Commodification of education

This past weekend, I had my first taste of "real civilization" since August when I visited the other side of Massachusetts to visit some friends at Harvard and Boston University. The first thing that immediately struck me as we walked down the bustling streets of Cambridge was the sheer amount of people and cars present, as compared to the levels of traffic (both human and vehicular) usually seen in Williamstown. Even though this was hardly my first time being in a city, after nearly two months in the Purple Bubble that surrounds Williams College, I felt like a wide-eyed country bumpkin. The fact that there were restaurants and stores on every corner astonished me; college students here could actually choose whether or not to eat on campus at meal times.

Visiting my friend at Harvard only served to heighten this sense of surreality. I asked my friend if all the groups of people taking pictures of one another at one end of the campus were all parents and prospective students. "Nope," he said, "half the people here are just tourists from foreign countries."

Although Williams certainly gets its fair share of tourist groups, it's certainly not as well-known as Harvard, with its reputation for being the best university in the world and home to many of the world's future leaders and thinkers. In fact, when I first told relatives that I had been accepted to and would be going to Williams College, I was asked many times "where that was," and I got lots of "oh, that's nice [i.e. huh?]" comments. Which made me think: if Williams really is among the top-ranked schools in the nation, why don't more people know about it? Could it be that the admissions department is not doing as good of a job marketing the school to prospective students and their parents as it is selecting actual students?

To put it bluntly, Williams is only really known as a top-notch institution among rich white people, usually in the northeast United States. This is because up until the 1970s, most of the students who did attend Williams College fit that demographic. And although the college has certainly come a long way since then in changing the profile of a typical Williams student (the pamphlet-ready response to this now, of course, is that “there is no typical Williams student - unless by typical you mean united by their enthusiasm, curiosity, and willingness to learn!”), I was still stumped as to why it hasn’t done more to market itself to prospective students. I only heard about Williams through my father, a college professor who had heard about it from various colleagues.

As a high school senior, I felt disillusioned and burnt out by the entire college admissions process of selling yourself to the highest bidder (in the case of high-commodity students and scholarships) or trying to persuade bidders that you were worth the gamble of an acceptance letter. The atmosphere at my high school was also very competitive, and out of sheer contrariness I decided to forget about applying to any Ivy League schools. And although you could argue that Williams itself is just as name-brand as Harvard or Princeton, it was definitely not as well-known in my high school, even by most of my teachers. So for a while, I enjoyed the questions and confused looks that came my way, and took a smug, elite pleasure in the fact that most of the people of my acquaintance hadn’t heard of it.

Once I heard back from Williams and the time came for me to send in my own acceptance letter, however, the questions began to annoy me. And although I knew that my future was in no way jeopardized by the fact that my next-door neighbors and my parents’ friends hadn’t heard of the school, it still bothered me that I had to explain myself every time someone asked me where I went to school.

“So, is that like William & Mary? Or Roger Williams?”

“Uh, no… It’s just Williams. It’s in Massachusetts.”

Of course, I could get self-righteous and wave Williams’s U.S. Report ranking around like a banner, but since then I’ve learned to take pleasure in the simple fact that I go to one of the best schools in the nation. As my JA put it, “The only people who will have heard about Williams are the ones that matter.” And although this might seem counterintuitive, as any college would naturally want as many qualified people to apply as possible, maybe that’s the objective of the admissions department after all - not to overexpose Williams College to people everywhere, but to perpetuate its current image of being a very sheltered, nurturing, close-knit, and bucolic college community by focusing more on actual student selection rather than direct marketing. After all, in the world of higher-level institutions, the best colleges and universities aren’t necessarily the ones that spend the most on in-your-face advertising (a degree from a school that advertises on the radio and on TV would probably not be as impressive in the workplace as, say, a degree from a Columbia or a Yale or a Swarthmore). As far as recruiting and college fairs go, although they are necessary to a certain extent, the objective of an elite institution should be to get the student to court the institution, not for the institution to court the student.