The Difference Your College Makes
When I was a senior in public high school, I was an honor student on the Dean’s list with a 4.25 GPA because of additional credit for AP classes. With a 1350 on the SAT and a very strong academic and extracurricular resume, I applied to 14 colleges, mainly Ivy leagues and similar schools. I had a few choices. I was offered a full ride as well as a stipend in the Honors College at Rutgers University; a $10,000 annual scholarship which was about a third of the annual cost at NYU; and a full tuition scholarship at Brandeis University. I was offered admission to the University of Chicago, which is consistently rated in the top five universities in the United States, akin to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But Chicago did not offer me any money. I did not qualify for financial aid because my parents made a solid middle class income. I needed the money, so instead of going to Chicago, which is a far better school, I went to Brandeis University - a college that I didn’t even apply to, but rather one that just somehow targeted me and sent me a financial offer that I could not refuse. I justified this decision to myself by saying that at least, at the time, it was a top 25 school, it was near Boston which is a great town, it had a solid reputation among my high school teachers, and I could always try to use the Justice Brandeis Scholarship that I was given as a career booster in the future. In hindsight, I don’t think the scholarship made much of a difference in that regard.
As I was heading into my senior year at Brandeis, I had a 3.9 GPA. I took a documentary filmmaking class in my senior year: a two semester class where whatever grade you got in the second semester counted as your overall grade in the class for both semesters, replacing whatever you got in the first semester. At the end of the first semester, I got an A+ and the teacher told me that I was the best film student he’d ever had in 30 years of teaching. At the end of the second semester, I produced a final documentary product that was perhaps more creative than he liked, or maybe it’s because my girlfriend in the class was giving me way more attention than he appreciated during class time. Either way he gave me a C+ the second semester which counted as a C+ for both semesters, and that dropped me down to a 3.5 GPA. So instead of graduating summa cum laude, I graduated with cum laude status - honors rather than highest honers.
I didn’t think much of it at the time because I figured I wasn’t going to go to graduate school, feeling pretty optimistic and liberal minded in my outlook. Soon thereafter I changed my mind and found that the school from which I had graduated as well as my GPA made all the difference to the echelon of graduate schools to which I was applying. I applied to a few PhD programs and attended UC Davis, and after a few months, I felt that a PhD in Comparative Literature would get me nowhere. So I instead attended the UC Santa Cruz Masters in Teaching program, which I also left feeling very disillusioned with public school education and the administration thereof.
After a few years of teaching experience, I decided that law school was a much better fit for my personality and goals, but law school admission is ultimately a product of two numbers: your LSAT score (mine was a strong 165) and your GPA weighted by the ranking of your undergraduate school. Consequently, I went to UC Hastings instead of Berkeley or Stanford. When I was practicing for the bar exam, I took a prep class with UC Berkeley students, and I realized they were my people and that’s where I had belonged.
Who knows what would’ve happened though had I gone to the University of Chicago and where I would’ve ended up. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….” Of course, knowing me and my personality, I’m fairly certain I would have regardless started my own law practice exactly as I did rather than working for long at some big name law firm. I’ve just never been a “typing monkey”, as lawyers with balls like to call those without.
I have made the most of my educational experiences. I know that college is a valuable experience, even though it is very much questioned by the current generation of applicants. I think this cynicism is really the fault of our highly stratified society and the fact that the money-obsessed business of education has become even more elitist than we could’ve imagined when I was applying to college so many years ago. It seems like colleges now charge four times more per year and offer so much less than they used to. So I very much understand the resentment and anger towards Ivy League and similar colleges, as well as the polemic around DEI based admissions processes. I don’t qualify as a minority, even though I was born in Iran and came to the USA with a single mom as a refugee from a totalitarian regime and grew up as you might imagine struggling and fighting for everything I’ve achieved. If Iranians in the United States are not minorities, but African-Americans, Latin Americans, and women are, then I think the system is upside down. And many other people feel similarly for their own reasons.
I’m with Bernie on so many issues, especially the proposition that healthcare and education are basic human rights, and in the wealthiest country in the world we deserve the very best of each. This is a top down problem that requires a top down solution; and until it gets one, we’re going to see people continue to feel resentful and express sour grapes about the value of a college education. We all lose when that happens.