The Good School

In high school, I applied to a program designed to get students from Bad Schools into Good Schools. The idea was to find students with good grades at “failing” high schools and send them to fancy, expensive colleges on the East Coast with as many scholarships as possible. On paper, it sounded like a great idea. To my parents and me, it sounded like a dream.

My friends and I managed to get into the program. We were elated, and believed our lives were forever changed. One by one, we attended summer courses, free of charge, at the Good Schools. Our school district paid for our own college counselors who helped us navigate the application process. And after graduation, we flew out to New York, Boston, Pennsylvania, and DC to begin the next chapter of our education.

But, some strange things happened at the Good Schools.

My friend April didn’t stay at her Good School for very long. The student body was 95% white and affluent (as opposed to our high school, which was roughly 25% white and decidedly not-affluent). April made some friends the first semester, but lost them when they discovered that she was on scholarship. There was a cultural disconnect as well, as students at the Good School shared few of April’s interests, most notably in music (hip hop). After the first semester, April returned home to California, and transferred to UC Berkeley.

There are good schools everywhere, but the Good Schools were ones that everyone knew, the ones with a reputation. We believed that getting in a Good School would solve all of our problems for the rest of our lives. As our college counselors told us, having a Good School on our resume would open doors in every industry. As first generation college students, we wanted this more than anything.

I stayed at my Good School for two years. The student body was 95% white and affluent. I used all the charisma I had to make friends, who (with the best intentions possible) told me that they basically saw me as a white person. At the time this felt like a huge compliment, because all I wanted to do was fit in at the Good School. It was the first time I had met folks my age who had read more books than me. I was excited, but I didn’t know why I was there, other than because of the school’s reputation.

I left after two years, because even with 80% of my tuition covered by scholarship, my parents couldn’t afford to keep sending me there. I already had student loans and was afraid to take out more. In 2014, I returned home, drank constantly, and wandered aimlessly for three years.

After a dozen jobs and a handful of therapists, I ended up in Seattle, Washington, working as a barista. Therapy had helped me make peace with my feelings about the Good Schools, and I reassembled my self-worth around personal projects that were meaningful to me. I wrote books, I learned to code, and made a lot of great friends. I felt very fulfilled and happy.

Then, as luck would have it, one of my old high school friends stopped by the café. Kevin had attended a Good School, and graduated. He now worked in education, at the management level. He told me that on paper, it looked like he had succeeded on all fronts. In truth, he said, he was extremely unhappy. He had spent so long trying to get good grades that he never even thought about the things that mattered to him. Now he felt he had been conditioned to just say yes to powerful people. “Graduation from the Good School just made me an expert at doing what I was told and ignoring myself.”

I was shocked to hear this. I had always admired Kevin for graduating, yet here he was saying that he was jealous of me. “What I would give to have the joy you have,” he said. We laughed at this incredible disconnect, that the graduate of the Good School wished for the happiness of a dropout, and how the dropout wished every day that he had managed to graduate.

The Good Schools were eventually exposed for taking bribes from wealthy families so that their unqualified children could attend. Now, Good Schools are hosting online classes without reducing the price tag of tuition. These developments made me further question who the Good Schools were trying to serve.

I am grateful for all the education that I have received in my life. Without a doubt, the teachers and professors that I worked with trained my brain for the better. Further, I made some of my best friends at the Good School. However, the worth of a college degree is on the decline. In Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book The Job, the author highlights the fact that for low income families, a Bachelor’s degree often saddles the student with more of a financial burden than a benefit. Students from poor backgrounds with Bachelor’s degrees, on average, make less money than their peers who didn’t attend college. According to the leaders of the study, “Individuals from poorer backgrounds may be encountering a glass ceiling that even a Bachelor’s degree does not break.” (p. 152).

I believe in the importance of education. I would like to imagine that colleges are havens where motivated students can find answers to academic questions that they cannot find anywhere else. But I also recognize that there are systemic problems, primarily related to wealth, that cloud the supposed mission of the Good Schools. Colleges, I believe, are simultaneously credible places of study, and also businesses that exploit its customers.

In a perfect world, I wish that college education was free. I don’t want to have to take out a loan and join a rich kids club in order to gain specialized knowledge. And I have come to believe that the internet solves part of this problem.

Think about it: previously, you would learn as much as you could until none of the teachers in your hometown could answer your questions. Then, you applied to a college that had a high density of experts in your field of interest. The physical proximity to experts was important for study, and thus propelled your education.

Now, with the internet, you no longer need physical proximity to the experts. If you are conducting high-level research, you can instantly access the most up to date opinions and theories from folks that work in that field. If you loved the work of Professor So-And-So, you had to physically be in their class to ask specific nuanced questions. Now we have YouTube and Twitter.

I am not saying the internet alone is better than college, but it changes the relationship we have to education. Learning today hinges more on your ability to motivate yourself and follow your interests than strategically positioning yourself at an elite institution for a piece of paper of dubious worth. In my daily life, I have consolidated my position to the more succinct “college is criminal” to quickly communicate my distrust of the for-profit education industry. I have more faith in the folks who make podcasts, YouTube videos, and blogs than I do in the students who are trying to “find themselves” in grad school.

The folks who are cultivating their self-driven learning are avoiding the my own mistakes, and the mistakes of my friends, who blindly chased grades and college degrees with no greater reason than being told we had to. Instead, sorting through your own values and interests in order to clarify your educational path is perhaps better than getting into the Good School. And finding the materials to find yourself, whether it be online, in books, or at your local library, allows you to form your own curriculum in your day to day life, which in my opinion, is the Best School.

Bibliography

• Shell, Ellen Ruppel. The Job. 2018. (link)
• Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in U.S. College Entry Fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html
• As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/covid-college-tuition.html
• What’s Life Like as a Student at U.S.C.? Depends on the Size of the Bank Account. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/usc-admissions-scandal-students.html

Appendix

Here are some of my favorite online learners and resources.

• Live Overflow. Information security student & educator. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClcE-kVhqyiHCcjYwcpfj9w
• Free Code Camp. Massive Open Online Courses for learning various computer programming languages. https://www.freecodecamp.org/
• Andy Matushcak. Researcher and software engineer that examines how we think and learn. https://andymatuschak.org/
• Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer.
  (link). A book that examines memory, training, and competitive brain sports.
• Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. (link). Two professors from Stanford tackle the problems of personal fulfillment as a design question.