The Years That Matter Most Quotes

“If we now want to nudge our country back in that direction, we might begin by embracing a principle that seemed self-evident to Americans a century ago, but is less widely acknowledged today: Our collective public education benefits us all.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“You’re on your own. You figure out how to get the skills you’re going to need.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Engaging with their peers made them feel like strangers in a place they could not fully call home,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“they favor students from the Privileged Poor over the Doubly Disadvantaged as a way to “hedge their bets on diversity.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“What she [Winterer] said was, in a way, not that different from what Ivonne had heard from Ileana after her last two tests: Things really aren't equal. They really aren't fair. You really are way behind where you deserve to be, and it really is going to be vary hard to catch up.
Where Winterer's message diverged from Ileana's was in what she said to Ivonne next: Where you stand in calculus right now has nothing to do with who you really are. Who you really are is a mathematician. It's not your fault that you're behind. And it's not your destiny. It is going to be hard to erase the disparity between your math knowledge and Marco's. But if you want that knowledge, you can get it. And if you decide you do want to get it, I'm here to help.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“When I spoke to Greg Walton one fall afternoon in his office at Stanford, he explained that freshman year of college, especially, is full of these ambiguous moments, and students generally don’t have enough context to figure out on their own how to interpret them. The point of his experiment with Cohen, and others like it, is to steer students, in these moments of uncertainty, toward a story that is going to help them rather than hold them back.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“During her senior year, she would often stop in to the school’s guidance office, looking for help with scholarships or financial aid, but the counselors there would just shrug.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“If you do this right, then during that period of time between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two you can arrest the damage that eighteen years of mediocre academic preparation has done to a student. If you can put somebody in the right place, in the right environment, with the right support structures, you can do wonders.” 2.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“the hoarding of opportunity.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“The administration’s whole community-college initiative just—poof—disappeared overnight.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“He stood up, in a rage, and called his teacher a “fucking moron.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“At Chick-fil-A, she was required to maintain “open availability” from 5:30 a.m. to midnight, six days a week,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Today, for many young Americans, a BA is simply an insurance policy against moving down.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“just have conversations with professors in which he could demonstrate his understanding of a book”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“If at an unsettled moment like that someone provides students with a coherent narrative to hang on to”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“It felt like they were trying to hide education from me,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“College Board’s own research, then, for about two-thirds of high school seniors, the SAT doesn’t matter much”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“the output is always the same: Admit more rich kids. It’s true everywhere:”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Frisch told Golden that no one at the school believed Kushner could possibly get into Harvard on his merits.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“fluffernutter pudding shots,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“typing her assignments on a phone with a cracked screen.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“being perceived as a potentially fun friend greatly increased your chance of being hired.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“By the time you reach the last page of Pedigree, you either want to go firebomb a bank or enroll your kid in squash lessons”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“and now, officially, SAT stands for nothing at all.)”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Annual revenues at the College Board are more than a billion dollars,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“are they graduating? And if they’re not, what does that mean for our country?”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“but that student won’t perform well academically if they don’t feel like they belong there.”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Elite colleges almost never sent recruiters to the high schools attended by these income-typical students,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“and they all had hot chocolate”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

“Ned’s rate as an SAT or ACT tutor is $400 an hour,”
― Paul Tough, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us