This is Sarah Stewart Holland and this is Beth Silverce. Thank you for joining us for

Pantsuit Politics.

Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics where we take a different approach to

the news this week. We're talking about the state of the schools beginning today with higher

education and then talking K-12 on Friday. So we know we can't cover the full state of the

schools in two episodes and that conversations will continue far beyond what we do this week,

but we have realized lately in our team meetings that education related issues just keep surfacing

for us. So we wanted to put all of this together this week to see what we learned from it.

Today we're talking higher education beginning with student loans and the cost of college.

Then we're going to talk about affirmative action in college admissions and what the goal

of these systems are. Outside of politics we are going to talk about all of the graduations from

high school and college that are coming up and happening right now and what appropriate gifts

look like for those graduates. Before we jump in we wanted to remind you that we are in the midst of

our biannual premium drive. At the end of every show you hear a list of executive producers. These

are our listeners who support our work at the hundred dollar a month level and we talk to our

executive producers and they get quarterly updates and they give incredibly valuable feedback.

For example, one of our longtime executive producers Martha suggested that we share a little more

about what our day-to-day work looks like and how the support from listeners enables us to do that

work. So we wanted you to hear directly from Elise today and what her job as managing director

involves. This is Elise, the managing director of Pantsuit Politics. Great title, right? But what does

managing director actually mean? My typical party small talk explanation is that I keep all the trains

running here at the show. What that actually looks like is different every day, which is part of why

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