahogany floors, and solid gold bathroom fixtures, they could pay for it out of petty cash and still bank $200 million. That's wiggle room. By the way, given that fact, you might wonder why anyone would ever give money to Princeton. Good question. I have way more to say about this subject. That's what next week's episode is about. But let's go back to Vassar. Things are a lot more complicated there. They have about a billion dollars in their endowment. That's less than Bowdoin. But for Vassar to cover their expenses, they need to take out

significantly more from their endowment than Bowdoin does. So they don't have the same kind of cushion. Last year, in fact, Vassar had a bad year and they ended up withdrawing more than they earned. You can't keep doing that year in and year out and survive as an institution. No wiggle room. So what are Vassar's other options? Well, they could get smaller. One of the reasons Bowdoin is in such better shape is that Bowdoin has only 1,800 students.

Vassar is more than a third larger. If Vassar were Bowdoin's size, then suddenly they'd have 650 fewer students to subsidize with their endowment. If I said to you, completely hypothetically, I want you to run this college in such a way as to maximize the amount of financial resources available, would you shrink the student body? In a perfect world, that would be the technique I would prefer. That's Vassar's VP Robert Walton again. Note that he says, in a perfect world. But of course, that's the last thing Vassar would ever do. It would be totally self-defeating. The whole point of Catherine Hill's transformation of Vassar was to try and educate as many poor smart kids as possible,

because America has a huge problem with not providing opportunity for poor smart kids. If you cut 650 spots, then you're part of the problem again. I'm a fiscal conservative, but she's convinced me we don't pay any taxes in terms of to the feds or the state. So we are a tax subsidized entity. So one would logically conclude that if you have a large endowment, you really have an obligation to provide a public good, not just to educate the rich. This is something people always forget. Universities don't pay taxes. We subsidize them. You and I. When Princeton makes that $2.4 billion return on their endowment, they don't pay a dime of capital gains taxes on it. And Walton's pointing out something really,

really crucial, which is that if you get that kind of subsidy from society, you're supposed to give back. Cutting 650 spots is not giving back. All right, how about this? Cut back on faculty. Bigger classes. No, no, no. That also defeats the purpose. The whole point of the Vassar experiment is to give students of all backgrounds the best possible education. If you make the education worse in order to pay for the students who need a good education,

then you're right back where you started from. The point of Vassar is that the best education comes when you mix students from all backgrounds. When the child of an investment banker sits in class next to the child of a janitor, the two of them have a learning experience that they could not have amongst people just like themselves. That's what they're trying to protect. So what do you do if you're Vassar and you're trying to protect that idea of what an education is? You have only one option.

You tighten your belt as tight as you can. You don't do anything extravagant. I worked with a college at one time, I should go unnamed, that opened a new residence hall in the last five years that was all singles, but had double beds. Basically, the dorm was a high-end hotel. You know, there are these amenities that some schools do that are just kind of crazy and over the top, but they do all kinds of things. You know, they have more money for speaker series than we do. We can't pay Bill Clinton to come and speak for $300,000 like my prior institution did. Things like that.

Bill Clinton, the ultimate college amenity. The problem with belt tightening, though, is attracting those 1,000 full-pay students, the ones whose money Vassar desperately needs. Who are they? They're the children of professionals. Upper middle class and upper class. Manhattan, Beverly Hills, Boston, San Francisco. They grew up privileged.

They have certain expectations about lifestyle. Those amenities that Bob Walton says are kind of crazy and over the top, that's what these kids are used to. So this is what keeps Catherine Hill up at night. How can she keep those wealthy kids coming to Vassar if she can't provide them with the lifestyle that they're used to? We are operating in an economy right now where income inequality has increased over the last 30 to 40 years.

So we are looking to attract talented students from high-income families. These are kids who have grown up with their own bedroom and their own bathroom, and when they come looking at college campuses, those are some of the things that the families are looking for. Vassar asks those kids to do without some of the luxuries they were raised with, and that's a hard sell. Every time another school with which we compete makes a different decision and doesn't spend it on financial aid then it puts us in the position of have being in a tougher position to compete

for the full pay students oh i see you mean if another school spends less and builds a fancier x and you don't have the fancy x yeah then they Then they're going to take some of those kids away from us who want the fancy X. Hill didn't name any names, but you know who she's talking about. She's talking about Bowdoin. And the kids she worries that Bowdoin will take away are the kids from Beverly Hills in Manhattan who grew up on beautifully ripe avocados and freshly cut rosemary. Robert Walton serves on something called the Parents Advisory Committee

at Vassar, which is basically the parents of the rich kids, and he hears it all the time. They come and, you know, they want to talk to the senior officers about, you know, their observations, you know. It's sort of a, you know, tough love kind of meeting. They always ask about food. They always ask about housing. They always ask, you know. It's sort of a, you know, tough love kind of meeting. They always ask about food. They always ask about housing. They always ask, you know. What do they say when they bring up food? Do they complain about food? Yeah, basically.

And so my reaction is we need to make food better, and we actually aren't going to make food better. But if food is really important to you, and if housing is really important to you, don't come to Vassar. That's not what we focus on. That's just not what we're into. Yeah.

And no apologies for that. I mean, that's just not what we do. This is why I said at the beginning that food is actually a moral issue. Because how long do you think Vassar can continue to do this? To say to parents and students, if food is really that important to you, go somewhere else. Those kids come to Vassar for a campus visit

and eat a soggy piece of pizza. Then they go to Bowdoin, where Chef Cardone is the god of the dining hall. He's got amazing resources, a bigger endowment, 650 fewer students, half as many kids on Pell Grants, and every day he's taking it up a notch in the kitchen. How long can soggy pizza hold up against Ken Cardone? When my producer Jacob was on his culinary investigation at Bowdoin,

the students talked about the food at their school like they were in Paris. In the beginning of the year, the ice cream didn't really taste that well. It was kind of watery, and so I know someone wrote a complaint card like, guys, and now it's so much better. They just fixed it. I've heard good things about the dessert. Is it good? How do you compete with this?

On your first year on campus there's this lobster bake where every student on campus has the choice of having a lobster for dinner or a steak or a vegetarian option. It's really phenomenal. If I were to ask you, maybe a prospective student was coming to campus and they were asked about the food, what would be your one-sentence pitch or how would you describe it? It's sort of indescribable in the way that you can't explain to someone

how it's always changing and it's always fresh and it's always different and it pushes you to try new things, which is, I think, what college is all about, which is experimenting and reaching out to new worlds. And, you know, the fact that the food here helps you do that as well is incredible. I cannot get over how excited this kid is about the food at Bowdoin. Do you think he talks this way about his professors? Oh, have you tried things that you wouldn't have tried otherwise?

Like, what kind of meals or dishes? Oh, wow. The other night I had an eggplant parmesan pancake. You know, I don't think I could have even told you that was a real thing until I had it. You know, I walked past it and didn't grab one, and I went back, I might as well, And it was phenomenal. I had six, actually. Eggplant parmesan pancake. I mean, this is completely absurd.

This is everything that's wrong with American colleges. We had venison here during deer season. It was really just fresh, locally sourced, different kinds of meats that I would never expect to see in a college dining hall. There's only one solution. If you're looking at liberal arts colleges, don't go to Bowdoin. Don't let your kids go to Bowdoin.

Don't let your friends go to Bowdoin. Don't give money to Bowdoin or to any other school that serves amazing food in its dining hall. Because every time you support a school that spends its money on amazing food, every time you cast a vote in favor of eggplant, parmesan, pancakes, and lobster bakes and venison during deer season, you're making it harder and harder for someone like Catherine Hill to create opportunities for poor kids. Suck it up and go to Vassar. Send a message to the Bodens of the world about what really matters. Fresh fruit is atrocious. Sometimes we get bananas, and then sometimes we get strawberries or grapes. But those are like, strawberries and grapes are like, those are a big deal.

Like, you go steal like five cups of that. You pocket them and run out with your pockets full of them? Absolutely, absolutely. I'm not joking. This is Amanda again, the vassar sophomore who complained about the guacamole. Amanda, the spoiled Californian, as she described herself. But I will say this for Amanda. She gets it. She understands what's at stake.

Atrocious fresh fruit is a small price to pay for a little social justice. I still complain regularly about the food and whatnot, but I just feel much better knowing that that money is going towards something useful. I would much prefer that our school be giving money to that than trying to make our food better, you know. Worst case scenario, you get the minimum meal plan and you can eat out. It's not a big deal. You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionisthistory.com or on your favorite podcast app.

Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yazuzawa. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact checker, Michelle Siraca. And the Panoply management team, Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.