Higher Education

When my younger son called to tell me he’d just found out, via the Internet, of course, that he’d been rejected by Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford, was on the waiting list at Columbia and Brown, and was accepted at Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, my immediate reaction was, “What does it take to get into these fucking schools?”

Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.

Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.

That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.

Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.

Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?

Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.

Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.

Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.