In praise of affordable schools and failure

Perspectives from the proverbial ivory tower

About a month ago I ran an interview with author Nicole LaPorte about her book on Operation Varsity Blues and invited witches who work in academia to weigh in with their perspectives on what has changed since they were in college and how their work has influenced what they hope for their own kids when they consider college:

From a witch at a top-10 institution in the Chicago area who has been there for 13 years and is an insider in upper administration—

It’s become very clear to me in the last few years that top tier institutions are toxic environments. Those crazy stories in the news lately about Lehman employees working 100 hour weeks on the reg? We’re the feeders to that shit. Some students get off on it, just like some Lehman assholes think that kind of experience is good for ‘weeding’ their talent. The takeaway for me is that I don’t want my kids to think their value in this world is dependent on their income, or their work ethic, or how many extracurriculars they have (both as students and as weird adults who think rock climbing is a legit entry in their hobby portfolio).

I read this piece recently and can’t say anything was news to me, but it was a further stark reminder that we are perpetuating a class divide that on its face promises everyone can be a Brahmin if they try hard enough but is simply not true.

Long story short, if my kids can get into any accredited four-year school, I’ll be super happy. Or, I hope they will be the very best HVAC technicians they can be and be proud of their work. There are carpenters at my office today (Achilles and Tim!) and I found myself wondering if I would be happier if I had been a carpenter. (And you were my lady.)

That said, I still believe with all my heart in the research mission of the academy, so there’s that.

From Kaitlyn W.B., in Fairfield, CT —

I worked in higher ed fundraising for 12 years - most recently with individual donors at Yale (which is my alma mater). I left because I couldn't stomach asking people for more money for a school that has $30 billion in their endowment. I am trying to wrap my brain around the fact that a.) my kids will almost certainly not be going to our alma maters (my husband graduated from Dartmouth) unless we can pay an additional $100K or so in donations and then b) no matter what, we'll be paying AT LEAST $500K for tuition for our kids' college education and does it even feel worth it? 

My kids are 7 and 4 and we're saving like mad, but having seen up close and personal how big of an influence $$$ has on admissions decisions (and this is the legal stuff!), I just don't know how to think about the reality of college for them. 

From a professor witch at a private Midwest University—

I find college students to be less mature and less responsible than when I was in college, although not across the board. There's a lot of expectation for more hand-holding through courses and assignments. I’m probably one of the kinder, gentler, more compassionate faculty members in that regard. I understand students face all sorts of pressures and responsibilities and have jobs, and for many, they’re the first student in their family to go to college. I try to be relatively flexible. But I think students have the sense that everything is your job as the faculty member and you’re supposed to impart this knowledge on them. They’re the paying customers.

Everything has shifted to the idea of a business model in higher ed. It’s like I work for them or their family so they’re expecting to be entertained in class, that it’s my job to give them a really good experience, rather than they get out of it what they put into it. Eve​n though I try to make courses interesting for students through a lot of interactive work and discussion and not to just lecture for an hour, I try not to just deliver knowledge to them. I try to help them come to that knowledge on their own, but I’m finding more that students don’t like that. They think I’m not doing my job if I'm not telling them exactly what they need to know and that’s always reflected in course evaluation​s. They don't want to come to the knowledge themselves, they want to know, “What do I need to know to pass this class?” The comments on course evaluations have changed in the last 6-7 years since I started. Sometimes it’s like think they’re filling out a Yelp review. ​This is something that impacts my career and something I’d take seriously about how I might make this course better for you, but I’m not necessarily going to make it easier or give you lists of what you need to know.

I have a really different perspective than I once did. I wanted to go to a big-name school, a really top school. I wouldn’t discourage my kids from applying to one but my own colleagues who are stars in their fields and who have PhDs didn’t all go to big-name undergraduate institutions. Many went to smaller schools or state schools or places you've never heard of and did really well and were really strong students and then selected wisely for graduate school. I see how people can succeed very well not going to a Georgetown or a Notre Dame or a Harvard or a Yale. Depending on what you end up wanting to do, those are the places you want to look for graduate programs. Knowing what I know too  ​about what private education costs, I don’t know if it’s worth paying the private tuition when you can get a really good education somewhere else. I know those names do carry weight and they’ve made connections for me although at the time that wasn’t what I was thinking of. They helped me get where I am but it’s also very clear you can go very far without going ​to one of those schools too.

My second-grade son has some anxiety at school and his therapist tells me it’s all internal; no matter what we say, he still feels anxious. The thing we care the most about is that he’s a good, kind person, that he learns to be welcoming and inclusive and everything else will fall into place. Do I think if he makes Bs and Cs will he find a place to go to college that’s right for him? Absolutely. I wasn't thinking about fit when I went to college. You really have to find a place that seems like the right fit for you. There are so many different things that go into that. I want him to do the work and I want him to work hard but if he’s working hard, the results are the results. Of course, I talk a big game.

From Lauren Pearlman, a professor at the University of Florida—

Current college kids’ experiences seem so different now compared to when I was in school. Everything is more pre-professional. I graduated from a small liberal arts school well before the 2007-2009 recession and now teach at an RI university. These students have to pick their majors before they even attend school, whereas I think I declared at the end of my sophomore year. They are tracked in their majors to help ensure they graduate in four years, not because it's better for them but to help our national ranking. Then there's the anxiety. They have so much anxiety. One interesting difference is that they seem more open about mental health struggles. On more than a few occasions, students have even shared with me in office hours that they are introverts and discuss how that makes them process things differently. I went to school before everyone had a cell phone, so that's another big difference, the way they can stay constantly connected to their parents. I see it when I advise incoming freshmen - they don't really know what they want to do, because they've never truly been allowed to explore different paths or take risks. I guess that's one of the biggest observations, just the fact that they are so afraid to take risks. Even open-ended writing prompts frustrate them. And this is no fault of theirs! They've been conditioned to learn a certain way, thanks to No Child Left Behind standardized testing, 5 paragraph essays, etc. 

So many of my students have never failed anything in their lives, and then they get to college and get a bad grade or have to change their major and they have no coping mechanisms. And it's in large part because their parents have always shielded them from failure and haven't let them make mistakes. And I get it - the stakes are so high these days! But if students don't know how to fail, then they don't really know how to succeed. So I would tell them to let them make mistakes and let them figure things out for themselves. I was advising a student who couldn't get into the course she wanted during registration and she said it wouldn't be a problem because her mom would just refresh all day for her during add/drop. Students who forget their passwords will call their parents asking for them. So I guess I would tell them not to enable them because they have to learn resilience.

Every year, I see these students starting school with dozens of AP/IB/AICE credits. They are so burnt out! Before they even start college! They've been under pressure for all of their high school careers. I really hope that seeing this first-hand helps me put a premium on goals for my kids that aren't so academically oriented. I hope that I encourage their happiness over their ability to perform well on tests and get good grades. But it's so hard because I also know that they have to do objectively well in order to get into a school that will help foster their imagination and creativity and, hopefully, their happiness. My parents were great about not imposing their own goals on me, but I was also really driven and I think they knew I put enough pressure on myself. My kids are still young (5 and 9) but I do want them to go somewhere where they will be given all the opportunities to be their best selves. Can that happen anywhere? Yeah, I think so. But is this easier at certain places? I also think so.

From a faculty member at a university in Ohio—

I have a lot of thoughts about college students and the pressures they are up against, and I’m watching how those pressures are forming and reforming during the pandemic. It definitely affected my approach in raising my 4-year-old son. I can’t believe how early the pressure starts. Right now we have friends whose preschoolers are in 3 or 4 supplemental activities and it just feels crazy. My husband and I worry that exploring a sport, instrument, or other extracurricular for the fun of it will no longer be a thing. You’ve got to be good at whatever extracurricular you choose from the get-go and the competition only intensifies. I see this in college students — the need to be perfect at everything and fear that going through a sometimes messy learning process means failure. I teach writing and constantly emphasize that it is not only ok but important to do shitty work from time to time. This can be a major mindset shift for many young adults. Learning and growing and improving at anything (academics, sports, hobbies) is valuable! It molds and shapes us as people. I put a lot of emphasis on the process of learning and how that informs the final product. I think that applies to an entire life philosophy.

From Anton DiSclafani, an associate professor of English/creative writing at Auburn—

The kids seem savvier now than when I was in school. They think about things that I did not think about. I went to Emory, graduated in 2003. Then I went to grad school at Washington University in St. Louis and taught there from 2006-2015; since 2015, I've been at Auburn University, in Alabama. So I've taught at both ends of the spectrum--a wealthy private school where a lot of the kids had money, came from money, etc, to a state university where a lot of my students are first-generation college students. The students at Wash U were definitely savvier—they thought about their careers in ways that, frankly, kind of astonished me. They were used to doors opening for them—they went to excellent private high schools, where they were taught they could do anything, and college was an extension of that—and they wanted professors to help open those doors. Megan Daum has a great essay on going into debt—a lot it incurred educating herself, and she talks about how this kind of privilege is good, on some level—you’re taught you can have whatever you want, which makes you go after whatever you want.

My students at Auburn are more respectful (that’s the south, I think—if you’re over the age of 25 you get called ma’am) and they’re not as bold, for lack of a better word, as my Wash U students. But they’re still incredibly ambitious, and their ambition has a goal—I think this is what is most different from when I was in college. Like, I loved writing, but it didn’t really occur to me that I could write a novel. I just wanted to write, and so when a professor suggested MFA programs I thought “Oh yeah, that sounds good.” I was ambitious, too (annoyingly so—I was at every office hour my professors ever had) but I wasn’t envisioning my career in the same way.

I think is largely a result of the internet. The internet was around, obviously, in 1999, but there weren’t blogs comparing MFA programs or easily found lists of places you should submit your short stories to, or Twitter, where you could follow writers, etc, etc.

I would tell the parents of my students it’s OK to let their kids fail. It’s also something I tell myself, though my kids are young—6 and 3. Most of my students are devastated by any grade lower than an A. Part of that is because of the massive inflation of grades in college, but part of that is because they’ve never really failed. So college has kind of become this place where you are reinforced—“That was good, here’s an A!”—instead of asked to work harder. This was definitely more true at Wash U than at Auburn, but it’s something I see everywhere.

My feeling about higher education is that it’s kind of the same everywhere. Obviously, there are major differences between a place like Wash U and a place like Auburn. Obviously. Auburn is a football school, for instance. But I think you can get the same experience at both schools. Take me. I was a nerdy little freshman who wanted to read books. The same kinds of professors teach at all schools—we all have the same degrees, basically the same publications, etc—so you get the same teaching at most colleges. Most colleges offer small class sizes (because class size affects their rankings) and all professors offer office hours, etc. I loved Emory—it felt like such a revelation after my shitty high school experience—but I think I could have loved a lot of places.

I hate to say this, but college has become much more about a lifestyle experience and much less about, well, learning. I mean, look at how the administrative positions at colleges have exploded while tenured professors have decreased rapidly. So my goal for my children is for them to go to a place they’ll like, but I honestly feel like they could like a lot of places, and that they don’t need to go to a tiny liberal arts college that costs $80K a year in order to learn and grow as a person. They can do that at a state school.

I do not want my children to accrue debt when they go to college, and that’s what I would tell everyone sending their kids to college—do not go into debt to do it. Take it from someone who has worked in higher ed for her entire adult life—it is not worth it. If it’s between a state school and that tiny liberal arts college, choose the state school. If I’d stayed in-state, I likely would have gone to the University of Florida. I probably would have felt alienated by the football and the Greek life scene. But the Greek life scene at Emory felt alienating, too, and so did the emphasis on science. So you make your place, and you do that by making friends, joining clubs (art clubs for me, baby), and visiting office hours.”

From a witch with nearly 20 years experience in higher education at both highly selective and less selective institutions—

There’s much more of an emphasis of recruiting a diverse class than when I went to school. If you look at my college’s (lower case, hard copy) face book, it’s a lot of white kids from private schools from rich places. I also think in this last year, with the suspension of standardized testing and a global emphasis on inequality, there are more pipelines to get to college and more attuned admissions counselors who are looking for an Amanda Gorman. 

There is a new level of support that schools are expected to offer. When I was in college, we were on the cusp of academic advising becoming more of a field, rather than something a nice professor did. The current space trend is to make things accessible and physically close to each other. At Wooster College, for example, the registrar is next to advising and where you pay your bills. They all get to know each other and can literally walk students to the next step. The increased emphasis on services undoubtedly makes everything more expensive. The expectations are unwavering and people like me cost money. 

I distinctly recall meetings where I asked the student a question and the parent is answering me. When students and families leave my office like that, I think, “How do I make sure I don't hamper my child so that he can’t answer a question about an academic interest without looking at me?” While it is expected to have your first meeting with the disability office with a parent there because there’s a legal shift in responsibility, but if a student can’t answer “What classes do you like? What are you excited to learn about?” without looking at their mom, I feel sad.

I work at such a small school now, there’s something nice about it. If a parent calls and is like “I’m worried about my daughter,” I can send someone to her room and say “Hey, call your mom, ok?” It’s so normalized now. That used to be weird ten years ago. There was an awful story in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently about that happening at Columbia with an uncle calling and they didn't check on the kid and the kid died of an overdose. 

Pre-COVID, enrollment conversations were all about 2024, the demographic cliff of traditionally-aged students. In 2008, fewer people made babies. So there has been a demographic cliff coming for 18 years. 18-year-olds aren’t born yesterday. There are literally not going to be enough 18-year-olds to go around to the 3,000+ higher education institutions. Then COVID hit and that blew the pants off that.

Prior to last year, I think a lot of schools were "too good” to teach online. Welp, they figured it out. Now schools are launching their own online programs, targeting folks with some college but no degree. We’ve already seen and will continue to see, schools closing or mergers happening. People are trying to figure out who survives. Small, tuition-driven schools compete with each other and offer substantial discounts to attract great students. Some of these schools are pressing up against a 65-70% discount rate. That means the average student pays 30-35% of the tuition cost, barely covering the cost of operations. It’s like running a store that is always in a going out of business sale. Folks in the enrollment industry call it the race to the bottom. 

From Annie Logue, financial writer, and former adjunct at the University of Illinois at Chicago—

I think the ‘elite’ colleges, however defined, have advantages, especially in building social capital, but also because it’s easier to take advantage of the experiences on campus because your fellow students are. Your stereotypical burnout is getting high in his fraternity house, where he's some sort of random officer, and his buddies drag him to class. At a commuter school, your random burnout is in his parents' basement, nothing on his resume, no social capital, no peer pressure to get him to class.

Commuter schools, non-flagship state schools, and so on have clubs and special events, undergraduate research opportunities just like fancy colleges. These schools may be easy to get into, but you have to be a little bit savvy to graduate and work harder to get the "college" experience. These graduates tend to have a great work ethic, a little moxie, and respect for diversity. My nieces had to attend a commuter college because their father teaches there and they got free tuition. They worked with what they had and were both leaders in campus organizations, and they got to participate in a lot of special programming as honors students (as they had considerably higher ACT scores than the average admitted student.) 

Employers often don't see the strength of these students, though. I would have students at UIC who would tell me that they wanted to get analyst jobs at big investment banks like Goldman Sachs, but let's face it: Goldman Sachs doesn't hire at places like UIC. The only exceptions they make to recruiting at the Ivies, etc. is when they recruit the children of clients. 

And the snobbery! When I worked in investment banking, I was like the diversity hire with my UChicago MBA. Everyone else went to Harvard or Stanford. That snobbery is real in some industries, unfortunately. The kids who need the social capital of college the most don't get it because the elite schools take so few students and scare people off with their list prices—although they are often cheaper after all the aid. It does take a little privilege to say that where you go to college doesn't matter. I think it does matter, but it is hardly the be-all and end-all.

Now, speaking as a parent: College admissions wasn't THAT stressful. Our kid had reasonable expectations, we had reasonable expectations, and his high school had good counseling. High school admissions in Chicago, on the other hand, was really stressful. But by junior and senior year of high school, the kids are (mostly) mature enough to understand the game and make good choices. And if they aren't, they probably aren't ready for college. Not everyone is at 18, and the US university system is flexible. I often had grown-ups in my classes at UIC. That was one aspect of the diversity on campus.

The Varsity Blues story is upsetting on so many levels. Those kids have tremendous social capital; they would not benefit from that aspect of attending a fancy college. There are so many other ways to get a good education than to go to USC or Georgetown! And, their parents didn't trust them to do it themselves. Choosing a college is one of the few rites of passage in our culture. Those parents took that from their children. 

From Layna M., Professor, Princeton—

A lot of students now come into college with a pre-professional sense. They feel pressured already as first-year students to think about, “What is this going to do for my career?” This is part of that general worry some of us have about the decline of liberal arts education, not so much seeing education as a means to be a better person or a better citizen but what’s going to be the link between the specific skills now and the job I’ll get. A lot of kids want to do computer science and data science, which can be useful, but we hope they will ground it in “How do I use that to understand politics or economics or sociology or psychology?”

It’s not surprising, regarding the worries about student loan debt. I used to get a lot of kids in my intro classes who thought they should go to med or law school and when you probed them a little bit, they’d say, “This is what I have been brought up to think I should do, so that’s the marker of success.” They’re not doing the thing they want to do. It’s sad to watch them suffer with that sometimes.  As a political science professor at UNC Chapel Hill (where I was for 16 years before coming to Princeton last year), I ended up with a lot of students who came in as pre-med, found the first-year science classes to be too challenging, and were disappointed with their grades. So they left natural science and entered the social sciences, thinking, “Well, I can be a lawyer.” Political scientists spend a lot of time convincing undergrads that they can do things other than law school with their social sciences training.

I would say that we faculty always complain that students don’t like to read. Students complain we ask them to read too much, “Really, you want me to go through a. 20 page article? Aren’t there bullet points?” I think all of our attention spans aren’t what they once were. The way students are taught to write is so formulaic – the five paragraph essay. When students come into the undergraduate classroom, if I ask them to write an 800 word paper making an argument, they’re afraid to be creative at all. They want to know what’s the rubric instead of this more holistic approach--are you making an argument? Are you providing supporting evidence? The standardized assessment of writing means many of them are getting filters when it comes to how they think about expressing themselves.

On the other hand, I’m often amazed by the students I encounter. Many of them have done a lot of amazing stuff. It's sometimes the result of privilege that they can do wonderful internships in exotic places, but it’s also to some extent that they’re interested in the world. They are interested in social justice and want to think about development or LGBTQ+ events and go create this event or group to do that. Even in high school, some of them are like, “I want to start a social entrepreneurship NGO,” or  “Can I be your unpaid research assistant?” They’re kind of plucky and thinking about how to get engaged.

My husband is also a poli sci PhD who was also a first generation college student. He grew up in England and went to a so-called redbrick university in the UK. It was not Oxford or Cambridge and his life is fine. We feel very fortunate that we got the opportunities we did-- we have two tenured jobs at an Ivy League school. The idea that there is one perfect university for every student is not something we embrace. We have this attitude that a kid ought to go to a place that makes them happy.  We have three kids and they’re each very different. The eldest, who is 14, really doesn’t react well to high-stress academic environments. When you live in university towns, even in the public schools there’s all of this “Who’s taking how many AP classes?” If that mode doesn’t work for you, we’re not going to push you and make you miserable. You have to figure out how to be happy.

If you're not in the academic world, college admissions is this mystical thing. Some people think there’s this formula out there and if you can just figure it out, you'll be among the 4% of kids who get into Harvard or Princeton. I worked with the admissions office at UNC where I saw it more from the inside. When you know it a little bit better you think, “It’s OK if you don’t work out that mystical formula.” If you don’t get into your dream school, it’s not a reflection of you. Schools are looking for so many things when they admit students. For the kids who apply, you want to do well and work hard and set yourself up, but you don't want to have this sense, if you don’t get this thing, it’s a sign of what’s wrong with you. It might not be about you at all. 

From Christy Klimas, Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Studies, DePaul University—

My undergraduate college, Southampton College-Long Island University, no longer exists. They always ran in the red and the other campuses got sick of sending them money. When I went, it was one of the top three schools for marine science, which was what my major was.

One-third of the students at DePaul, where I teach, are first-generation college students. Between 80-95% of students get some form of aid. They often also work to go to school. The students have worked really hard to get there, they’re grateful to be there and grateful for the learning opportunities and sometimes I’ll have to explain to students that they should ask questions, that it’s part of what they’re there for. They’re paying for this, I’m there and it’s not an inconvenience to ask me a question. This is particularly true with first-generation students. The hardest part of working at a university for me is the fact that for some students the debt they take on to be there is overwhelming. If they’re struggling, will that pay off for them? 

We’re really lucky because my kids could go to DePaul for free. There’s tuition exchange programs and they could go to other schools in the network for less; that gives them a lot more options, but it’s hard knowing so many other people don’t have these reduced cost options to go to college, especially since higher ed is a gatekeeper institution where if you have the funds to go to school and get a good job, unpaid internships, if having money means that you can get more out of college and having her school potentially paid for will give her more opportunities. 

My husband went to Harvard. Sometimes he’ll mention it to my older daughter, but not that she has to go there or anything like that. He has had opportunities that were predominantly due to him being at Harvard because faculty do cutting-edge research there and there’s the value associated with the name of Harvard. My husband is not like this, but he went to Columbia for grad school and we’d go to alumni events where people would ask where I went to school and once they realized I didn’t go to a big-name school, people would just ignore me for an hour, hour and a half. I remember one person who was purposefully ignoring me until I mentioned I did work in the Amazon and then started talking with me. It was like I had to prove myself. This isn’t true with my husband or many of his friends from college but I have met other people, where I’m like, “Oh, I’ve known you for 15 seconds and I know you went to Harvard. Awesome, so proud.” The name recognition means a lot but it cuts both ways. It can really help you, but sometimes it makes you forget that people are brilliant in their own way whether or not they went to Harvard. This is something that higher ed needs to grapple with-- that there is value in not having university degrees, too. If my older daughter decided she didn't want to go to university I’d be surprised because she’s so academically oriented but at the same time, some of the smartest people I know I’ve worked within other countries don't even have high school degrees.

Early on, with my older daughter and schoolwork, I was like “OK, you can fail. I’m not going to do it for you. If you're not going to do it that’s fine, but you’ll learn very quickly what happens when you don’t.” We don’t monitor her very much. COVID has slightly changed things because all of a sudden it's like, wait, now we’re getting emails you're not turning stuff in. Do we care? Yes. But we care more that she’s doing her best and if her best is a C or an F, OK. I think learning how to fail, pivot, and learn from that is important. The challenges we face in life are challenges because they're not easy. We pushed her to do volleyball because it doesn’t come easy for her so she has to work hard to get better. She’s good at it, now. Some of the things we have pushed her to do involved an element of failure so she can learn from that. In some ways you can say we set her up for failure, which sounds horrible.

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