“Educated” Author: College Is Unaffordable and Unimaginable

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, from a political circus of such to the politics of education, for many, the cost of a university degree is simply too high. “The New York Times” best-selling author Tara Westover shares her childhood experience and financial pressures in her memoir, Educated.” She recounted her unorthodox upbringing as the child of survivalists the last time we spoke.

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TARA WESTOVER, AUTHOR, “EDUCATED”: In a lot of ways, I had a beautiful childhood. I grew up on this beautiful mountain in the Idaho, but because my father had some kind of radical beliefs, we were a bit isolated. So, I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor. I didn’t even have a birth certificate until I was nine.

AMANPOUR: You didn’t have a birth certificate?

WESTOVER: No, not until I was nine years old, which meant — because we didn’t go to school or to the doctor, effectively, according to the State of Idaho and the federal government, we didn’t exist.

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AMANPOUR: So, that’s the world she grew up in, and she didn’t set foot inside a classroom until she was 17. Successful now, she still says she’s not a poster child for the American dream. And Westover joins Michel Martin to discuss why universities should function less like a business and more like a school.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Tara Westover, thank you so much for joining us.

TARA WESTOVER, AUTHOR, “EDUCATED”: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: Well, congratulations on the success of your book, which so many people have embraced. And you recently wrote an essay in “The New York Times” kind of reflecting on some of the lessons you think people are wrongly getting from the book. And I just wanted to read one line from the essay. You said that, a curious thing happens when you offer up your life for public consumption, people start to interpret your biography to explain to you what they think it means. When did you first start to notice that?

WESTOVER: I do think a story like mine tends to get put into this category of inspiring, resilience. And that’s kind of fine, too, I don’t mind. But occasionally people would say something to me that took it a little further than that and they would say, you are a proof that the American dream is possible, that absolutely anything is possible for anybody. And that started to wear on me a bit over time because I just knew I was so lucky and I was also very helped, and I was living in a time where you could actually work your way through college. The university I went to was affordable. I mean, it was really hard, but I it was still possible. And I’m not sure that’s possible today. And so, it started to feel — I started to feel a bit fraudulent, I guess, when people would say, oh, you’re proof that absolutely anybody can do anything. And I would think — I think there’s value to stories of resilience. I don’t think that we should completely discount them. But you don’t want to weaponize resilience and you definitely don’t want to use it as an excuse not to reform your institutions or have a look at what people are facing today and how that changed.

MARTIN: The title of your essay is “I Am Not Proof of the American Dream.” You can’t get any more blunt than that. So, I want to ask you, walk me through it, for people who haven’t walked your walk. So, first, I want to talk about how hard it can be to be a poor kid in a rich school, even to be a poor kid in a middle middle-class school, like the one that you went to, you went to Brigham Young University, BYU, which, at the time, was pretty affordable and still is. So, I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about what it’s like to be on that grind.

WESTOVER: Yes. Well, I started out working as an early morning janitor, which meant I had to be at work at 4:00 a.m., which meant I had to wake up at 3:30 or 3:40. So, I would sleep in my clothes so that I wouldn’t have to get up and that 10 minutes of extra sleep feels like a lot more than 10 minutes when you’re talking about 3:00 a.m. And I did it because they paid a dollar more, basically. You could be an early morning janitor and get a dollar more than if you worked the day shift. And everything at that time in my life was about money, because I just didn’t have any. And so, trying to make enough for food and rent in the summer, cover tuition, I pretty much had to take every job that I could, working in the cafeteria, serving food for the freshmen meal plan, which I couldn’t afford, by the way. I wasn’t on the meal plan because I didn’t have that kind of money, but I worked in the cafeteria for it. And it was really hard, but it was possible. And then, my life changed completely when I applied for a Pell Grant, my — the second half of my sophomore year. I applied for it, and it just changed absolutely everything. It was the difference, I think, between me dropping out of school and staying in school was that Pell Grant.

MARTIN: You say in your piece, the day I cashed that check is the day I became a student.

WESTOVER: Well, I would say all of us have a limited bandwidth, for lack of a better metaphor, of what we can think about, and there’s been a lot of research done on what happens when you have a massive scarcity in your life, something important, whether it’s love or money. You become obsessed with that thing, and it’s very difficult to think about anything else. When I was — you know, you could have shaken me awake in the middle of the night, which for me would have been at 1:00 a.m. instead of waking up at 3:00 anyway, and asked me like how much money was in my bank account. I could have told you down to the dime. But if you’d asked me what courses I was taking, I’m not sure I could have told you. That was like really far back in my list of priorities. And what happens when I cashed that check, I actually started thinking about my classes. I started thinking about what do I enjoy, what do I like doing, I did the required reading. I did more than that. I actually became a student instead of someone just trying to make rent money. And I think what I learned that day is that maybe the most powerful advantage of money is really just that it gives you the ability to think of things besides money. It frees you up to think about your life and what you want out of it and what you want to learn and who you want to be, and I just did not have that before I applied for that Pell Grant.

MARTIN: One of the things I appreciated about that book is that, you know, it sounds like many of your students were really kind to you, they really wrapped their arms around you. I mean, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, they really wanted you to succeed. But you do think they understood just how different your life was from theirs?

WESTOVER: No. I mean, I came from a really unusual family. You know, my parents were kind of radical in their ideology. They didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. So, we never went to the hospital or to the doctor, never got vaccinated. I didn’t have a birth certificate until I was nine. My parents didn’t allow us to go to school. I had a pretty unusual upbringing. And there were very few people — I never met anyone else like that at BYU. I felt kind of on my own in that way. But it was something I wanted to write about in the piece is that I wasn’t the only poor kid at BYU, not by a long stretch. You know, so the — there were other freshmen working in that cafeteria who also could not afford the meal plan. And I think it’s because Brigham Young University was such an affordable university. And so, it attracted people who wanted to work their way through college. It was the first rung on that ladder that it was low enough that a lot of people got onto it that you wouldn’t expect to see at university. And so, there were people maybe not with my exact biography but certainly who had come from money working their way through. And part of what motivated me to try to write the piece is that I’m worried that when that first rung is too high up, those kids stop climbing. It becomes unimaginable. And so, you know, for me, the tuition when I went to bring Brigham Young University was $1,600 a semester, I think it was $1,640. And that was a lot of money for me. I’ve never seen that much money, but it was an imaginable number. I could imagine myself getting together that kind of money. If I had looked at the website and it had been $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, everybody knows that college students don’t often end up paying that sticker price. If you get a bunch of aid or you get scholarships or things come through, but think of a poor kid who doesn’t understand that system, who doesn’t understand how to navigate that, they — you know, when I had a cousin in Idaho who got a really high score on her ACT, high enough that Harvard actually wrote her and said, hey, why don’t you apply here? And she and her dad, they went to the website, they saw the tuition sticker price, and they just closed the browser. They never even looked at financially and things like that because they don’t know about the system. And so, there’s something to be said for just keeping the numbers imaginable. They have to be something that if your father’s a truck driver, if your mother is a waitress, you can imagine that amount of money. And right now, I think the numbers are not imaginable.

MARTIN: What — you know, you say in your piece, for kids today from poorer backgrounds, the path I took through education no longer exists. Why does it no longer exist?

WESTOVER: Those universities are the first step for a lot of people, whether you’re talking about community colleges, or in my case BYU, or just publicly funded state flag universities, that’s where a lot of kids go from all over the place, it’s their first step. And the tuition at those schools, I mean, the Department of Education has said that even after you adjust for inflation over the last three decades, the average cost of attending — just the tuition actually of a four-year school, not a fancy private school but just a four-year public institution has more than doubled. And so, you start taking — you start making education just an unimaginable thing where kids don’t feel like it’s for them. These 16-year-old, 17-year- old kids, where that’s the age where you’re making massive decisions about your future, and I think the message we’re sending to them is, this isn’t for you, unless your family has money, unless you come from five generations of college graduates, this isn’t for you.

MARTIN: Kids graduate with tremendous debt, and it isn’t just a matter of the poorest kids who are likely to get some support if they can figure out how to get it. But what about kids whose parents are on the first rung of that middle class?

WESTOVER: That right now is, what — is it $1.2 trillion? It’s an incredible increase and an incredible debt to saddle any young person with. We know from the Department of Education that tuition has doubled over the last three decades, right, even after (INAUDIBLE) inflation. But if you look at the wages, if you look at the Department of Labor, how much has the earnings of people age 18 to 29 gone up over the last three decades, it’s not even 20 percent. And so, you’re talking about this huge increase and the cost to get an education, but not that much increase in the wages to actually pay for it. So, I think that’s the knowing scenario, I think, for lower-class kids, for middle-class kids, how do you navigate this system with any hope of ever owning a home, with any hope of ever being out of debt, like how do you navigate that?

MARTIN: What you say in the piece, you say, to poor kids today, we present a no-win scenario. We shout shrilly that they must get a college degree, because without one they can’t hope to compete in a globalized economy, but even as we say it, we doubt our own advice. And then, you say that, it’s almost like — you say, for them, the American dream has become a taunt. What do you think the consequences of that is? I mean, first of all, let’s talk about — you’ve thought about this, obviously, is, you know, what happens when it becomes sort of a luxury good, like higher education becomes a luxury good? What do you think the consequences of that are?

WESTOVER: Well, you know, there’s a Gallup Poll that came out in 2019 where they found that the number of young people, I think it’s 18 to 29, thought that college was very important had drop 30 points in six years. So, it got from, I think, 74 percent to 41 percent of kids saying, college degrees isn’t important. And we know that that’s not a reflection of the economy. Because in the economy, a college degree is probably more important than it’s ever been. So, what is that a reflection of? And I think it’s a reflection of inaccessibility. When something is not within your reach, it’s just human nature to devalue that thing. And so, I think that that’s going to be the inheritance. We’ve created a situation where so many people feel like this just isn’t a possibility for them. They no longer think it’s even valuable. And I think the social implications of that are really frightening, and the political implications. I mean, education sits at the center of our political divide, whether or not you have a college degree has a huge impact on the way people vote, the way that they identify themselves, the kind of tribalism that’s in our politics that’s largely starting to be along educational lines. And so, I think that is part of the inheritance of making education into a good but it’s distributed according to wealth. Is it — it becomes another mechanism of our great divide.

MARTIN: You know what interesting? Because in the piece — in your book, you talk about what difference education made in your life, but there’s this one scene where you started to be exposed to black people and the experiences of black people in America. And —

WESTOVER: There are not a lot in Utah. This is —

MARTIN: No. There are not a lot in Utah nor in Idaho.

WESTOVER: Yes. No.

MARTIN: You kind of awakened me to the idea of what it would be like for a white kid who doesn’t know any black people reading that and how you would absorb that and how — once you became acquainted with realities, how it opened your mind.

WESTOVER: Yeah. What I was taught about slavery growing up was pretty limited, and I didn’t question that, you know. It was information I had. It was given to me by people I trusted and I didn’t really question that. And then, I got to college and I was — it’s my first time in classroom. I was 17 years old before I was in a classroom. And I took a class, it was a civics course, an American civics course, and that professor taught slavery. And, you know, we had to read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And we just learned things about it, and that was shocking to me, you know, that shifted things for me a little bit. And then, I learned a couple months, maybe a month or two later, he taught the civil rights movement and I had never heard about the civil rights movement. I just — nobody ever told me anything about that. And for me, I was just — first I was confused. Do we get — 1968? Surely not 1968. I had no idea that these continued for so long. And when I read about the civil rights movement, I was in that lecture, I remember he told us the story about Rosa Parks and I remember he told us that she had been arrested for taking a seat of a bus. So, I assumed that what he meant was that she had been arrested for stealing the bus seat. That’s the kind of a ridiculous misunderstanding of like to take a seat versus to take that seat. Because in my mind, from what little I knew of history, that it made a lot more sense that you would get arrested for, you know, stealing. We arrest people for stealing. I had no idea that we arrested for sitting. And so, that just shifted my whole frame when I finally understood that story for what it was and when later, he was telling us about Emmett Till, and you can’t really miss misunderstand that story. Once I started to get a grip with what was being discussed, what had happened, what the history was, it shifted everything for me. And my family was definitely problematic around race and I went home and I noticed those things, words were used, things we said that I suddenly was very uncomfortable with. But I had to change (INAUDIBLE) long story of it. The history I grown up with was really inadequate.

MARTIN: Before I let you go, I have to ask you, because there has been such a fight over educational policy in recent years. You’ve seen a sort of conservative movement to, you know, contest with and to fight with the universities, sort of bastions of elitism. And now, you’re seeing this fight over education policy going into the lower grades where people are arguing over what books they want kids to read or, you know — and that’s going deep into the curriculum. So, I guess I have to ask you whether you think this is part of political movement in a way?

WESTOVER: I think the sad thing is that because education has been distributed by income and because the income increasingly — you know, all these things are connected to each other. So, whether you have a college degree is a strong predictor of how you vote, it’s also a strong predictor of what kind of income you’re going to have. And so, we’ve allowed these things that should be pretty evenly distributed among the population regardless of party and regardless of income to be almost determined by those things. And so, I mean, it breaks my heart to see universities become such ideological — become so ideological tainted in that way, where I — you know, I learned about the civil rights movement at a really conservative university. I was at Brigham Young University, you know, a very Republican place. That’s where I learned about it. And I just don’t remember there being this climate of we can’t talk about this. You know, I mean, people disagreed and it was a conservative climate, but you could get exposed to all kinds of ideas there. And I thought that was the beauty of the place. There were conservative ideas, there are a lot, there were also a lot of progressive ideas there. There was all manner of perspectives. And I get very nervous because I grew up in a family where my dad didn’t want us go to school because he didn’t want us to be exposed to ideas he didn’t agree with. That was one of the reasons. And I don’t understand an approach to education that tries to restrict access to perspectives, you know. If you’re living in a school district and they’re only teaching one thing, I could kind of imagine getting a little bit upset with it. But in general, I think exposure to a lot of different ideas and perspectives, it’s just — it’s a good thing and you use that exposure to everything to make up your own mind and decide what you think. And so, I get very anxious when the debate over what to teach in schools goes to a legislative kind of book banning place as oppose to a war of ideas. You know, you don’t like the ideas that are being taught, bring better ideas. Let’s have a conversation about it, as opposed to banning certain perspectives, which seems very bizarre to me.

MARTIN: Tara Westover, thanks so much for talking with us.

WESTOVER: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.