Paul Tough - The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

Copyright 2019 by Paul Tough

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tough, Paul, author.

Title: The years that matter most : how college makes or breaks us / Paul Tough.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013123 (print) | LCCN 2019022277 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544944480 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544944367 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Universities and collegesAdmissionSocial aspects. | Educational equalization. | College student orientation. | College StudentsSocial conditions. | College studentsAttitudes. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes. | EDUCATION / Higher. | HISTORY / Social History.

Classification: LCC LB 2351 . T 68 2019 (print) | LCC LB 2351 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/98dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013123

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022277

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Cover photography: Viorika / Getty Images

Author photograph Jeff Wilson

Part of originally appeared, in different form, in Who Gets to Graduate?, written by the author and published in May 2014 by the New York Times Magazine.

Text reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, by Anthony Abraham Jack. Copyright 2019 by Anthony Abraham Jack. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.

eISBN 978-0-544-94436-7
v1.0819

For Paula

When I walked up out of the subway on that cold spring afternoon, Shannen Torres was nowhere to be seen. We had arranged to meet at 4:15 p.m. in St. Nicholas Park in West Harlem, just down the hill from A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, where she was a senior, a few months away from graduation. But when I got to the park, I couldnt see her anywhere.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from Shannen: Im to your left.

I looked up the path and spotted her, sitting huddled over her phone on a bench about fifty yards away. She was dressed in layers against the chill, a beige barn jacket over two dark hoodies. Everything else she wore was black: black sweatpants, big black high-top sneakers, black chunky glasses, and a black backward Nike baseball cap, into which shed stuffed her long, thick dark hair. I walked over and sat down next to her.

Hi, she said. Im hiding here because I dont want anyone to see me.

I had met Shannen only a couple of times before, so it was hard for me to say for sure if this constituted strange behavior for her. But it definitely seemed a little odd.

Then she explained the situation. It was March 30. At exactly 5:00 p.m. that afternoon, every college in the Ivy League would simultaneously release their acceptance and rejection letters for next years freshman class. I had dimly understood that the decisions were going out at some point that week, but I hadnt realized they would be arriving at the very moment Shannen and I had planned to meet.

Shannen had applied to two Ivy League colleges: Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. She wanted to get into Princeton, but she really, really wanted to get into the University of Pennsylvania. It had been her dream school, she told me, since seventh grade. And in less than an hour, either her dream would come true, or it wouldnt.

That fact was overwhelming her. When Id interviewed her before, she had always seemed pretty coola Bronx girl, a streetwise Dominicanabut here on this bench in St. Nicholas Park, she was coming undone right before my eyes. Im the nervousest Ive ever been, she said. Her hands were trembling. She looked like she was about to cry.

I think its just, like, Ive been working my entire life for this one thing, she explained. It feels like everything is depending on this. Which sounds dramatic, I know. But its true.

Shannen was born in New York City in 1999 to parents who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic. When she was two, with her parents relationship crumbling, her mother took her and her older brother to New Bedford, Massachusetts. They stayed with some relatives at first, but that arrangement soon crumbled, too, and they moved next into a shelter run by Catholic nuns, and then, after a few months, into an apartment of their own in the projects.

Shannen started elementary school in Massachusetts, and she was a good student from the beginning. School wasnt stressful in those early years, but once her mother moved the family back to New York, to the Bronx, the pressure started to build. In sixth grade Shannen entered Junior High School 22, a struggling school in a hulking building on 167th Street. There were fights in the hallway every day, and she was bullied by new arrivals from the Dominican Republic who made fun of her for not being Dominican enough. Shannen was proud of her roots and her race, but there were elements of other cultures she was coming to appreciate as well: Coldplay, pasta, Harry Potter novels. She retreated into her schoolwork, studying harder, doing more. And when she got to high school, she worked harder still.

In the entrance hall of Randolph High, on a bright yellow bulletin board on the wall, the administration posts, each semester, the honor roll for each grade, all the top scholars from a school of almost fifteen hundred students, listed in order of their grade point average. In the first semester of her freshman year, Shannens name appeared at the very top of the list, and her name had stayed at the top ever since. Now, as graduation approached, her academic average was 97.7 percent, which would almost certainly make her valedictorian. In three and a half years, she had not missed a single day of high school.

But remaining number one took an enormous effort. Each night, Shannen stayed up until her homework was done perfectly, sometimes till four or five in the morning, ignoring her mothers admonitions to close the books and go to bed. The previous year, her junior year, was the most grueling. She took three AP courses, and she studied so relentlessly in the first semester that by Christmas she had lost eleven pounds off her already small frame. She got used to sleeping three hours a night. She drank so much coffee that she became immune to its effects.

The harder she worked, the greater peoples expectations for her grew. And the more she felt the weight of those expectations, the harder she felt she had to work. Where it was all leading, in Shannens mind, was college. And not just any college. When she was little, teachers and family members saw her intelligence and intense determination and predicted that she would make it into an Ivy League school. At first it was just one of those crazy things people say to a smart kid, but as time went on, this recurring prophecy began to seem more plausible.

Beginning in sophomore year, Shannen took free SAT-prep classes at Columbia University, and each time she visited, she felt a bit more at home surrounded by neoclassical architecture and great books. In the spring of junior year, she was accepted into a highly selective and demanding college-prep summer program for low-income students called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America; historically, more than half of each years LEDA class was admitted to an Ivy League college. Then four students from the class above hers at Randolphwhich is not, on average, a high-achieving schoolwere admitted to Ivy Leaguelevel colleges: Penn, Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia. They all got full-ride scholarships, and Shannen knew, given her familys limited income, that if she were admitted, she would probably be offered the same. Suddenly the idea that she might aspire to a place like Penn or Princeton didnt seem crazy at all.