Personal Attention

Our family dropped both of our sons off at their respective schools, both HBCUs, this past weekend. Of course, I am a bundle of emotions, threads and knots which I trust will slowly smooth out. My conversations this week with each of my sons began the process. While one was holded up in his dorm most of the week, feeling a little isolated as a freshman in an upperclass residence, the other seemed to be adjusting very well to a school which he argues I chose for him. At the beginning of the week, he was getting along with his roommate, had decided that the cafeteria all in all wasn't bad for his health, had priced out all of his books, and, with a few other students, was shopping at Walmart, the college having shuttled them over.

Needless to say, I was pleased at his adjustment and very impressed at the college's attention to their students' needs. As my son explained his college's generosity, I was deeply satisfied that my son was a beneficiary of it. The provision of free transportation seems such a generous accommodation, yet it reminded me that black colleges often show such generosity. It reminded me, for instance, of my own first year at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My first return to my home in Detroit for the holidays began with a drive to the airport, a free trip provided by the college. As I recall, I was the only one on the college van, driven by one of the security guards, who instructed me to call the college to alert them of my return date. That was over twenty-five years ago, and as I have watched institutions of higher ed become more lean and mean, my heart certainly is warmed to know that, despite financial tightening, some institutions are still going out of their way to meet student needs, even needs which they would have little trouble making the case should be the students' and parents', not the institutions', responsibility.

My faith is renewed, not in black colleges, for my commitment to them has never wavered. Rather, I am just plain ol' happy that at a time when it would appear that nearly all institutions have adopted an ethic of practicality, becoming super-structured, inflexible, and, one could argue, impersonal, my son's school is relating to students as people first.

As for my other son, he is at a state-funded HBCU. He wanted a larger population than is the case at most private black colleges. He in fact wanted to be at a university rather than a college. He wanted a full sports program. My husband and I let him have his way though I was tempted, even as we drove our sons to their campuses, to talk him into the smaller school. My second son's school is larger in many other ways; the campus is bigger in terms of acreage. There are many more choices of residence halls, and all student-designated areas, including academic buildings, have more bells and whistles, such as new, plush, furniture and mounted thin-screen televisions. At orientation, my son was so impressed with the display that his decision was sealed, and the son attending the private college began to have serious doubts about his fate.

As an educator, I tend to question the real value of surface-level accommodations when compared to human relationships. In other words, while the state school clearly has more money to make its campus more comfortable, I wonder if the tendency isn't to over-rely on such conveniences to the point of discounting the building of relationships and personal generosity. At this point, I admit to being overly critical of the state-funded HBCU since personalization is in my opinion the hallmark of the black college and the very reason why I so wanted my children to experience these historic institutions.

By yesterday, my temporarily-isolated son had come out of his room, evidenced by the fact that the loneliness in his voice at 5:00 p.m., when he'd called me and tried to engage in any conversation that would keep me on the phone, and his voice at 9 p.m., when he informed me that he had no time to talk. He was busy! It will be an interesting four years, and I hope to share the best and the worst of these two types of black colleges. I suspect both are needed; some students and their parents as well naturally want more structure, more systematization, and I don't doubt that such might be good for my son, who has been just a little coddled in childhood. As for the other, his college has already renewed a faith challenged during his formative years of schooling by a strong sense of being just a number. So, I think, all is well.

Aggressive Recruiting by Colleges

I am venting.

Where to begin? Let's see. As usual, I'm having a hard time adjusting to change, that is, differences in the way high school seniors went about selecting the colleges they would attend back in my day--the early '80s--and the ways that young people are pushed to choose a college now. Perhaps my memory is foggy, but I don't remember receiving very many college/university brochures. If I recall correctly, counselors' offices may have had a supply of postcards that one could drop in the mail if interested in a school. These would also be attached to brochures that one would get when visiting a campus. If you tore the card out, then the college would send you something. In my whole senior year, I actually only visited two campuses. I didn't choose to go to either of those schools. Instead, I chose a college that right away offered me a scholarship after receiving my SAT score. If I were to describe my college selection experience with one word, that word would be peaceful.

But then, I grew up, post Vietnam and pre-Gulf War, in a more peaceful America generally speaking. There was little angst as I recall concerning college despite the fact that the Reagan years saw major cuts in Pell grant allocations. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) The ease with which I entered college is something that I now cherish more than ever since my children's (twins') experience of researching and making a final decision about college differs from my experience as much as night differs from day.

Let me be honest though. My children do not complain when daily arrive three new, shiny, colorful, i.e. expensive, thick college brochures. After these advertisements pile up on our mail table, the kids sort through them--sitting to read some and also to look through the pictures. They take the time I think because they are of course excited about college and feel it important to get an idea of the offerings of different institutions. I can remember being excited as I too flipped through the few brochures that came to my house. I grew up in Detroit, a city that had become by the '80s more urban as disinvestment diminished tree lined neighborhoods of well appointed homes and increased blight. For me as is likely true for kids growing up in rust-belt, "abandoned," cities today, bright pictures of smiling young men and women walking through sunny campuses are just so idyllic and promising. Such images have a fantastical character and, in my opinion, induce fantasizing. I wonder, given this effect, how grounded some kids remain as they make their selections. In other words, how much do those coeds sitting under huge oaks, pensively attending books lain upon their sun-dappled laps influence the choices our children make?

Some schools have sent my children as many as ten different brochures, even schools that they unfortunately do not have the grades for. What's the overall effect of all of the attention? When else in life will an individual be so aggressively courted? What is an adolescent of seventeen or eighteen to make of the campaign to convince him or her at least to submit an application? It has been argued that colleges want more and more applications because the number of applications submitted increases an institution's perceived prestige. Is an institution's practice of non-selectively sending American high school seniors a half dozen or more brochures a win-win situation? What are the short-term and long-term effects on children of being approached in this way?

Before I go on to answer that question, let me add that my children have also received phone calls. Now, my grades in high school were about the same as theirs, and yet I didn't receive one call. Clearly, the personal calling--elicited I think by my children's filling out of the cards I mentioned earlier, during visits by colleges to their high school--is a sign that colleges are recruiting more aggressively and that institutions have, therefore, obviously increased recruitment budgets in the thirty years since I applied to college. I would imagine that they have done so not just to play the game of "more applications," but for the more serious purpose of increasing student enrollment as well. There is no obvious crime in that. But, here's my problem. Adolescence is a time of rebellion. Is this news? If not, then why would institutions of higher learning participate in such zealous selling at such a critical time in the lives of young people?

Our family has been grooming our children for many years to attend a certain kind of college--small, liberal arts, religious affiliated, and preferably located in the South. Since they were born, our children have visited my husband's and my alma mater. They have been at every homecoming we have attended; for two years, they lived on that college's campus while I served as a department chair. When they were prepubescent they vowed that they would go to "our college." I would always smile at their declarations, but I knew that when they were older they would learn about other schools and likely go somewhere else. And of course this was fine with me not because I believe in the wisdom of the idea that well-reared and well-informed young people should exercise an absolute right in selecting a college but because there is a sense of independence to be found in the power to choose an institution, and I remain aware that declaring independence is a stage of human development. However, I do not advocate adolescents, and seventeen and even eighteen year olds still are adolescents, choosing a college with little input from their parents or worse from the type of fantasizing induced, as I described earlier, from glossy brochures.

Unfortunately, I think that too often this is exactly what happens. Students view their choice of college as a way to mark their new territory. College is their frontier. It is a romantic idea, and there is a lot that is good in it, but while young people are declaring independence from mom or dad or both, they usually have not learned to declare independence from savvy marketers, which I argue include college recruitment staff. My children's senior year has proven disappointing if not for them then for me as their parent not because of the long list of things we must do to prepare for the fall; it has been disappointing because the unyielding sell tactics of America's institutions of higher education have in essence stolen from us what should have been a more meaningful family experience.

From Walter Kimbrough's New York Times blog with Marybeth Gasman

Part two of Walter Kimbrough and Marybeth Gasman's blog on HBCUs.

Here's the link.

I am especially intrigued by Kimbrough's comments on America's unfortunate loyalty to brands.

Enjoy.