Interview: Andrew Rossi (Ivory Tower)

Andrew Rossi’s prior film, Page One: Inside the New York Times, delved into the newspaper industry while it began to teeter on the brink of collapse as the rise of blogs and social media began to take a strangle hold on physical news distribution. His latest, Ivory Tower, looks at another industry in tailspin – the higher education system. Anyone who hasn’t gotten a free ride to college in the last decade knows that the current business model in which students blindly accept loans upwards of $100,000 for college degrees which come with no guarantee of bagging a job that makes enough cash to pay that mountain of debt back. Rossi’s film is massively important in that it brings this issue to light with insightful clarity, though offers no obvious solutions. Just after the film’s premiere at Sundance earlier this year, I had the good fortune to sit down with the director to discuss how he managed to wrangle this expansive topic and what he thinks the solution may be. Our conversation can be found below: