KOL254 | Interviewing Tom Woods About Getting Into Harvard

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 254. From TomWoods Ep. 1304 How I Got into Harvard. I interviewed Tom about this and related questions since my 15 year old son is nearing college age and I was curious. Transcript below. From Tom's shownotes: Stephan Kinsella, the libertarian theorist and author of Against Intellectual Property, asked me the other day about my college admission experience. We are each the parent of a tenth grader, so the topic of college comes up in our households. I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about it, but we decided he would in effect host this episode and ask me questions. The resulting conversation turned out to be great! Read the original article at TomWoods.com. http://tomwoods.com/ep-1304-how-i-got-into-harvard/ https://youtu.be/YyQS0x7AOOM?si=YLNB6F6KAcvDJosi   Transcript   0:00 the Tom would show episode 1304 prepared a set fire to the index card of 0:06 allowable opinion your daily dose of Liberty education starts here the Tom 0:11 woods show hail you homeschooling parents out there you may be thinking to 0:17 yourselves well it's too far into the school year for me to change homeschooling programs now so we'll just 0:24 have to slog through it if that's how you feel go ahead and Chuck that labor-intensive 0:29 homeschool program you've got and join the self-taught Ron Paul curriculum through my link where you get a hundred 0:36 sixty dollars worth of free bonuses check it out at Ron Paul homeschool calm 0:41 everybody Tom was here with Stephan Kinsella you know Stephan as the author Who is Stephan Kinsella 0:47 of against intellectual property which is an extremely challenging book it's 0:53 the kind of book whose thesis you almost don't want to accept when you first start reading it and then by the end of 0:58 it you want to take that book and bash people over the head who don't accept it so it's very very well done interesting 1:04 he's also the author of the forthcoming as in early 2009 international 1:09 investment political risk and dispute resolution a practitioners guide published by Oxford and you can find him 1:16 I pretty sure at Stephan Kinsella comm am i right Stefan that's all correct 1:22 okay all right well I'm gonna blame you for this episode if it turns out badly and maybe take the credit if it turns 1:29 out well but it was Stefan's idea the other day we were on facebook Messenger it's but we have decent we'll go like a 1:36 week no conversation to three weeks and then it'll be this incredible flurry of back and forth messages on all kinds of 1:43 things we're having one of those the other day and you have a son who you tell me is in the I know you have a son 1:48 of course but I didn't know what grade he was in the tenth grade and so it's in fact I have a daughter who's in the tenth grade and so you think about 1:55 college and I know we got people who say you shouldn't go to college I get that but it's it's you know it's for some 2:02 people it's the wise thing to do and you got to do it on a case-by-case basis but you're in that mode you're thinking once 2:08 again just as you were when you were kid about college and college application 2:13 in the process and so you thought it would be interesting to talk to me about my own experience and I insisted this 2:18 would not be interesting in any way and then you persuaded me more or less that 2:24 there may be people who would find this interesting and so I mean look if I've 2:29 done episodes on my stupid musical tastes then probably we can do an episode on this so I thought in this 2:35 episode I might kind of in a way turn the hosts mic over to you in a way yeah 2:40 to let you kind of guide the conversation and ask me things that you think I might be able to help with yeah The college process 2:45 and I'm a lot of Tom woods completest so I wasn't sure if you'd talk about this before that's why I was sort of asking you but yeah I'm in that mode where you 2:53 know tenth grader everyone's all my friends were thinking about college and yeah most people I know their kids are 3:00 going to college and you know I haven't let my son know that not going to college is an option okay so he's going to go right he's one of these thanks but 3:08 only for also for my own interest I've always been you know I went to a big state school and so a lot of us you 3:14 might not know it we have Ivy League Envy right you know we kind of are we're mystified by the the people to get to go 3:20 to those kind of schools right and especially now that my kids getting to 3:26 this point you know we want better things for our kids and to go to LSU or something like that not to bash LSU but 3:33 and these days given the phd glut yeah almost any school is gonna have a really 3:38 top-flight faculty well and I'm sure you're noticing to the college process now is apparently totally different than 3:45 we were when we were young or at least southerners when we were young I mean it was you're raised near a big state 3:51 school you apply there and you go it's really simple and it was pretty cheap and you did fine so you didn't have the 3:57 the issue of like oh maybe I'll go cross-country or maybe I'll go here or what scholarship process like and how do 4:02 I maximize my AC T scores or SAT scores and by the way has it ever annoyed you 4:07 that people say in especially some Yankees say SATs with a plural like I 4:12 took my SATs instead oh yeah I think I probably say that but I I get why that's 4:18 annoying yeah I mean it's it's it's not quite as bad as ATM machine no she makes 4:24 me want to commit an atrocity yeah I'm standing on line instead of in line but okay your thing - yeah I know I know 4:32 I don't know why they say that and anyway so you know it just so you went How I got into Harvard 4:37 to Harvard and the whole process just I'm always impressed by someone who was able to somehow do that especially and 4:43 so I was just curious how the hell did you do it because you know if you have a kid like all my friends kids we're all 4:49 we assume that Gale and Harvard these things are sort of how to reach or that it's really political now it's extremely 4:56 competitive you know you hear stories about some of the better schools even if you make a perfect SAT you're not 5:01 guaranteed to get it right so you know I don't know what it was like or and just 5:07 what the whole experience was like and by the way you and I both spoke at Yale in the last year so which was right for 5:12 me it was a pleasure because I can't turn down a chance to speak at a place that wouldn't have allowed me and as an undergrad all right let's dive it now 5:25 first of all I did notice it's not the same topic but it's a related topic that all the way back in episode 239 I have 5:32 an episode called how Tom navigated academia right and and so that was more once I got in right how did I fit in and 5:40 stuff like that that's kind of a different thing but I'll link to that on this show notes page as a related thing so how did I do well the thing is I'm 5:47 I'm not entirely sure so let's just walk through we'll talk about what I did and apparently it turned out to be enough I 5:54 will say that I went for a campus interview you have to do at least one 5:59 interview you have to have at least the alumni interview and if you happen to live within reasonable distance of 6:05 Cambridge you can also do an on-campus interview that was the way they did it in my day anyway so I lived 45 minutes 6:11 away from campus so I did both interviews even they what they wouldn't let you do an on-campus interview if you 6:16 didn't live close oh you could they just didn't want to disadvantage you like well if you don't do one here than 6:21 Bennet I just I figured I might as well I thought I made a pretty good impression of people so I might as well do it twice so I went in for that 6:28 interview but what I remember about it is we had somebody in my high school who was a year before me who had just 6:35 everything could ask for scholar athlete he had every credential you could ask for and he was rich ejected from Harvard and so I brought 6:42 that up and I just to say I had a little apprehension because I couldn't understand how this guy right would not 6:48 have gotten in and they asked the the woman Niner that maybe this was the alumni owner but I don't report it was 6:54 in Cambridge in fact I bet my life on it actually nothing about and it was the answer that came back was we basically 7:01 frankly said that he was a white man and she said we I'm not kidding you we probably already had enough of those 7:07 right when I was right right well just flat out well let me back up a second though so you came from sort of like High School 7:14 blue-collar family or lower family and so you didn't have any legacies or or so 7:21 so we were oh did you go to leave high school or just a regular high school or how does the public public high school 7:26 okay and so I assume you had good grade yeah I was the valedictorian okay so we 7:32 had okay so that's one explanation I guess between Don elector Ian straight A's helps but like so you knew you 7:37 wanted to go to college when you were in high school yeah definitely and did you think I can go anywhere in the country 7:43