Learn more about Paul Tough: For most of the 20th century, colleges and universities in the United States were powerful instruments of social mobility and increasing equality. Each generation’s population of college-educated adults was bigger and more diverse than the one before it—a phenomenon that helped create the great American middle class and produced the most powerful economy in the world. Today, the system of higher education in the United States tends to work very effectively for higher-income families, but it is no longer accomplishing its traditional mission of helping ambitious poor and working-class young people reach the middle and upper classes.
Paul Tough is the bestselling author of How Children Succeed and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and This American Life. In his new book, The Years That Matter Most, Tough describes the way higher education in America can both help and hinder young people searching for better opportunities. The book tells the stories of several remarkable students, including some for whom college acts as a powerful engine of social mobility. But Tough also reveals the sometimes hidden ways that our higher education system favors children of wealth and privilege, and holds back striving young Americans from modest backgrounds. We’re approaching a watershed moment, an opportunity to enable millions of young people to forge a reliable path to a decent life. At other points in American history, we’ve been able to unite to create educations systems that respond to their needs. We owe it to ourselves to do better—and we need to let history remind us that we can.
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