“And I’d say, ‘Where is Harvard located?’ They couldn’t tell me,” he recalled.
Of course, most high school students who want a college degree can’t and don’t harbor such ambitions. They need to go to college part-time, to choose public institutions within commuting distance from their parents’ homes, to select the cheapest option or to find a place that takes almost all comers, because they struggled through high school and emerged with unremarkable transcripts. Only a privileged minority of young people can even think about playing “The Hunger Games,” and many of them simply turn in whatever direction all the other contestants are headed.
Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, marveled to me: “Our applications for admission, which hovered around 9,000 for many, many years, suddenly doubled to 17,500. Then they increased to over 21,000. We have to turn away students who want tours and we find ourselves looking at an admit rate of 10 percent. Has this deterred students from applying? No. We find interest growing even further. I am left wondering: Is Colgate more desirable because it is more desired?”
Well, yes. Higher education is a marketplace. And many of its consumers care more about how they can outwardly trade on their college degree than about how it will inwardly transform them. “I saw this firsthand during a lunch with first-year students that had just unpacked their bags the prior day,” David Schanzer, a fellow professor of public policy at Duke, wrote in December in his newsletter, Perilous Times. “I started the lunch conversation asking the students what they were most looking forward to about college and, I kid you not, one of them asked me what activities they should do to maximize their chances for admission to law school. When I answered that the best approach was to find something they loved doing and doing it well and that Duke didn’t have a pre-law program, the student’s response was, ‘Why not?’”
The Times’s tool is a helpful and necessary instrument for pushing back against such superficial judgments. As I instructed it to show me only schools in cities and suburbs, and then adjusted the degree of importance I wanted it to place on, say, “campus safety” or “party scene,” I watched the list of institutions change and then change again. And I was struck by a sense of possibility — by how much is out there and how frequently that’s overlooked.
I was conversely impressed by how well college-bound students could home in on a short list of schools truly tailored to their needs. The madness of the admission process and students’ sense of desperation would be lessened greatly if they simply weren’t applying to so many more schools than their predecessors did.
A few weeks ago, I reached out to students I’ve taught at Duke and asked them about the work and worry that propelled them here. Few had qualms with how everything turned out. Many had misgivings about the journey to this point.
Sophie Riegel, a psychology major who will graduate in May, said that no one could have convinced her younger self “that a brand-name school is overrated, that I’d be happy anywhere.” “In my mind,” she wrote in an email to me, “if I didn’t get into Duke, my life was over.” She finds that silly now. The way she described her college years, they have been less about some charmed environment than about the discrete challenges she took on and the specific skills she decided to hone. Duke was to some extent incidental in that. “Maybe it’s time people ask themselves why they are going to college,” she wrote. “Getting a degree is not equivalent to getting an education.”
Frank Bruni
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