College, Class, Race, Success, America, New Hampshire Instructs

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When the Phantom was 9 years old, his father was invited to speak at The University of New Hampshire, which meant the whole family got a trip for a week's vacation at Lake Winnipesaukee  and that's when the Phantom fell in love with New England, New Hampshire and the idea of college.

During the day, it was 80 degrees on the lake and at night it dropped to nearly 50, and you needed a jacket. Back home in Washington, D.C. the temperatures and the humidity ran over 90 and it was not much more comfortable at night. New Hampshire had wonderful birch tress with white bark and the water on the lake was so clear you could see to the bottom a hundred feet off shore.  In those days, the mid 1950's, no motorized boats were allowed on the lake, except for the Mount Washington cruise ship. 

Walking around the campus of the University of New Hampshire, the Phantom informed his parents he would someday come to Durham to go to college. His mother smiled indulgently, and told him he would never last the winter. 

But 9 years later, the Phantom learned the real reason he would not go to UNH: It didn't have enough social cachet.  The Phantom learned from his friends in his Maryland high school the glittering prizes lay in the Ivy League.

The Phantom's father had suffered through the Great Depression. He was the first member of his family to graduate college--he worked his way through City College of New York, along with Jonas Salk and a generation of first generation sons of new immigrants. And he was fortunate to land a job in a job placement firm where he saw how the system in this nation worked: If he sent an applicant with a stellar record from Brooklyn College and another with a mediocre record from Yale down to Chase bank, the Yalie got the job. 

That was then.

Since then, the idea took hold widely that getting into an Ivy League or some other elite college (Stanford, Swarthmore, MIT, you-fill-in-the-blank) was "getting your ticket punched," the first step toward an inevitable ascension into the upper class.

But this is a big country, and there are lots of colleges which claim to be elite and considerable confusion about how much attaching the name of one of these to your application will launch your career and prospects.  The sheer numbers likely explains the fascination with that insipid gossip rag, U.S. News and World Report, a sort of social register for which colleges are entitled to snob appeal.

Once the idea became accepted that an acceptance to Harvard was essentially equivalent to winning the lottery, the fight to claim a place took on legal and social dimensions:  Affirmative action battles began. If you could exclude Blacks and Hispanics from Harvard and MIT, then you were excluding them from any chance at entering the upper classes and if you could assure them a place, then you would move the underclass into the upper class.

This thinking reverberated all down the line, so a student applying to the University of Colorado from Dover, New Hampshire, would absorb the marketing that going into debt to go to Colorado would change her life, and was a reasonable investment in her future, even though it meant acquiring debt UNH would not load on her. 

Parents were in no position to analyze the marketing claims from colleges which promised a better life for their kids--the investment was worth it. Don't short change your kids' future. 

But here in New Hampshire, that psychology does not play much. Yes, people know the names Harvard and Dartmouth, but beyond that, none of the hype resonates much with them. Too many people in New Hampshire have either never gone to college and done just fine--when doing just fine means having a job, a house--a camp, they call it--on a lake and time to hunt and fish. They judge the success of their children by how secure they are economically, how well they've married, how nice a house they've built themselves and how much vacation time they have. 

Here in New Hampshire, most folks I meet do not think there is much difference between Hesser College and Bowdoin, between Franklin Pierce and Haverford, between Keene State and Vanderbilt, between Southern New Hampshire and Johns Hopkins, between the University of Phoenix and the University of Pennsylvania, between Plymouth State and Wellseley or between the University of New Hampshire and the University of Chicago.

All the same to folks here. And maybe they're on to something.

In New York City, there are lines a block long outside the latest hot restaurant  where everyone just has to be, to eat, to be seen.  Once you get in,  is the food that different from the food at Jumping Jay's?

In the big "glamour cities" around the country, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, your kid is not known personally by more than a few score of friends and neighbors. He needs another name attached to his to be a success.

The Phantom was "lucky" enough to slip into three different Ivy League schools for college, medical school and post graduate study. Maybe he was just not smart enough to be able to understand how brilliant everyone was at these places, but as far as he could see, there was far more hype than reality to these places.  There were plenty of smart people, for sure, but there were a fairly large number of pretty mediocre intellects ensconced in these places. And at universities with less cachet, i.e. less effective marketing, there were plenty of very smart people. 

In small town New Hampshire, everyone knows your kid, has since he was little, watched him grow up through middle school to high school and if he does go off to Harvard, it won't change their opinion of him much, because the basis for their opinion of him is based on way more than Harvard's.

So maybe the solution to the student loan burden is for America to become more like New Hampshire. Stop lining up for that table in the restaurant everyone is so eager for, and savor the food which is on your own table.