Notes on higher ed from a family's college search

As our kid looked at schools, my own university fell apart

I spent the past year at a strange confluence, helping our teenager look at colleges while the university where I worked was imploding. In the end I managed largely to escape from higher education—for the first time in almost twenty years I have no “.edu” email address—just as the kid was looking to enter it.

And these phenomena are entwined, according to some pundits, since various higher ed crises are depicted as flowing from under-enrollment. If more teenagers like our kid wanted to go to college, then austerity and its miseries wouldn’t be forced on older people like me who work (or worked) in higher education.

I think that analysis gets mobilized by bad-faith actors looking to distract from their own failures—demography only counts for so much when plenty of universities see applications and enrollment climbing, and not just at the elite end of things. But I’ll accept the underlying premise that the numbers don’t make things easy.

What, then, works? What impresses students and parents when they’re looking at schools? From the (necessarily partial and situated) perspective of our own recent search, some notes:

—While you hear allegations about higher ed’s supposed bloat, some schools seem not to have enough people working there. Would-be students see and hear from the admissions staff, of course. But they also look at social media, click (sometimes dead or dated) links all around a university’s various websites, walk past the library the night before a tour (for instance) and see whether it’s open. My family’s witnessed some obvious screwups—an unsolicited admissions email with a placeholder [first name here] instead of a first name, that kind of thing. And I get it, everyone makes mistakes. But some institutions leave the overall impression of being poorly staffed, because of churn or layoffs or bad morale or lack of support for basic maintenance work. I don’t think it’s unreasonably fussy for a family to hope that a university will invest resources in taking care of people.

—Lots of schools appear to be on the verge of some kind of crisis, and it matters whether they seem to bring healthy values to their responses. Will leaders at public schools go to bat to get the resources they need from the legislature? What’s the attitude toward labor organizing by faculty and staff? (There were literal signs about this on nearly every campus we visited.) Who has a meaningful say in the university’s direction? And so on. At this point I think our kid is likely to encounter some disruption wherever they go to college—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. With colleges and universities reacting to a lot of the same dynamism as the rest of society, my hope is that on balance any unexpected change on campus (a strike, say) adds up to a positive learning experience instead of something, well, creepier.

—One great tool for seeing how students engage change on campus is student journalism. Superficially similar colleges will have vastly different campus newspapers. The good ones, especially if critical, are both a resource for prospective families and a sign of campus health.

—Speaking of crises, the pandemic and its responses hover over everything in higher ed. People obviously take away different messages from what is, after all, a world-historical event. For me, it’s a warning against nostalgia. The college experience in 2024 will be different from that in 2019 (never mind the experience when I was an undergrad in the George H.W. Bush era). While some higher ed leaders deploy the pandemic cynically to celebrate austerity and the gutting of liberal arts education, my own hope is that receptiveness to change in the aftermath of Covid’s upheavals can be harnessed in more humane directions. That might mean increased sensitivity to how higher ed treats the people who learn, work, and live there. It might also prompt a renewed awareness of how campus and its surrounding community interact, and not just in much-talked-about training to meet corporate needs. The pandemic showed that higher education can’t keep the world out. I don’t think it should want to—and if that means things get messy, then I hope for students’ sake that the mess is productive, and that they can be proud of their schools’ conduct.

I realize this is the rare installment of Book Work that hasn’t yet mentioned books, so I’ll finish with a plug for Catherine Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness, coming this summer. It’s the inaugural title in a series about higher ed that I’m working on as an at-large editor with the University of Oklahoma Press.