Collegiate Value

“But I knew I would come to regret the nearly $200,000 in student loans I’d have to take out because I wanted to go somewhere beautiful.”

*Submissions for the first New Critic essay contest are due Wednesday, May 27th! On the occasion of our graduation, the New Critic founding editors seek a proper commencement address — one that answers “What Was College For?” The winning essay receives a $1,000 prize!*

Kit Knuppel

Clare Ashcraft is a proud, 22-year-old Ohioan. She writes The Mestiza, where she makes observations about identity, psychology, and culture.

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I dreamt about college growing up the same way some people dream about their wedding. It was the place I’d finally become myself.

What I didn’t imagine was that instead of touring campuses and imagining my future self in the bodies of students chatting about philosophy on the lawn, I’d be scrolling their overproduced websites in the background of a Zoom lecture. I kept adding colleges to my ever-growing applications list, then paring it down, then expanding it again because it was the pandemic and I didn’t have much else to do beyond daydreaming.

I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I deserved to go to the Ivy League, but I always imagined myself somewhere close, at some B-tier college with name recognition. The place I ended up falling in love with was Kenyon College, a writer’s school known for its famous fiction-writing alumni John Green and Ransom Riggs, the musicians Yoke Lore and Walk the Moon, and cartoonist Bill Waterson. It was hidden in the rural Ohio hills, a place I could disappear into for a while, like any good novel.

Most campus websites and brochures feature the best angle of the only pretty building on campus and are actually somewhat dull and ugly, but Kenyon was surrounded by a quad of beautiful gothic buildings every bit as stunning as the pictures. I wasn’t allowed to take a tour when I arrived to visit campus because apparently there was a waitlist due to Covid, so I walked around trying to keep in mind the less than 30% acceptance rate before I got too attached.

I visited the few buildings open to everyone — admissions, the art gallery, the dining hall, the recreation center, the chapel, and the single general store. The dining hall’s vaulted ceilings and chandeliers reminded me of Hogwarts. The lines of the building were accented with dark wood and romantic stained glass windows. This little town they created had one street in and out. It was an academic community set apart from the world, just beside ordinary life. It mirrored the way I saw myself: warm, inspired, but in some ways unreachable.

I was often beside the world, but not in it, which isn’t a wholly unpleasant position to be in. In high school, I got along with everyone just fine. I was well-liked. I’d watch my friends get in a snowball fight and smile at their uproarious laughter without feeling it deeply myself. Call it something clinical like dissociation or depression, or call it the condition of a writer, to be a witness. But when I saw the high ceilings and tall windows at Kenyon, I saw a place from which I could observe the world, study it, and be among others with similar habits.

I was accepted to Kenyon, Kent State University, the University of Toledo, Capital University, and Sewanee: The University of the South; waitlisted for Columbia University and Temple University; and rejected from Northwestern, Harvard, and Cornell. My Kenyon acceptance letter came with a handwritten note and a copy of David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” given at the college in 2005. They knew how to charm a future English major. What wasn’t charming was the $76,000 tuition bill.

The first time I visited Capital University, I had to be dragged out of the car. My parents and I were on our way back from a four-hour road trip, and I just wanted to go home. My parents said Capital was on the way and I may as well take a look. The campus was comprised of a few brick rectangles and was so small you could walk from end to end in five minutes. I can see the whole thing from my car window without getting out, I whined, can’t we just keep driving? We stopped in the center of campus, I looked at a map, walked a few paces forward and back, and we left. Even if I had wanted to see it, I was convinced I wouldn’t end up somewhere so bland. It looked more like a maze of parking lots than somewhere that made me excited to dive into Mill, Locke, and Aristotle, though I was reluctant to admit then how much the ugly aesthetics of the place mattered to me.

The second time I visited Capital was for a “Capital Cruise-in” event because they gave out a $1,000 per semester scholarship to anyone who came, and although I didn’t want to go, my mother insisted, just in case. The first person I met there was my future philosophy professor. I’d just finished reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer and was persuaded of veganism, and the professor and I got into an argument about whether Singer’s claims were ableist (I did not know at the time that disability studies were his expertise). I also met the manager of the black box theater below our student union — he would later become my boss for the year and a half I spent building sets (he’d toured with Huey Lewis and the News and often regaled me with stories of his rock and roll days while we painted floors or constructed walls together). Everyone I met that day was friendly. Importantly, Capital was also $30,000 cheaper than Kenyon.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing weeks I used my acceptance letters and attached tuition bills to bargain with Kenyon to knock down the cost, which they did, subtracting $10,000 from the sticker price. But even with scholarships and aid, Kenyon would still cost $51,000 a year, and they wouldn’t let me transfer all of the credits I’d accrued in high school because they wanted all students to have the full, four-year “Kenyon College experience.”

Going to a $50,000-a-year college because it’s pretty and prestigious is unreasonable. I, with my middle-class Midwestern sensibilities, knew it wasn’t the “correct” choice. I could have gone to Kenyon — no one would have stopped me. But I knew I would come to regret the nearly $200,000 in student loans I’d have to take out because I wanted to go somewhere beautiful.

So I convinced myself I didn’t really want to go to Kenyon anyway. It was too pretentious to ask for so much money in tuition and then not accept all of the transfer credits I rightfully earned. Not to mention the fact that knocking off $10,000 just because I asked nicely proved they were massively overcharging students.

At the time, it seemed more sane to stomach the emotional consequences of not going than the financial consequences of going, but in hindsight it’s not so obvious to me. I wish someone had told me it’s okay to be unreasonable, as long as I take responsibility for the consequences of it. It’s easier to pretend the answers are obvious and universal than to own the sacrifice you’re making in denying yourself.

To add insult to injury, several of my friends ended up at top schools — Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis. I had friends all over the map. Other friends of mine went to local state schools, community colleges, and several didn’t go to college at all. I believe those are acceptable paths, maybe even better ones in the current economy, but they weren’t acceptable for me, because I considered my main asset to be my academic intelligence. I don’t have particularly strong social skills; in fact, that was one of the main reasons for me to go to college: to have community. And I wasn’t athletic or coordinated enough to work with my hands like friends who grew plants or built PCs. I’d always been destined for some white-collar job with a high mental workload, but it seemed many of my friends that had interests of a similar caliber pursued their dream school without a second thought.

Part of the reason I ended up at Capital instead of somewhere like Kent State was Capital’s small class size. I didn’t have many close friends in high school, but since my graduating class was only 80 students and we often collaborated on projects together, it was a tight-knit group; I was friendly with all of them. I imagined my college major might be the same. When it wasn’t — because we were all adults with more freedom than high school kids — I was convinced I would simply have to try harder. I founded student organizations and took up leadership roles to dig my heels into the campus culture, but I never truly made friends. I can count the number of times I hung out with someone outside of class or a club event during those three years on one hand.

My freshman year, I brought a famous philosopher to campus who has several hundred thousand social media followers to speak at an event hosted by BridgeUSA, a political dialogue club I ran, even though I had essentially no fellow club members to help me execute the event. I emailed the university president to let him know about it, proud that I could bring our small campus some publicity, and got a generic response from him about it being a campus policy not to endorse any student events. I just wanted someone to be proud of what I was doing. I wanted anyone to recognize it.

I got several internship offers that summer from places I found and applied to myself. That internship turned into a part-time editorial job at AllSides I was excited about, but my professors barely paid any interest. They gave advice about graduate school and literary magazine submissions but did not understand the new media world I was becoming a part of, one focused on media bias and meta-criticism. They were in a world that still held The New York Times as the paper of record and Poetry Magazine as the best place to be published, while I was in a world where it became cool to dunk on The Times and common to lament about the fall of magazines like Poetry.

When I returned to campus for my second year, it was to an empty room. I’d asked around at the end of the previous spring, but everyone had their roommates picked by then. I spent most of that year wedged between the isolating concrete walls of a dorm room eating canned soup (the single dining hall had nil vegan options). The posters I bought never stuck to the stark white concrete bricks. One side of the room had cheap wall-to-wall closet built-ins, and the fire alarms in the building were constantly going off from people smoking weed in the middle of the afternoon. There was little space for character, history, or joy of learning.

Older generations had sold me an idea of college — that it would be a place where I stayed up past midnight discussing religion and the meaning of life, that I might meet my spouse there, like my parents did. None of that came true, and it’s hard to know if it was because of Covid, or me, or the college, or all of the above. I kept telling myself I’d be fine at any college I went to, that I’d find my people. When I didn’t, it became hard not to wonder what my life could have looked like elsewhere.

One of my professors that first year at Capital also taught part-time at Kenyon. I felt vindicated because it meant I was essentially getting the same quality of education for $30k cheaper. Recently, I learned one of my coworkers, who’s of a similar age to me, had also graduated from Kenyon. See, we all end up in the same place, a part of me said. But that led me to the conclusion that the school I went to was not something I could blame my unhappiness on, that, had I gone elsewhere, my life may not have been as tangibly different as I wanted to believe.

I stayed only three years at Capital, mostly because I was sad and lonely, but it was easy enough to frame it as ambition. I had a post-graduation job lined up, so there was no need to stay longer, anyway. If I couldn’t boast that I’d gone anywhere worth knowing, I could at least say I graduated at 20. It’s embarrassing to be complaining about the college experience I didn’t get to have at the college I didn’t get to go to when I’m 22 and happily employed now. But all those ambivalent feelings came flooding back when I was invited back to campus recently by my creative nonfiction professor to talk about my job and my writing on Substack.

I was working the same job and writing on Substack six months before I graduated, but no one seemed to care then. I am the same person two years post-graduation as I was, only now I’m seen as more successful. This professor, for whom I’m grateful, told the class that I’d “found success on an alternative path” and hadn’t taken the usual mainstream publication route. I had always done that — built a new path for myself because I didn’t understand the old one. I didn’t understand how to make friends, or build community, or publish in literary magazines. I didn’t perceive how, at some point, not knowing those things became cause for admiration rather than pity.

After I presented to the class, a journalist for the student newspaper interviewed me. “Why did you choose Capital, and why did you stay? What was the most valuable part of your experience at Capital? Did career development help you find your job?” I had to take a beat, so that I didn’t say, “I stayed because I’m arrogant and stubborn and transferring was too much work. Career development didn’t help me, nor did the administration, nor did my professors, though the professors were kind.” Instead I gave some palatable, mostly true answer about trying to build the community I wanted to see and the importance of learning from failure.

I naturally find myself getting along with people who went to UPenn and Dartmouth because I spend my weekends reading philosophy for fun, but I talk to my Ivy League friends with a chip on my shoulder. Other times I feel entirely out of my depth because I didn’t vacation in Europe, and I’m still brushing up on obscure literary references I was never taught. I won’t say, “it should have been me at one of those schools,” because it’s futile to argue against the past. But I do Google philosophy graduate degrees at Oxford and daydream about an Iowa Writers Workshop MFA, as if going to graduate school would be a corrective experience — as if things would turn out differently if I could just outwork my jealousy, jealousy mostly of the person I expect myself to be, jealousy of my potential on my best days.

“Potential” doesn’t grant you anything, though, hence why I work. And when it goes unnoticed, I double down, and when people ask how I got here, my only answer is how could I not have? How could I have ended up anywhere but here, denying unreasonable dreams, sandwiched between working-class bitterness and persistent, egotistical naiveté? I haven’t managed to give up that desire for institutional approval quite yet, but at least I paid off my student loans.

People are quick to give you mountains of advice when you’re lost and 17: “College will be your happiest years,” but “pick a practical major and don’t go into debt.” “Don’t make any choices you’ll regret,” but also “now’s the time to make choices you’ll regret.” When students are understandably overwhelmed by all this, advice-givers pivot to, “This choice doesn’t matter as much as it seems to. You’ll be fine anywhere.” I would argue it matters a great deal, but the good news is you can make more choices at any time.

Rationally, it doesn’t make sense to talk about my experience in terms of right or wrong choices. There are only the choices that I made, and I can’t know if anything would have been substantively different otherwise. Rather than sacrificing young people to the advice-industrial complex that is the internet (or fancy Ivy League tutors), we must empower their agency so they understand they cannot undo their choices, but they can always make more as they better comprehend the consequences of their initial decisions.

While Ivy League students are sometimes decried as brats who have never been told no in their lives, I wonder about the kids who were told to be reasonable so many times they never even risked asking for more, the ones who dreamed in secret, knowing they’d one day have to settle for a boring middle-class life in the suburbs but weren’t quite ready to believe it. As long as you’re in high school, it’s easy to convince yourself of all the people you might one day become, but choosing to attend a “reasonable” college marks the first betrayal of the romantic in you. It is the first time it hits you that you will be nothing more than average because you don’t have the stomach to make unreasonable decisions. To be great, you have to give up the urge to protect and maintain the good, cushy, safe, middle-class life that your parents worked hard for — that you feel you should be satisfied with but cannot deny that you aren’t — and take a risk that could have financial ramifications for the rest of your life.

I don’t regret going to an affordable school as much as I regret the feeling of stuckness that came with it. There was a richness to the warm wood, vaulted ceilings, and tall windows at Kenyon. It allowed breathing room that was absent under Capital’s buzzing fluorescent lights and dusty linoleum floors. Simply put, Capital was a harder place to dream in. Even now, the pragmatist in me cringes at that characterization, because the abstract concept of dreaming has such a concrete cost in the form of student loan debt. But unquantifiable experiences are often the most valuable to cultivate. The romanticist in me has been so often denied by the educational system and its fixation on GPAs, test scores, and career paths. And yet it remains unbroken, I still crave the pursuit of the sublime.

Romance is a fickle, ambitious, insistent thing. As much as I tried to root it out — as much as the education system tried to root it out of me — I remain tumultuously wedded to it. I can no longer sheepishly tuck away my tendency toward desiring grand ideas and places, doing so only makes me resent myself. I must sustain a healthy diet, balanced with foolish hope and delusion, to honor the annoying part of me that’s eternally reaching for a grittier, self-transcendent panacea.

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