Speak up for your alma mater

So these days my older daughter gets more mail than anyone else in the house.

She’ll be a high school senior in September and colleges are bidding for her attention and/or her tuition dollars. That makes for a lot of mail.

She doesn’t yet have a strict criteria for sorting through the stacks of letters and brochures. We’re trying to be as openly supportive as possible without putting parental fingers on the scale.

Mostly, anyway. The Slacktivixen has occasional lapses of panic at the thought of her daughter winding up hundreds or thousands of miles away, so she sometimes winds up talking up the virtues of West Chester University or Ursinus, and maybe sometimes overstating the potential danger of earthquakes at California schools. And I occasionally start to boggle at tuition figures and find myself making the case for Berea College and presenting a ludicrously upbeat assessment of the weather in Appalachian Kentucky.

My own alma mater is close enough to make mom happy. Eastern University is a good, solid school, but it’s also a good, solid school that now charges $27,000 a year in tuition. A good, solid education is worth paying for, but $27K isn’t a good, solid price. That’s a prestige price — and an Eastern diploma doesn’t confer the privileges of prestige that would justify it. If you’re paying to go to Harvard, you’re paying a lot for the “wow” factor (“Wow, Harvard …”) and it’s crazy that so many schools are charging wow-factor prices when only a handful can supply that.

My kids will be stuck with the tail-end of the traditional model of college — a model that can’t be sustained for another generation into the future. Four years of plain old “good, solid” college education now costs as much as a house. That can’t continue. Hundreds of professions require college education but will not ever pay enough to cover the cost of such second mortgages. Those future workers will have to be educated somehow and somewhere, and it cannot continue to be at schools charging $27,000 a year.

That kind of cost changes the character of those schools. My alma mater has probably priced itself beyond its ability to do what it used to do best. Eastern turned out people like Bryan Stevenson and Shane Claiborne. It’s rightly proud of that. But you can’t graduate to become the next Bryan Stevenson or the next Shane Claiborne if you’re $108,000 in debt to Sallie Mae. At those prices, you’ve no choice but to turn your back on everything you learned from Tony Campolo and instead become the next Fabrice Tourre or the next Steven J. Baum. And the world really, really doesn’t need any more people like that.

In any case, my alma mater also doesn’t have women’s rugby. So that’s out.

And but so, what about your alma mater?

Here’s your chance to plug the school you graduated from, or the school you attend, or the school you teach at. What can you tell us about the place that would nudge it closer to the top of my daughter’s growing stack of brochures?

Alternatively, since we haven’t yet figured out the Big Idea that will allow us to move past the mortgage-for-college model, if you have an idea of what that will look like, please feel free to share that as well.