The Coach Effect

May 27, 2020

Colleges today talk a big game about valuing diversity — so why are so many of them failing to retain first-generation students? We meet a homeless straight-A track star and her ad-hoc college application coach to look at why it’s so hard to get into college while rural, poor, and uncoached. We go deep with coaches and students at a non-profit called ScholarMatch, founded by novelist David Eggers, to find out just what it can take to get first-generation college students over the graduation finish line. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our last episode was about an explosion an explosion of coaching in Modern Life all sorts of people are getting paid to be coaches in places that never used to have coaches big corporations Wall Street trading floors fire stations people are declaring themselves coaches not just of skills but of states of mind and getting paid to do it

so it's now worn noticeable when you come across situations that cry out for a coach and no coaches around when total amateurs you don't think of themselves as coaches are forced to coach for free because no one's doing it for money

like this woman I am mehrsa baradaran author of several books and articles on Banking and inequality racial wealth Gap Etc Marisa came to the United States from Iran as a child her family were political refugees he's now a professor at the UC Irvine law school but it's not her job that matters here maris's brother-in-law is the sheriff of a small town east of Los Angeles he called her one day to say had taken in a high school

didn't she was his sons classmate and track teammate and she was homeless her name is Kayla Kayla kept getting kicked out of her home like on and off and finally permanently last year and so their son you know told his parents and they just said come live with us right Marisa found Kayla totally striking six feet tall self-possessed but she's a 17 year-old African-American girl in a poor White Town

down not just homeless but working two jobs just trying to figure out how to survive I don't know exact date but I think maybe around September my mother kicked me out of the house that's Kayla it was something that it happened before but this time it was a permanent one so I just tried to be prepared but I mean there's not much you can be prepared for when that happens why did she say she kicked you out of the house this recent time I think

it was just maybe I feel like a lack of appreciation maybe she didn't think I appreciated what she's done for me because I think she felt that I was only there to finish my education and that I was using everything she gave me just to go to school

so yeah I think that's probably the main reason why she kicked me out are you still in touch with her no I don't talk to you at all

okay so I asked Kayla a bunch of questions but her new friend Marisa had asked her more she learned that Kayla was a star long distance Runner a great student too who's somehow maintain a grade point average of 4.0 Caleb managed to take the SAT to she just walked into an SAT Center and taking it cold without any idea of what it was she got a score of 1260 which was better than 83% of the other people who took it Marisa

how badly Kayla wanted to go to college and she knew from her brother-in-law that college was not the obvious next step for kids from Kayla school I mean this this is a high school and I went to one of these high schools where the only recruiters that come to campus are like military and Community College if that so most of these kids are not you know four-year College bath when she first tells you what she's doing and to apply to college the first time you sit down talk to her about it what does she say and what is your response she says

as I said well what colleges are you applying to and she says well I applied to a couple of like UC schools I think she'd applied to like three schools at the time she'd actually applied to four schools State schools because you could do that for free never mind the eventual tuition Kayla couldn't afford the application fees so I just ask Haley I'm like hey do you mind if I look I'll pay for the application costs and we'll just do it together I would you be into that and she was super into it right so she was like absolutely I want to do this

anyway that's how Marisa remembers it Kayla recalls hesitating before she said yes she's like what colleges you playing for you only find a for well eating a pie two more and I was like well I can't pay for this and she was like well you don't have to worry about it I got it I got it covered and at first I was really like I'm not the type of person that accepts money from other people it was the first time that anyone had offered to help her and the situation was his new to Kayla as it was to Marisa you know you could tell that she's hungry for the coaching and

she she wanted it and I could just see that and and you know I don't have a lot of time either right like I have a full-time job and kids and all the other stuff but when you see someone like that you're like okay whatever it takes I'm going to help you with this because who else is going to exactly right who else is going to Kayla sasser's the kind of kid every Elite School in the country claims to be looking for Marisa had the same thought she also thought oh no I'm too late

I'm Michael Lewis and this is against the rules a show about various authority figures in American life this season is about the rise of coaches and this episode is about a place in American life where there should be coaches

Columbia asks what exhibits lectures theater Productions and concerts have you liked best in the last year I'm tempted to write Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera psych My Town doesn't have a movie theater Kayla sasser's deadline for college applications was less than a month away there wasn't time to hire an SAT coach and retake the test or anything like that so her new friend Marisa just starts grabbing applications to Elite schools off the web now she and Kayla have to figure out how to decode with their real

asking the kids who apply I asked her what kids do for entertainment and she says drugs another school asks her what her favorite periodicals newspapers and websites are she doesn't have access to a computer except when she does homework on a school computer she doesn't get the New Yorker she's never traveled outside her Town it just seems like anyone who can answer these questions has got to be coached Kayla obviously needs a coach and Marisa just by chance and temperament is the right person to coach her but right away

is she seeing the bigger issue and then I'm looking at these questions and I'm like you clearly don't get it right you don't understand what it's like to grow up in a rural town and not have resources like you know Elite Americans do so she helps Kayla with the application questions as best she can then they get to the big one the personal essay the place where you let all these college admissions officers know who you really are rich kids get all kinds of help doing

this they write about their week-long service trip to some poor Guatemalan Village as a transformative experience in which they overcame something or other Marisa looks at an essay Kayla already wrote the one for her University of California applications so here she is she's African-American you know homeless Works two jobs and I mean just every obstacle you want to put in someone's path she's had it and her essays were on

you know like how she stopped bullies on the cross-country team which my goodness I mean she's a hero but like there wasn't a lot in there where she was explaining to them the circumstances that she's overcome Kayla has like zero perspective on her own life this doesn't surprise Marisa I'm a war Refugee I immigrated to America when I was 10 my mom spent my entire childhood in political prison I saw you know bodies hanging in Iran and I wrote my college application

you know how Alice Walker's The Color Purple changed my view of literature right so there was nothing in my 18 year old college application about my background because I couldn't put it into words at the time and I and when you're 18 or 17 at least when I was and when Kayla is where she's at you don't want to put that front and center you don't want to be a victim you are a Survivor you're just like everyone else you're normal and and and you

should be it's not like Marisa wants Kayla to relive her trauma for the benefit of college admissions officers but she does want her to get her situation across to them because it matters it matters that she overcame so much just to get to this point applying to college she wants a writer essay about international relations in Spanish why do you say you know she wants to do foreign languages and that's her thing and she wrote a lot about that and I said why you know tell me more about what got you interested in Spanish and it took like maybe ten questions to get to when she first

I kicked out the family that took her in was Spanish-speaking they spoke limited English and she felt like she really wanted to communicate with this family and she couldn't because she didn't speak Spanish so she you know started listening to podcasts and books on tape just to learn Spanish so she could communicate with his family that was taking her in that's the story right yes and and for her it was just I'm really interested in languages and I want to go study abroad and see how the world is and and and all of this stuff

Marisa went to a high school just like Kayla's she knows Kayla because she was Kayla once and now she's her college application coach multiply this story by thousands and you never know maybe it changes the world

the decline of social Mobility it's a desperate problem and no one seems to know how to solve it

but when you hear the story of kahless a sir or at least when I hear the story of kahless a sir I wonder is this partly a coaching problem that is is it a problem that coaches might help to solve

this idea isn't original with me Dave Eggers had it back in the year 2000 he'd recently published his first book which was called a heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and he'd also started tutoring kids who'd fallen behind in school when I heard about Dave doing this back then I remember thinking he's just looking for even more ways to make other Riders feel inferior

but Dave was actually into it he could see that his tutoring had a big effect and a thought struck him

if I could clone myself I could give all of these kids the time that they needed and that just sort of sunk in and rattled in my brain for a few years and finally we thought well maybe we could use all of this available time among the writers editors Freelancers journalists graduate students that we know and have them become this Clone Army helping the students

each student up to grade level by giving them that you know our to of one-on-one attention every day after school and it worked and it grew kind of rapidly they rented a building for his Clone Army it was in the Mission District of San Francisco he named the organization for the address 826 Valencia in the back was the mcsweeney's publishing offices and the front was all going to be the tutoring center but that's when the landlord told us that the front was Zone

for retail and we had to sell something in the storefront

that's when we came upon the idea of selling Buccaneer supplies to working Pirates 826 Valencia became both tutoring center and pirate gear retail store yeah

soon Dave opened another tutoring center in Boston which sold Bigfoot themed merchandise and yet another in Brooklyn which sold superhero equipment but is Dave's organization encountered in help more kids he started to see another problem you know the kids started aging up and we had a lot of high school kids come in for various programs and I started writing College Rex for these kids and realizing that depending on whether or not their family their parents had gone to college

College they had a drastically different levels of preparation Dave's tutors were working mostly with kids from families in which no one had ever gone to college he saw that the society was saying one thing about social Mobility but doing another

it had structured itself to keep these kids in the class to which they were born the kids that had family members had gone to college might be applying to 12 or 13 colleges all over the country because they knew the landscape their parents had sort of told them that the wider National College landscape and the kids that were first in their family going to public schools here in San Francisco generally applied to to colleges City College and SF State and they did not

that generally know about all the other opportunities it surprise you that the public schools that they were in didn't have College counseling departments that had done this work for them well in California the last statistic I saw said that in among public high school students in California the ratio of students to counselors is 945 to one and that's not just College counselors that's all

counselors so I keep on meeting counselors that would say I'd say what are your goals this year and she would say my goal this year is to meet the students in my cohort just meet them let alone spending maybe 10 to 12 hours per student that you might need to properly prepare them for college in 2010 Dave created this whole other organization to do for a bunch of kids in San Francisco essentially

Marisa had set out to do for Kayla

to help them find good colleges and to get into them Dave call this new organization scholar match and it was indeed able to help a couple of hundred high school kids get scholarships and all seemed well but all was not well

before we get back to the show here's another show I think you'll like lately every day can feel like a year the gist with Mike Pesca is here for you at the end of every week day to help you make sense of it all tune in to hear Mike's analysis of the covid-19 outbreak and its political implications what lessons can we learn from the past how is this impacted the homeless population recently Mike's been joined by guest like Jay Alex Navarro the editor-in-chief

the 1918 influenza digital archive at the University of Michigan also by homeless Advocate Josh D subscribe to the gist from slight wherever you get your podcasts

so Dave Eggers in his scholar match program were helping low-income kids get into college but once the kids got there they had a bunch of problems that they've had an anticipated stress about work stress about planning an hourly schedule stress about their families back home health issues and the kids started dropping out Nationwide the dropout rate for first-generation college students is scandalous

only about one in every nine of them actually finishes school scholar match thought they'd anticipated this problem I mean they'd found the right school for the student in the money to pay for it but still 40 percent of their kids were dropping out like what good is it if you go to a school with a full ride that you're going to feel like you don't fit in or like you're not welcome and then it's you're going to struggle the whole way and not make it anyway

her name is Diana Adamson Dave Eggers hired her to run scholar match and Diana started keeping a mental list of all the snags their first generation students hit a failed class an illness the wrong major a parent whose immigration status was called into question

these kids were being dealt crippling Blows By things that privileged kids might treat his bumps in the road and the blows could come before they even set foot on any college campus the summer before the start of college was especially fraud so there's two things that happened in that summer one is they have to put in a housing deposit to reserve their dorm and it cost a couple hundred dollars sometimes as much as 400 most of our students have a little bit of difficulty of coming up with $400

in a week you know to send off to the school but if you don't do that then you run the risk of not getting put in a dorm and we've seen that happen and so then a student gets the money but it's late and then they're not prioritized for a dorm placement and then they suddenly don't have a dorm they have to live off campus as a freshman and it just becomes the first step in the unraveling of oh what am I doing here I don't belong here first generation College

age students from low-income families were in some ways incredibly robust I mean just to get into a college was an amazing achievement but they could be derailed by problems that money alone couldn't solve even my family disagreed with gone to Ohio meat and Esau of San Francisco and your parents and not going to college no dining too far just a guy was in high school where they born and raised here and I'll draw from China are they and I didn't speak English Andy went through the sky

or match program and it introduced him to the world especially the world of private colleges with full ride scholarships before that he just assumed he go to Community College and maybe one day if he got really lucky he transferred to a State University I went over to the Mission District uh-huh I was like I need help with my like application I'm not sure what I'm really doing either that's where Ohio Wesleyan came into the picture how did it come into the picture

ER because I told no one will doubt like our community the Asian-American Community only thinks about UCS uh-huh so like you see this you see that that's like the only option and then we have safety schools like state and city for sure I'll get in those but you see is to reach right

Andy was talking with a guy named Noel Ramirez the person is scholar match you helped him with his college application and the thing with Andy is that we had many conversations and I can recall with him that he had this exceptional interest in life it was beyond getting the job you know I think it again is letter recommendations I wrote for him that I said that he was the type of student that wasn't only interested in you know getting a job getting married buying house having

this bind a pet so with that I felt he he would Thrive at a place that would have those types of conversations where he could take a philosophy class a religion class where he would meet people from all over the world where he would take a risk and go to a place that looks completely different from his world so Noel and Andy focused on applying to Ohio Wesleyan

the school had a great biology program but also a strong Humanities program it not only accepted Andy he was able to go there on scholarship All Andy needed to do was to get there and that's when things took a turn

keep in mind is like my second time fly I did not know what to do it is only other time flying was when he was six months old he had no real experience with travel and at the San Francisco Airport his plane was fogged in by the time he landed in Chicago for his connecting flight to Ohio the flight was gone what do you do I walked around just falling people who were like on the same plane for both of us to go in Ohio

just listening to what everyone's saying and some were like I just I'm going to go to a hotel and sleep I'm like I don't really notice neighborhood like I don't want to take that risk he's now living in his head so I walked around more they gave us a food voucher and I got my food from McDonald's and I decided like it's not worth going outside I should just sleep in the airport but then someone told him he needed to go to the ticket counter to get on the first flight out in the morning and Andy met his first gate agent

their line person ripped up my ticket he's at this ticket no longer works want to rip it up he ripped out in front of my face and I was like man you can't do this to me right now and I tear it up so you thought he was taking away your ticket yeah like that was gonna be trapped in the hair I was like watch you do that I start tearing up yeah I was like my first time crying so really well in front of people yeah they River tagus like the sentencing you to life in prison in O'Hare Airport yeah it feels like I was going to be trapped here like why'd you do that I have

no exit now yeah I was pretty bad

and it was bad but it got worse and he called home and his family reminded him that they hadn't liked the idea of him going so far away your family to your family thought was a bad idea it was a bad idea like look what look what you've been doing like you shouldn't not be going to this place look at all these negative outcome that happened and it tried to sleep that night on the floor of O'Hare Airport but his parents fears echoed in his head it was a bad idea like look at on- out negative outcome that happened

this Faraway College thing was a big mistake

and he comes back like with this terrible attitude about the trip saying I don't want to go anymore it's not worth it Noel Ramirez again and he's college coach I just I couldn't believe it that's something that I guess I wasn't prepared I didn't know I should have prepared him an advance mentally what happens when you face these types of obstacles but we were yeah how would how would you ever have prepared him for I guess you could have taken him you simulate a flight actually you know to to to be honest after that incident

that's what I started to do I actually for students that were going to taking a plane right away we did develop a kind of a training module for these students so that they know exactly what to do this sort of thing was now happening all the time it's Colour match here's Dave Eggers again once there was an obstacle or once there was a reason to quit they often did they don't they don't have a set of assumptions like the set of assumptions that you and I grew up with that you just right you just supposed to go to college

when you are the first it can be like heading out you know on a polar expedition to the North Pole like why would you go go do that when you could be home scholar match it set out to connect smart and ambitious kids from low-income families with Rich colleges that had the resources to support them but the colleges were in some ways ill-equipped to educate kids who grew up without money or the assumptions that money allows you to have

of everything you described about and the coaches have described about the relationship of this pool of kids to this process makes it feel like a catastrophic environment where there is there's so many things that could kill you in the environment it's true it's like if you could build a system against students that didn't have support navigating it this is what it would look like this is the director of scholar match Diana Adamson we've heard this from students before where

almost like they didn't know they were poor until they got there and it's not so much that they thought they had all this money you know it's more like they were fine like they were their life was adequate for them and it's not until you get to this place where you realize like oh wow the ceiling is so much higher than you ever imagined and you just didn't even realize it creates some complex emotions

a bad grade on a paper or God forbid an F

it can feel like the end of the world for a lot of kids in college but it's so much worse when no one back home has any clue what you're up against we had a student once tell us I think she summed it up the best where she was so excited that she had just picked her major and she didn't know how to tell her parents about it because she didn't know the word for it and Chinese and her parents don't speak English so there was just this huge

disconnect where she wants to go home and like tell her parents all about this amazing things that she's learning and she just doesn't have the words for it they can't actually understand yeah but that's a little metaphor for the whole exactly a problem yeah Dave and Diana get the idea of hiring people to work with scholar match kids after they get into college but they need the right kind of person the right kind of Coach so we would do a lot of role plays and just see could they empathize

with the student so we had a couple scenarios that we knew would come up and we would have a staff member play the student and hear how the end they didn't have to hit do it perfectly you know there was give me an example I mean it's so sure put me in the position okay so do you want to be the coach okay so here I'm applying for the job if I'm okay so the scenario is you're doing a check in call with me

and I just got my grades back and I'm failing a class and so I want to leave and go home because you're failing your class yeah is it your first year yeah it's my first time it's my first semester would you failed as a matter I feel chemistry you feel good and I want to be a doctor to be a doctor yeah and I'm supposed to say something now yeah so you're calling for for you seen my grades but we haven't talked about yet on kiddo be what the

are you doing now what the fuck are you doing a hiring yeah so that's already I'm already disqualified I said I've got to get into a different space it's a different kind of child yeah well first thing I'd say is when I was your age I failed a class to actually II and I took it past fails was even it's even less forgivable so just dis for starters that AF is not the end of the world okay that's a great first step yours are analyzing the experience it's a get stoned at the end of the

world in fact I did quite well in college after that so it was just it was just a bump on the road and I had to figure out what it was I was doing that I needed to change in my case I needed to stop going to squash play Squash instead of going to the physics lab yeah but but but that was but it took me a while to figure that out so but in your case we let's talk about what how did you feel like it when you were in that class did you know I felt terrible I couldn't understand the lectures I couldn't keep up with it

I feel like everyone else in the class had taken chemistry in high school and so they just knew the stuff and they didn't even have to study and that's probably true it's probably true that you came into that class it's some kind of disadvantage because you're not used to failing much you've been a great student your whole life and it's really hard really hard to start off behind everybody in something and if you'd be in this if if those kids have been in the in your situation

equation they probably would have failed to so so maybe the first thing we need to talk about is how you decide what classes you're going to take so we so we don't put you in this situation again because it's not a fair situation you're crushing it maybe we would hire you yeah well actually the first thing I see is what the fuck you doing so you don't got you thrown out of the room

so I'm probably not built to be a college coach but Diana finds plenty of people who are and they start coaching and the coaching pays off

scholar match has started out almost as a technical advisor for kids on how to apply to college how to apply for loans and grants but in short order it became something else a place where students could be coached as they tried to move from one social class to another the new coaches became deeply involved in the lives of the students and they had astonishing effects the graduation rate for scholar match kids went from 60% to 81 percent which beat the national average for all College

students never mind first generation ones coaching these kids all the way to a college diploma cost scholar match roughly 13,000 dollars of student the expected lifetime earnings of a person with a college degree is 1.2 million dollars more than a person who doesn't graduate from college but it's not only that a college degree in a family that has never had one that has even more Ripple effects for instance it makes it a lot more likely that younger siblings will go to college

but the scholar match coaching was also having effects that were harder to measure

I didn't really see myself going to college I don't none of my friends that I grew up with it this is Luis Mendez it wasn't something that was possible for me giving my academic background gave him the things that you know I was into and if you want to get a picture you know I grew up here in San Francisco we grew up doing what teenagers in the city do you know vandalizing smoking we drink it you know and all that Lewis got himself thrown out of high school his junior year and he went to

work doing odd jobs when I was 16 or 17 I started reading books all right my stepdad he was incarcerated for about eight to ten years he knew all the classic books he had read them all while incarcerated right he started passing them down to me Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich Rich Dad Poor Dad all these books they're saying you know if you think it you if you believe it was all the cliches stuff right but I bought into it at the time like hey like it is

ball for me to to grow and do something with my life

and Lewis turns a corner

gets a GED goes to Community College gets a variety of part-time jobs and gets himself into UC Davis on his own

and then I was walking in the neighborhood in the mission and the mission right in the Mission District Valencia and it was the summer before I started school that UC Davis Lewis had spotted The Scholar match office he'd already gotten himself into a good college and you'd already figured out how to pay for it up to some point at or had you not I figured that there is going to fall into place there I said we'll figure it out

all Lewis needed at the time was access to a computer so he could take his UC Davis placement exams scholar match let him use a computer and so Lewis kept coming back and they grew so fond of him that they offered to help him out more he hadn't gone through their program so they couldn't give him money but they could give him a coach with the coach's name Kate Kate Lewis had zero sense of that point that he was going to need Kate but as it turned out UC Davis was a shock to his system

mmm the campus was only an hour or so away from where he grew up but it was the first time that he felt like he was in another world

I mean like did you have trouble making friends did you don't seem like a person is gonna be trouble making friends well my story I don't want to blame it on on the campus I don't want to blame it on the population or you know the design of the program where they're anything like on demographics but for whatever reason I did have a challenge of going deeper in my relationships with students on campus I would see students that were like the best of buds and me you know I was the guy everyone knew and I was cool with a lot of people but

but I don't think I ever got to that deep consistent connection with other way of my peers huh yeah because you felt different Lewis tried going to a frat party didn't like it I actually found my place in the Christian Community but on a day-to-day basis I just it wasn't a deep connection I guess with my peers that's unusual that strikes me as odd that you were so enmeshed in the Christian Community and I didn't yield deep relationships I would think it would right

because that's the idea behind it right did you feel vulnerable or exposed or like did you were you scared or did you feel insecure or scared and I was at this point I remember it clearly I was in tears because I thought to myself if if I can't make solid friendships and deep connection on the college campus when it's like Geared for that for socialization how am I going to make connections and deep friendship

oops post-college when everyone is just everywhere din is not as structured right and it isn't this the place where everyone meets their best friends like where's mom so yeah I was a little scared about that but quitting and dropping out just wasn't an option for me still Lewis didn't think to turn to his college coach Kate this is where Louis wandered in this is exactly where

Louis came when he was working for Uber this is Kate Bueller at the time she met Lewis who was driving an Uber to make ends meet she was also coaching 50 other students but she paid enough attention to Louis to see that he was struggling and trying to hide it so she tells him we're going to have an adult relationship and honesty is a big part of that and we're going to be accountable to each other and I am here to guide you and making sure you grow

you as a person and when I feel like there's a missing part of that story I asked you know this isn't totally adding up around this time Lewis did something that caught his coaches attention and would have caught no one else has he was late for a class I missed Calculus exam I walk in and everyone's turning into scantrons I had to check in with Kate later that day she asked me about her said Louis how did the exam go I said well

what happened was I thought the class started at 11 you really started at 9:30 but I talked to my professor and he is fine he said I could still pass this class I just cannot miss another one right it had this very relaxed attitude no guilt no regret I got it under control Kate I'm like well lol there's more to this story right there's more to the story about missing exam that isn't just thinking it's all going to work out and and my goal then is to have

authentic conversation of don't you think that you should not be half-assing this thing that you've worked for your whole entire life the coach had noticed a tendency in her player it wasn't about him getting a c in that class it was about getting a was more how does he move through life and actually push himself to learn and hold himself responsible when it makes sense up to this point in his life Luis Mendez had never really had

a lot of people who believed in him how did you decide she was someone you trusted it's got a question I think I had been waiting for such a long time for an authority figure because it growing up from just my mom my mom being stretched super thin but all five of us and work and everything I never had anyone to tell me what to do so it's almost as if Kate finally answered or met this need or this longing of having someone to tell me to go to class right

when you grow up in a privileged environment you kind of take that voice for granted you forget just how powerful it can be if she made you aware of essentially a lower expectation you have for yourself exactly exactly might not even put it into words I was unconscious of it I was unconscious I figured you know when I get to my career that's when I really come alive and turn up and and really throw myself into this work but I just need to get through this first but she said no start now don't wait and the

he is first he hears my voice saying but you know what time he just hears himself saying

your coach won't let you give up even when that's all you're trying to do

and Esau hit a snag in the O'Hare Airport and then flew back home he just wanted to give up but he didn't return just to his family he had to explain himself to his coach Noel Ramirez got on the phone and I like hey I can do this like I'm going to take the safe route at the riskier and so I talked to no well I was crying like I can't do this no I know you think is better but I don't think it's better it's not

for me to go to Ohio Noel here is and he's say that he's already enrolled in a local community college

he then says you can do this go back to Ohio Wesleyan it's worth it what's more I will go back with you I'll get on the plane fly with you to Ohio and stay there until you feel happy and I was like okay I'll Trust like I will trust you like a hundred percent this this is the best option I believe you

Noel spends five days on campus sleeping on various couches

he introduces Andy to his new life

after five days he leaves and Andy stays a bit later Andy's parents finally visited they went down under like what is this place there's no one here do you have any like our Asian food there's no rice so it's a culture shock for them to but I trust everywhere done the will said I just hundred percent trusted and Esau graduated from Ohio Wesleyan four years later in 2018

with a degree in microbiology was it a good experience best four years of my life

I'm Michael Lewis thanks for listening to against the rules

against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the shows produced by Audrey dilling and Catherine Jurado with research assistance from Lydia Gene cot and zuy win our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobel is our executive producer our theme was composed by Nick brittle with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphony net we got fact-checked by Beth Johnson our show was recorded by Topher Ruth and Trace Schultz at Northgate studios in Berkeley and thanks to

BDO San Francisco for providing audio for this episode as always thanks to pushkin's Founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell

oh I almost forgot Kayla Sasser the high school senior we began with I checked in with her after her acceptance letters started to roll in so tell me since we last talked what you've heard so I've gotten into a think about 11 schools do you want me to list them yes you okay you got it you got it you got into 11 schools yes CSU San Bernardino excuse you

and CSU Long Beach I got into CBU University of Redlands Whittier UC Riverside UC San Diego UCLA which was really awesome and NYU oh I also got into San Diego State University uh-huh but I didn't apply to that one so that was like really surprising I didn't know how that worked so you got into 10 schools that are in California and one in New York hey

that's fantastic congratulations thank you

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