Road Trip

I spent a pleasant few hours on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin last week.

I had insightful conversations with adjunct faculty members in the English Department. I chatted with students studying business, history, engineering, and international relations. I spent time in the campus bookstore, the Student Union, and the coop. I listened to an admissions representative describe the free movies available every other Wednesday. I watched student representatives of the college hand out free ice cream and I posed with Bevo, the UT Austin mascot.

It had been over ten years since my most recent tour of UT-Austin. I noticed a few modest changes. The bookstore had been thoroughly infiltrated by merch. There were tee-shirts, sweatshirts, aprons, and overalls in a rainbow of orange from extra small to XX-Large. There were UT logos on notebooks, hats, footballs, basketballs, water bottles, pocketbooks, coffee mugs, shot glasses, wine glasses, bottle openers, and flasks. There were stuffed animals—predominately but not exclusively cows, UT bumper stickers, frames for diplomas, jewelry, and ping-pong balls. Notably there were no ping pong paddles on offer.

Presumably the bookstore also contained books of some kind, but as I stated, I only had a few hours on campus and did not feel the need to scurry through every basement of every building.

My conversations with adjunct faculty were also elucidating. How are the students? Some better than others. How is your commitment to pedagogy? I spend every waking moment preparing lectures, correcting essays, meeting with undergraduates. How are the salaries? Pathetic. Insulting. The football coach earns two hundred times as much as I do. (Not a typo. Adjunct faculty earn $50,000 a year. Steve Sarkisian gets $10,000,000.)

Perhaps the above insights regarding books stores sans books and inequitable faculty salaries are old news. James Thurber wrote about the oversized influence of football at Ohio State 80 years ago. Neither is it a headline that un-tenured faculty will never be able to afford a home near the college. And I certainly don’t mean to pick on Bevo, the Texas Longhorn Steer. The discrepancy between the salaries of part-time faculty and football coaches are not limited to Austin. Similar ratios exist at my alma mater (Go Badgers!) and every state school from the University of Florida (Gators!) in Gainesville to the University of Washington in Seattle (Huskies!) and from the University of Maine (Bananas The Bear!) to the University of California at Santa Cruz (Banana Slugs!)

I also noticed the “Core Values” of the university—Learning, Discovery, Freedom, Leadership, Individual Opportunity, and Responsibility—etched in literal stone. I was not able to discern whether the undergraduates were paying more attention to the Core Purpose—"To transform lives for the benefit of society”—or the free sunglasses being passed out by the mascot.

So if I was able to learn only so much, the next question might be, having already visited over 400 colleges and universities across the country, why do I keep spending time on campuses, talking to students, chatting with faculty, conversing with librarians, and speaking with maintenance people.

Because there’s some information that just doesn’t show up on-line or in the guidebooks.

Indeed, on a recent visit, (not UT) a maintenance worker shared some intel that wasn’t available from any other source. They pointed out that the students not only left dirty dishes in the sink, but also routinely spray painted grafitti in common areas. That school seldom shows up on the lists that I prepare for students.

Now, in my 40th year of helping students and their families determine where to attend college, it is incumbent upon me, not only to add to my list of hundreds of campus tours, but also to think deeply about how to guide students to the best possible match. 

Except for the purchase of a home, a college education is the most significant expenditure that most families will ever make. There is no car, no vacation—not even a lengthy hospital stay—that costs as much as four years of undergraduate education. It’s important to get it right.

Some counselors argue that capable students do well wherever they enroll and that unfinished students are destined to fail independent of their college choice. Maybe so. But there are certainly young people for whom the qualities of a campus make all the difference. It has been said that life is about connection, finding our place, finding our people, discovering the square holes for our square pegs. Sober kids need other sober kids to let them know that it’s okay not to play beer pong every day; incipient engineers need other budding engineers with whom to study and build robots; kids who learn differently need professors who acknowledge that not all brains are the same; kids with religious convictions need others with whom to worship; atheist kids need to be left alone when others are going to their devotions. And all kids need to be exposed to others who don’t share their majors, ideas, values, and beliefs.

It is the sacred duty of competent counselors to be as informed as possible about what is etched on the stones and written on the walls of the campuses we recommend.

I’m never going to know all there is to know about every campus in this country, but until the compensation of the adjunct faculty and the football coach are equal, I’ll keep visiting.