Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Political Eclectics. This is Ricky Schlaught, and I'm here without Robbie and instead with Evan Mandry, who is a guest today with an excellent book that everyone should order. He is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a lawyer by training, but also the author of eight books, including Poison Ivy, How Elite Colleges Divide Us,

which anyone who's listened to the podcast for a while knows that that's kind of a passion issue for me as a proud dropout.

So, Evan, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Ricky. I'm very happy to be here.

So first, I think a good place to start is give us the elevator pitch for the book.

What can readers expect to read?

That elite colleges dramatically exacerbate social inequality,

that they're not just merely reflecting it, that they're making it worse,

and that they operate in connection

with suburbs to really drive de facto segregation in the United States, a standard kind of upper

middle class, rich white life course, as you live in the city until you have kids and then you

move to the suburbs. And what you're doing is you're chasing access to the narratives that elite colleges value.

And that really drives a huge wedge

between rich and poor in the United States.

Can we rewind to kind of the beginning for you?

And can you tell us a little bit about your own upbringing

in education and maybe your pathway into academia yourself?

I grew up in Brooklyn. Both of my parents were teachers. Actually, both of my parents went to

CUNY. They went to Brooklyn College. We lived in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island to a middle-class

white suburb called East Meadow when I was about 13, and I went to Harvard.

In retrospect, I think I was kind of the target of a scholarship program that was aimed at middle-class people.

It was actually kind of originally geared for farmers.

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