Daniel Golden

I am a journalist and author, best known for my investigative reporting on higher education. Some college administrators have called me a muckraker or a gadfly, labels that I wear with pride. I won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. I expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, It drew renewed attention in the Trump era because of its disclosure that Jared Kushner was admitted to Harvard after his father pledged $2.5 million to the university. A new edition with a chapter on the Varsity Blues scandal was published in 2019. My second book was Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities, which was published in 2017. One of my idols, the famed spy novelist John Le Carré, called it "timely and shocking." My day job is as a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica, where I co-edited a 2019 Pulitzer-winning series about the MS-13 gang. Before joining ProPublica, I worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News. I edited a series about tax inversions--companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes-- that earned Bloomberg's first-ever Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Prior to The Wall Street Journal, I spent 18 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including four years on its Spotlight team. I have won numerous honors aside from the Pulitzer, including three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the New York Press Club Gold Keyboard award, and two Education Writers Association Grand Prizes. I was a Pulitzer finalist in 2011 for a series of Bloomberg articles on for-profit colleges that recruit soldiers, veterans, the homeless, and low-income students, often to leave them with debt and no degree. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where my parents were professors at the University of Massachusetts. My wife Kathy and I have lived in Belmont, a Boston suburb, for 35 years. Outside of work, most of my time is devoted to family, watching Boston sports, and walking our golden retriever, Sydney.