Inside the College Pricing Game ft. Dan Currell (Ep. 556)
Thinking LSAT
Nathan Fox and Ben Olson
4.6 • 886 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan Currell, former Department of Education official, joins the podcast to break down how colleges and law schools use opaque pricing, fake tuition numbers, and binding early decision contracts to maximize returns from students.
Check out all of our “What’s the Deal With” segments
Get caught up with our Word of the Week library
0:00 The Early Decision Racket
5:30 How College Pricing Actually Works
14:54 The Hidden Price Problem
22:13 Antitrust, Regulation, and Who Could Fix This
33:18 Who Pays Full Price?
41:59 Southern School Surge and Demographics
50:19 Record Law School Applications and Final Advice
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I feel like some of the ick is the huge disparity between information that some students have |
| 0:07.1 | and then the total lack of information that other students have. |
| 0:11.3 | Yeah, and just I'll have to maybe during this discussion come in every few minutes |
| 0:15.0 | to remind people that I'm the critic of the system, I think it should go away completely. |
| 0:18.2 | It should be murdered right in its crib. |
| 0:27.2 | Yeah. I think it should go away completely. It should be murdered right in its crib. Hello and welcome to episode 556 of the Thinking ElSat podcast. |
| 0:31.1 | I'm Nathan Fox. |
| 0:31.8 | With me is Ben Olson. |
| 0:33.0 | We are the co-founders of LSATDemon.com and the LSAT Demon Daily podcast. |
| 0:38.1 | Today we have a special guest, Dan Carell, and we're just going to jump right into the interview with Dan. |
| 0:45.8 | Our guest is Dan Carell. |
| 0:47.1 | Dan was a deputy, undersecretary, and senior advisor at the Department of Education from 2018 to 2021. |
| 0:54.6 | He has written opinion columns in the New York Times and writes about all things college on his substack, the college question. |
| 1:02.2 | Welcome, Dan. |
| 1:03.6 | Thank you. |
| 1:04.3 | Great to be here. |
| 1:05.9 | Thanks for joining. |
| 1:06.9 | We reached out to you because of, I believe, the piece that we saw in the New York Times entitled The Early Decision Option is a Racket. |
| 1:17.7 | Shut it down. |
| 1:19.2 | When did you write that piece? |
| 1:21.7 | That was last fall. |
| 1:23.8 | I had written a piece in 2024, so almost two years ago, about admissions |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nathan Fox and Ben Olson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nathan Fox and Ben Olson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.