Debunking the Dual Myths of Place and Prestige in College Selection
In the movie Road Trip, Tom Green leads a cliched group of wanderers through the storied grounds of fictional Ithaca College as the setting of the campus tour becomes the flashback stimulus for the overlay of the movie’s main plot depicted in narrative fashion but with real time action as per the convenience of Hollywood. Despite the fact that Road Trip is a slapstick college comedy and offers little intellectual provocation, it does illustrate a moment that is ripe with potential: the college decision making process, the campus tour, parents and seniors in high school. What the college tour is often depicted as is some sort of Xanadu glimpsing voyage into the holy mountain of university life. In some cases, students and parents peek in at lectures and projects in medias res, in other cases, the campus dining facilities are scrutinized with an eye for critique and discernment finely honed as in selecting cruise ship packages or summer camps to attend. In the movie, as in real life, the halls do hold stories. The audience for these stories’ topics varies just as it does for Hollywood movies. For an incoming freshman, it may be what school has the greatest dating potential…true story from a GoGuardian internet reveal. For others, it may be its proximity to the beach, or distance from whichever suburban home hosts the helicopter parents the child is striving to leave. For some, it is simply a formula of time, money, acceptance and convenience. What I have been able to discern in the event a student has some choice in the matter of which college they will attend, based on 8 years of teaching and based on my own experiences, is that too often students fall for a passive stance with the outcome left to chance predominantly influenced by two factors: Prestige and or location. In both cases, there are more important things to determining the 4 years that will serve as a springboard to the Renaissance of your future life.
Debunking the Myth of Prestige:
As far as the college selection goes, there are whole industries designed to take your money along the way. Publications rate colleges and provide insights into relatively useless facts such as the “ranking” of the college (not by department or concentration) but by some nebulous factors cross referenced in algorithmic precision computing a winner. Some of the categories include impaction of classes, accolades of professors, location, cost of living, attrition of majors into the workforce and their resultant incomes. In many cases, this “prestige” is factored in with the school’s “historical prowess” and “significance” in terms of its contribution to the academic community or greater society.
Although it is hardly arguable that impaction of classes is not a factor in the efficacy of a college decision, some of the other categories are far from relevant to the average student. Recently, in a movie review of the box smash Suicide Squad, Anthony Lane writes that the language of its plot is “superlative — the grammatical form of choice for comic-book adjectives […] Nothing in this movie is ever middling, or allowed to muddle along. Nobody has an O.K. day. […] This perpetual overreach, desperate to outdo anything that might smack of regularity, has the genuine tang of adolescence”. Lane critiques the movie based on its use of a lens through which nothing is ordinary and life reads in the superlative. Although this does appeal to the teenage brain, this sort of advanced prestige is also, very much so, a marketing ploy. That prestige that is being marketed is an experience: the best experience of eating an ice cream ever, the greatest student lounge for lounging and texting ever, the most exciting ropes course the first week of school in the history of ropes courses. What does this have to do it with one’s education at all? In addition, what does the degree or award a professor has earned for his or her own research have to do with A) his or her ability to teach or B) your interest in that subject? Does the “best freshman comp class in the history of the world” , by the very nature of its title an amalgamation of the hopes and dreams of ALL incoming college freshman, even exist? I would argue no, since the vast majority would hope for class being cancelled, a free day, a trip to the beach with their friends.
What then determines the worth and value of an institution, its prestige if you will, with regard to you — potential college enrollees? Does the algorithm used by major media outlets to rank colleges hold any function? The answers is a qualified yes to the latter and in it lies the answer to the former question as well. Rankings programs provide important data and if used accurately can and should assist you in your selection process, but it is just that — it is your selection process. Make your own ranking criteria and then look it up on google. Let that inform a prestige stylized to you: your needs, your wants, your finances, your interests, your trajectory. The last bit, trajectory, is perhaps the most important for students entering college today. With inflated student loan rates and a dauntingly ephemeral and perhaps fickle job field, one with careers ending and beginning like fireflies flitting around a campus park at dusk, your trajectory is of utmost importance with regard to your decision.
The Myth of Place:
There is an old Hermetic axiom that states that the acolyte (or student in search of higher understanding — alchemy of mind (soul) and heart) must essentially “become the path they walk down”. Thus, it would makes sense that in selecting an institute of “higher learning” that would ideally, in the greatest sense, be a collegio — or meeting/joining of the minds — as the Greeks put it — all students would find a destination that best fits “them”. If they are truly to become the path they walk down, then the college they select would logically not only occupy a place on that path, but also reflect the student’s essential self, essential wants, hopes, dreams.
The perfect institution, logically then, is one in which the student intuitively feels “right”. The place occupies an important role in the identity of the self. Nature has many faces. Colleges exist in deltas, deserts, redwood forests, storied downtowns, near great lakes, amidst rolling tundra and prairies, alongside vast beaches. We come in contact, then, with different biospheres, with different population densities and demographics, and of course climates both academic, social and atmospheric. Incoming college students have differing preferences and expectations for all aspects of college life. Some want “fun in the sun”; others, a quiet Midwestern existence among storied halls. Long has been the prevailing wisdom that if one is lucky enough to tour potential colleges, one should go on a tour, hang out in the space of the college or university and lastly, settle on one where it “just feels right”.
Along with the many “feelings” that coincide with selection, we also have to speculate on the inherent preferences that students may or may not have along with expectations; we also must speculate on the parts of “place” that clever marketing pushes forward as theme oriented as a Vegas strip quadrant, as vacation seeming as a hotel welcome guide. In fact, college life is neither of those, so why would a burgeoning academic 19 year old be asked to make intuitively guided decisions about place when the place being marketed is not an adequate representation of the reality of college life.
In debunking this powerful myth of place it helps to look at specific examples. It also helps to consider identity factors that coincide with student choice such as: majors, extracurricular interests, outside hobbies, community standards and lastly — fun. Starting with the notion of majors and concentrations, we can put some notches in the armor of the powerful myth of place. The first example takes us to two California public schools: one sort of near the beach and one inland.
To Be Continued in Next Post…
