Food Fight

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The first week I arrived, I was met at
the backdoor by local folks who were bringing in flats
of blueberries, and it was just it was remarkable. That's
Ken Cardon speaking. He's the executive chef at Bowden College
in Maine. In the world of American colleges, Chef Cardon's

(00:36):
food holds a special place. So you've consistently make the
top number one spot on the lists of best college food.
What are a couple of things that you think sets
Bowden 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

(00:59):
below us is a salad bar, and you'll notice in
the center of the salad bar this several prepared salads,
entree solids, and then you have you make your own areas.
To the right and left, there's homemade soups in vegan options,
there's fresh fruits and desserts, and then you'll see there's
conniments and toppings, and we actually make our own peanut

(01:20):
butter and bake our own breads, and that's all available
at every meal. My guess is your college wasn't like this.
Mine certaintly 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 launch is a hot turkey
sandwich and orizo and tofu salad. I worked in my

(01:42):
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 nineteen eighties. I don't
think that anyone properly understood back then how crucial healthy

(02:03):
eating was to a positive learning environment. Bodin is in
a whole different class. It's like paradise. The deli special
today is a smashed chickpe avocado and pesto sandwich, and
we have a faro salad with asparagus and pomegan cool. So,
can we take a look at the kitchen? Are you
able to go back there? As you can see if

(02:23):
you'll walk down and right here at this at this area,
we're preparing fresh rosemary is one of the ingredients in
tonight's dinner and they're cutting chicken, so everything really is
done from scratch. It has that for us, all touch,
fresh rosemary and the personal touch. But here's what I

(02:45):
want to talk about. The food at Bowden is actually
a problem, a moral problem. I don't mean this in
any way as a criticism of people like Ken Cardon.
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. No do I mean the
people students in particular shouldn't eat properly? They should Point

(03:09):
is at 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 Cardon's amazing food is
one of those things. My name is Malcolm Glaubew. Welcome
to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood.

(03:35):
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

(03:56):
the way of his making it at a 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 Boden is a big part of that problem. The
best way to understand this is to compare Bodin with
one of its competitors, Vassar College. Vasser is in Poughkeepsie,

(04:19):
just north of New York City. It's a lot like
Boden 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. Boden is smaller and preppier. Boden

(04:40):
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 ad vasor would you say food? It
could be better? You know, there's always room for improvement.
The salad bar always makes me kind of sad like
one time I was eating like a spinach kale stir

(05:01):
fry that was prepared and I may or may not
have found like an industrial size staple in it. The
president of Vassasar College is a woman named Katherine Hill.
She's an economist by training. Tall, gracious, distinguished, a touch
of gray, what you would expect from an academic leader.

(05:21):
We met in her office on the Vassasar campus, which
is full of lots of Gothic graystone buildings and creaky
oak staircases, huge double sash windows, ancient rugs, all very
nineteenth century. Before she was at Vassasor, Catherine Hill was
at Williams College, about two hours north at Poughkeepsie. She
was the provost. While she was there, Princeton dramatically expanded

(05:44):
its financial aid, and suddenly every liberal arts college in
the country felt it had to examine its policies as well,
and we had to figure out what we were going
to do in response to Princeton announcing that they were
going to move away from Lands. So Hill teams up
with another economist and starts digging around in the data
from the admission's office. A colleague of mine, Gordon Winston

(06:05):
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

(06:27):
we were also finding out that we weren't getting many
not surprisingly, Yeah, you know, I think we were finding
that we were asking families in the bottom forty percent
of the income distribution to pay, you know, about fifty
percent of their family incomes pre tax. He'll saying that
at that time, if the family of a poor, smart
kid wanted their child to go to Williams, that'd have
to spend half their income on tuition half. That's why

(06:49):
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 He'll becomes president of Vasser.
Vasser 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 verse either in terms

(07:10):
of socioeconomic diversity or racial diversity. So she decides to
change Vasser's priorities. Students from the poorest families in the
United States get a small five thousand dollars grant from
the federal government called a PELL grant. He'll decide she
wants to accept way more PELL grand students advassor so,
what are you spending on financially? We're spending about sixty
million dollars sixty million, yeah, and when I started in

(07:32):
six it was about twenty five million. Oh, I see,
So it's basically it's about double And we have about
twenty three percent PELL grant recipients, which makes us, I think,
the highest amongst a very large group of schools and
the lowest income kids and peal. When you started, what
was it, I think I read eleven percent when you started. Um, yeah,

(07:53):
you know, I'm not even sure we were tracking it,
but it was in the low teens. That was ten
years ago. Since then, Hall 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 accepted a school
like vasser and not compromise your academic standards. Okay, that's

(08:15):
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

(08:35):
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 Vassor, including room and board is
sixty two thousand dollars a year. You let in some
poor kid for free, you're out somewhere a range of

(08:57):
sixty two thousand dollars. 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

(09:18):
always making trade offs. Yeah, in the margin, did you
catch that better food in the dining hall? Right after
my producer Jacob went to Bowden to check out their food,
he went to vasser. How often do you eat there?
About twice a day? Jacob is talking to a sophomore
advassor named Amanda. So, lunch and dinner usually I do

(09:43):
like a quick breakfast in the dinner because breakfast is
notoriously their best meal. And what about dinner? Which dinner
look like a 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

(10:06):
not really sure about, and like pizza you should 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

(10:29):
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 one
hundred percent. When I'm talking about if you could step
in and make like sweeping changes to dining ADVs or
what would you change sweeping changes? I mean my thing is, like,

(10:52):
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 purate
some like unripe avocados. Vassar has terrible food. Boden practically

(11:13):
has a Michelin star. Two otherwise almost identical schools that,
on this one measure couldn't be more different, and why
because Bodin doesn't spend nearly as much on financial aid
as Vassar does. Now, I don't want to single out
Boden as some kind of moral villain. There are lots

(11:36):
of private colleges in the US that do a far
worse job than Boden at educating low income students. But
just listen to these numbers. Twenty three percent of Vassar's
undergraduates are on PELL grants. That is, they come from
the poorest part of American society. At Boden, just thirteen
percent of students are on pelgrants, so just over half

(11:56):
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 one. If you do better than average, your score
is greater than one. Among all American universities and colleges measured,
Vasser comes in eighth with a score of one point

(12:19):
three six, 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.
Bowden fifty first at one point zero five, just above average.
If you want an example of a school that does
really badly in the New York Times Index, New York

(12:40):
University NYU is a point six five, which ranks that
one hundred and fifty six, which is appalling. Now, why
does this matter? We don't want all schools to be
the same. What's wrong with the system Where one school
spends its marginal dollar on gathering the most interesting and

(13:01):
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. Boden and Vassar are connected. I'm back at Vassar.

(13:24):
I'm sitting in a small conference room in the main
administration building. In front of me is Robert Walton, Vassor's
vice president of finance. Vasser might be the home of
the edgy and the tattooed, but that's not Robert Walton.
He's a numbers guy, white hair, carefully trim beard. He's
got the school's budget open in front of him. So
if we look at our total budget sort of what

(13:47):
we actually spend, it's about one hundred and seventy five
million dollars, 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

(14:07):
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 two thousand, four hundred and fifty undergraduates Advasser.

(14:29):
A thousand of them are on the wealthy end of
the barbell. They pay full tuition or close to it.
That comes to sixty million dollars 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

(14:50):
Vasser 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 Advasser work. A couple of questions
before you went, you made this shift, which was what
roughly ten roughly two thousand and seven, happened midyear. Sort

(15:12):
of social heart. That's Marian Begaman, Vasser'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 eighty now seventy
five to eighty let's say, seventy five to eighty percent
of students paid full tuition back then. This is an

(15:33):
important point. The barbel 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,
Vasser goes from a place that quite comfortably supported itself

(15:56):
on tuition revenue to a place that has to rely
really heavily on its endowment to make the numbers work. Now,
Vasser is wealthy enough to pull that off. It all
adds up, but barely. They have no wiggle room. So
the one thousand kids who pay full tuition, Vassar needs
every single one. Without them, everything falls apart financially. I

(16:18):
asked Walton, what would happen if the number of full
paying students dropped? If even fifty of that one thousand
went elsewhere, that would be bad. That would be bad.
No wiggle room. Okay, Now about the endowment once again.
Bodin College is a good comparison. Bodin starts twenty fifteen

(16:41):
with an endowment of one point four billion dollars. 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 comes to one hundred and twenty million dollars.
So to put it another way, Boden had one hundred
and twenty million dollars cushion last year. What I've just

(17:03):
described explains how endowments at elite universities keep getting bigger
and bigger. They earn way more in 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 twenty fourteen
with twenty point six billion dollars in the bank. Let

(17:25):
me repeat that, twenty point six billion dollars in the bank.
They make two point one 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 seven
hundred million dollars left over, And after you add in
all the other money they raised, Princeton ends the year

(17:45):
with an endowment of twenty two point seven billion dollars.
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,

(18:06):
they could pay for it at a petty cash still
bank two hundred billion dollars. 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

(18:27):
is about. But let's go back to Vasser. Things are
a lot more complicated there. They have about a billion
dollars in their endowment. That's less than Boden, but for
Vaster to cover their expenses, they need to take out
significantly more from their endowment than Bowden does, so they
don't have the same kind of cushion. Last year, In fact,

(18:50):
Vasser 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 Vasser's other options? Well, they
could get smaller. One of the reasons Boden is in
such better shape is that Boden has only eighteen hundred students.

(19:10):
Vassaer is more than a third larger. If Vasser were
Bowden's size, then suddenly they have six hundred and fifty
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?

(19:33):
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 Vasser was to try and educate as many poor
smart kids as possible, because America has a huge problem

(19:56):
with not providing opportunity for poor smart kids. If you
cut six hundred and fifty spots, then you're part of
the problem. Again, I'm a physical conservative, but she's convinced me.
We don't pay any taxes in terms of to the
fads of the states, so we are a tax subsidized entity.
So one would logically conclude then if you have a

(20:19):
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 two point four
billion dollars return on their endowment, they don't pay a
dime of capital gains taxes on it. And Walton's pointing

(20:40):
out something really really crucial, which is that if you
get that kind of subsidy from society, you're supposed to
give back. Cutting six hundred and fifty spots is not
giving back. All right, how about this cut back on faculty,
bigger classes? No, no, no, that also defeats the purpose.

(21:01):
The whole point of the Vasser 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'll write back
where you started from. The point of Vasser is that
the best education comes when you mix students from all backgrounds.

(21:22):
When the child of an investment banker sits in class
next to the child of a janitor, that 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 a vassor and
you're trying to protect that idea of what an education is.
You have only one option. You tighten your belt as

(21:44):
tight as you can. You don't do anything extravagant. I
worked with a college at one time. If you're going
name that opened a new residence hall in the last
five years. That was all singles that 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

(22:05):
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 three hundred thousand like
my prior institution did. Thanks like that, Bill Clinton the
ultimate college amenity. The problem with belt tightening, though, is
attracting those one thousand full pay students, the ones whose

(22:27):
money Vasser desperately needs. Who are they? They're the children
of professionals, upper middle class and opera 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

(22:47):
are used to. So this is what keeps Catherine Hill
up at night. How can she keep those wealthy kids
coming to Vasser 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 thirty to forty years. So we are looking to

(23:09):
attract talented students from high income families. Are These are
kids who have grown up with their own bedroom, in
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

(23:33):
makes a different decision and doesn't spend it on financial aid,
then it puts us in the position of 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,

(23:54):
then they're gonna take some of those kids away from
us who want the fancy X. He'll didn't name any names,
but you know who she's talking about. She's talking about
Boden and the kids she worries that Boden will take
away are the kids from Beverly Hills in Manhattan who
grew up on beautifully ripe avocados and freshly cut rosemary.

(24:17):
Robert Walton serves on something called the Parents Advisory Committee ADVASSOR,
which is basically the parents of the rich kids, and
he hears it all the time. They comment, 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 that, you know,

(24:38):
they what do they say when they bring up food?
Do they complain about food about 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 a Vassor. That's not
what we focus on. That's just not what we're into. Yeah,
you know, and no apologies for that. I mean, that's

(24:58):
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 vasser can continue to
do this, to say to parents and students, if food
is really that important to you, go somewhere else. Those

(25:20):
kids come to Vassar for a campus visit and to
eat a saggy piece of pizza. Then they go to Boden,
where Chef Cardone is the god of the dining hall.
He's got amazing resources, a bigger endowment, six hundred and
fifty fewer students, half as many kids on pell grants,
and every day he's taking it up a notch in
a kitchen. How long can saggy pizza hold up against

(25:44):
ken cardone? When my producer Jacob was on his culinary
investigation at Boden, the students talked about the food of
their school like they were in Paris in the beginning
of the year. That ice cream didn't really taste that well,
like it was like kind of watery, and so I know,
someone like wrote a complaint card, like guys, and then

(26:05):
that's like so much better, like they just fixed it.
I've heard good things about the dessert. Is it good?
How do you compete with this? On your first Dame campus,
there's this lobster bake where every student on campus has
a choice of having a lobster for dinner or a
steak or a vegetarian option. It's really phenomenal. If I
were like to ask you, maybe like respective student was

(26:26):
coming to campus and they were asked about the food,
what would be your like 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.
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

(26:47):
is incredible. I cannot get over how excited this kid
is about the food of bud. Do you think he
talks this way about his professors? Oh? Have you tried
things that like you wouldn't have tried otherwise, Like what
kind of 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

(27:08):
was a real thing until I had it. You know,
I walked past it didn't travel, and I went back
might as well, and it was phenomena of sex. 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,

(27:29):
different kinds of meat, so 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 Boden. Don't let your kids go to Boden. Don't
let your friends go to Boden. Don't give money to
Boden or to any other school that serves amazing food
in its dining home. Because every time you support a

(27:51):
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 Bodins of the

(28:13):
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, your pocket them and run out with
your pockets full of Absolutely. Absolutely, I'm not joking. This

(28:34):
is Amanda again, the vast 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

(28:58):
about the food and whatnot, but I just feel much
better knowing that that money's going towards something useful. I
would much prefer that our school be giving money to
that then trying to make our food better. You know,
of course, case scenario, you get the minimum meal plan
and you can eat out. It's not a big deal.

(29:26):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
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You can get more information about this and other episodes
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Our show is produced by Mela Bell, Roxane Scott, and
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(29:50):
by Luis Guera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer,
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Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You couldn't
got every count to cop on me