My time at Northwestern is probably the most important, ahem, five years of my life. Formative years, the St. X ethos and hourly wages helped me convert on that potential, but the NU experience has been invaluable.
The Fellas are still a solid sight years away from the big transition, but I’m already wrestling with what “college in 2025” means. I wax annoyingly prolific on my missed opportunity in reading “The Closing of the American Mind” [Read] and have my handful of throwaway comments like “college is the new high school” and “I think there is some point of maximization of education and great experience at Michigan (Go Blue!)” or “LinkedIn has dismissed a lot of the value of college in bringing together fragmented supplies of workers and the demand of employers”, but I don’t have a super clear “this is what college is for” perspective.
It’s also always hard to separate my specific experience from the perspective I will use to support The Fellas in their eventual choices. As my first wave of friends are making their way through the joys and heartache of college admissions, it still feels significantly the same as it did in 1985. There’s still a lot of “best school” talk more than “right school” talk. I’m currently trying to put some meat on the bones of my “role of the VP on the ticket” theory of college — make great friends and ‘do no harm’. The perfect spot may be school that gives you a great environment for becoming a little more of an adult, lands you a pack of friends good for fifty years, and meets solid-to-good education/training requirements. I am feeling that all the things we might do to max the GPA and breadth of extracurriculars to create the most compelling college application is still rooted in the dated fallacy that if you “just get them a seat a great college, everything good will flow from that”.
College stories today run more along the lines of Peter Thiel paying kids not to go, or “The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life” or “Elite-College Admissions Are Broken” or “College is Dying, Design Your Own Education”. It might be cool to be innovative, but the “system” punishes the “tall poppy” a lot more than they reward them.
If my kids are bursting with curiosity, resilience and ambition and tell me that “college isn’t the right path for thm”, am I really going to be able to embrace that?
That is all a fish to fry on a later day.