Notes from around American Higher Education

This fine fellow is the Loaded Pork Pierogi plate from Manny’s BBQ, located in the PNC concourse. It was… a delight. It spawned enough grease to soak through the box, my pants, and very possibly my skin. I attended last night’s Cubs-Pirates game in the course of visiting Carnegie Mellon University, part of the larger project of visiting colleges and universities to which my two seventeen year olds are contemplating attendance.

• I’ll confess that I don’t quite understand the whole “visit a university to help you decide where to go” project. The only campus I visited during high school was the University of Oregon, and that was for Model UN rather than a college visit per se. My family did not have the means to send me anywhere else on a visit, and I ended up going to UO because of circumstances other than “I visited this place and fell in love with the campus.” I get that folks want their kids to be happy for the four years that they’re in college, but I quite doubt whether a visit of a few hours nested within a visit to a city of a day or so can really reveal meaningful prospects of “happiness.” Also, four years may sound like a long time to a teenager but in the long run I doubt that you learn much from a visit that’s not available from a website.
• Evidently many selective schools now use college visits as an indication of seriousness, which yield-protecting administrators then use as justification for turning down applicants that they worry won’t attend if accepted. This is some sick shit and it clearly disadvantages students who lack the means to visit all the colleges on their list, which of course ends up being quintessentially American as it protects institutional prestige at the cost of widening the opportunity divide.
• Carnegie Mellon is a beautiful campus and I’m glad I had the chance to visit. That said, college campuses tend to be places of great beauty, and I’m constitutionally inclined to find myself at home on them. Of all the campuses I’ve ever visited (quite a few at this point), I can only remember two that I’d categorize as “uglier than shit,” and I shall not repeat their names here out of concern about getting nasty e-mails from alums and admins.
• Of course when you travel you get to knock cities and baseball parks off your list. I had never been to PNC Park and somehow had never been to Pittsburgh, despite living for a year in south central Pennsylvania and traveling between Carlisle and Lexington at least two dozen times that year. Of the 30 top US metropolitan areas I am now short only Houston, Miami, and Raleigh-Durham; the first two I visited as a very small child, so they don’t really count. Anyway, Pittsburgh seems quite lovely and PNC Park is a great place to watch baseball.
• I do feel that having as many perspectives on higher education as possible is good for a teen, even when they have parents who work in the industry. Accordingly, I’m dispatching the one daughter to visit Brown with Loomis (which I expect should generate a great volume of truly ornery commentary on higher education in Rhode Island), and the other to visit the University of Washington with DJW and Lemieux (believe it or not they’ve already met Campos at UC-Boulder, albeit a couple years back). The point here is less “see the campus,” than “hear what people who work in the field think about the entire process.”

We’re nowhere near the end of this journey; applications will go out over the next few months and then will begin the long process of determining just how geographically far away I can economically deposit my progeny. Despite the mild complaints outlined here I find the entire project to be entertaining and even a bit exciting. I only expect to personally visit a couple more places, but we shall see how the situations develop.