What it’s like to get accepted to an Ivy League school for journalism and not be able to go

My parents didn’t go to college. Actually, they didn’t even finish high school. I wasn’t aware of this until the day of my own graduation from a low-ranked public high school in my small, Florida hometown where a guidance counselor once told me and my father, quite seriously, that I should just “drop out now” because of how much I sucked. Somehow, I made it through, though. At my miraculous graduation party, my elderly uncle congratulated me on being the “first in your clan” to graduate from high school, to which my aunt rasped, “Tony! Don’t say that.” It was too late, though. It clicked. I thought, “Oh, of course my parents didn’t graduate high school.”

The children of high school dropouts don’t have a great chance of going to college, statistics show. Higher education was a concept so foreign to my family that I don’t think it ever came up. This may have been partially out of embarrassment at their lack of knowledge — my parents or grandparents seriously wouldn’t know the difference between applying for Dartmouth or DeVry — but they were smart and self aware of their ignorance even if uneducated (lovely people, too!). Also there was no money to pay for it (I’m sure none of us even knew that I could simply sell myself into crushing debt, because none of them had ever needed to know about student loans). The one piece of career advice I remember came from my grandmother, who told me to try to get a job somewhere that had air conditioning.

So I came to higher education all on my own, in my mid 20s, years after jobs as a Sears treadmill salesman, a telemarketer and a one day stint on an assembly line in a bottled water factory. I took full advantage of the fantastic Florida community college system and a state rule that guarantees you a transfer into a university after getting your two-year degree. As a freshman, I was years older than most graduating seniors, which meant that I was putting in the work because I wanted to, not just because I was on a track that had led me there straight from high school. That translated into a 4.0 GPA at the College of Central Florida, and a 3.8 at the University of South Florida, which I chose over the highly regarded University of Florida, again, because I didn’t come from a culture that understood any of this. Anyway, for a person like me, from where I’m from, the possibility of attending an Ivy League university is a quantum leap in only one generation that normally takes an American family much longer, if it’s possible at all. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

I eventually found a career path (which would provide air conditioning at least some of the time) as a journalist. There were two moments that made me realize I’d found my thing in life. One was the first time I was sent on an assignment. I was covering a college baseball game, but, to my surprise, it turned into a sidebar on the newspaper’s biggest story of that month, a 100 mph car crash that killed five joyriding teenagers on a private airplane runway owned by John Travolta. The coach revealed the reason two star players missed the game that day was because they’d been called away to identify the bodies of their friends. A boring game story turned into a story about a coach’s place in a grieving player’s life, the way teams feel individual losses as a whole and tragic consequences of reckless teenage choices. The second thing was when there was a large, loud discussion in the middle of the newsroom about the term “tea bagging” and whether or not the average person knows what it means. In my relatively few years in journalism I’ve rarely had to go to the bar with my colleagues after work. Anything that could be said over beers could also be said in the newsroom.

When I got into this, I wanted to change the world, hold the powerful accountable and all that stuff all journalists more or less secretly, or at least quietly, want. Or, I wanted to at least write true stories that are entertaining enough that a person could get a brief respite from their stresses, which, by the way, is also a way of changing the world.

Like all journos, I’m still as inwardly idealistic and outwardly cynical as I was when I started, and I still want to do those things, but all signs point to my job (and my company) coming to an abrupt end, and soon. Even if it were to continue, I’ve made it to the place that was supposed to be the promised land, the main newsroom at a big city newspaper, where you could learn on the job to be a great reporter, conceive and work on big, important projects, and grow. Except you can’t do any of those things , because there is no time or money and the only imperative is to get a daily paper together and get it out the door to survive another day. I’m not saying it’s not a good place with good people doing good work, quite the opposite, but we’re in survival mode. There is no time for teaching, or innovation, or digging that goes beyond a day.

The wild part is that even after all the decimation I’ve seen in this industry, and personal pay cuts I’ve been hit with, I have no intention of ever leaving it. There are still news organizations with motivation and money to do great things with enterprising teams of reporters working on wide-ranging projects, but they’re the top organizations and increasingly hard to break into. And that is why I applied to graduate school at Columbia University, where, to my total shock, I was accepted (email me if you want to know anything about the application process). It’s a place where you can still learn to do great, ethical, important journalism, from Pulitzer winners, no less.

You may think that you don’t need graduate school to be a journalist, which is true, but if you want to work at one of those top places, and you’re like me, someone who wants to pivot from an old-school newspaper to a digital operation and all your experience is in print, you probably do, actually. Columbia graduates are gatekeepers at every big, innovative media company. Think I’m wrong? Okay, it’s possible that I am, but I do know this: I’ve been sending my polished resume out for months. I haven’t received a single response until this week, when I mentioned my mere acceptance to Columbia in my cover letter.

Columbia costs a crazy amount of money (about $65,000, before NYC living expenses, which bumps it to an estimated $97,000). Everyone knows that. What they don’t realize is that if you get accepted, and you need it, they’ll cover a lot of that advertised price tag with institutional scholarships. The problem for me, though, comes in how they determine that “need.” Although I’ve hit a dead end in my career and am currently looking at the prospect of being unemployed, I worked a second, part-time job last year and was able to cobble together a livable salary by working 65 hours a week and having no life. So based on my tax return and FAFSA, the federal government rates me as being able to afford a sizable tuition because of my earnings (note: I eat spaghetti with butter and drive a car with broken air conditioning in Florida to afford my rent, which I split with two roommates at age 32). Partly because of that income, Columbia offered me only $10,000 in aid; not nearly enough. Essentially, I worked so hard that I screwed myself out of being able to afford the thing that could save me. Kids who haven’t entered the workforce yet and are coming straight out of undergrad are rated as needing more aid, because they made zero last year, but in reality we need it just the same.

To come from uneducated poverty and merely get to see my name on an acceptance letter from Columbia University was the thrill of a lifetime. I literally danced in my living room. It was a fantasy come true. It’s also torturous, because I can’t go. With my past student loans, I’d be over $110,000 in debt after Columbia, with prospects in a field that, even at the top places, doesn’t pay much. Even so, I haven’t completely let go of it. In a few days, the deadline to accept admission will have passed, along with the chance of a lifetime.

All I can say is that I will keep plugging away. I’m still going to be in journalism long after the trashy clickbait era ends, and it will end, because, as Jim VandeHei recently wrote in his fantastic essay, it’s just a bad business model. I will carry the fire for the best objectives and practices of newspaper journalism after newspapers are gone, and leave behind its inefficiencies, pomposity and unwillingness to adapt and serve in making people smarter and their lives easier. It’s my thing.

And if you want to help me go to Columbia, I’ll make this deal with you. I will keep doing this the best I can do it and treating this job of serving you as the privilege it is. Also, no matter where I end up working, hell, maybe I’ll be at the New York Times, but if you email me with a story idea, I will promise to at least, no matter what, give it a look and consider writing it. Call me up, even. I’ll talk about it. Every time. Forever. That’s the least I can do for you.

Anyway, anyone got a better idea? Seriously, tell me. :)