A year of college now costs as much as a Tesla, and other thoughts

I just want to visit some thoughtfulness upon the latest news of a Connecticut college exceeding the $70K mark on tuition, leading the pricetag pack for the nation. I want to be thoughtful and not just indignant, paralyzed by the sticker shock. Because sticker shock about the cost of higher education is nothing new. Neither is the slackjaw expression of parents, sizing up that great economic pipeline into which we are setting our little children, fearful of how high that tuition will inevitably climb when it's our turn to cut a check. Or cash out on our bitcoins. And what then?

I really believe in the function of college, particularly as adolescence is lasting longer and longer and university is something of a petri dish in which to grow some thoughtful, civic-minded adults. I had the great fortune to attend a small college in a wee little hamlet, with hills and grassy knolls. I don't use fortune lightly--tuition was $26,000 in the year nineteen hundred and ninety eight. I received scholarships and worked as an RA for 3 years to defray costs of room and board. Good, good, Kendra, so when are we going to move past the part about your privilege?

That's exactly the point. I come from some absurd privilege, which I define as having attended private school and having two supportive parents who had earned degrees and had professional careers for years. Also, I took tennis lessons in high school and sometimes wore a tennis skirt which is obnoxious; all the volunteering in the world cannot course correct for that kind of privileged bologna.

But those same dynamics would not have been enough to buoy me through that same college experience and dump me out on the other side of four years, diploma-fied and debt-free, if I were a student matriculating in this current calendar year. $70,000 would simply represent too much of a burden for my family financially. And I am pretty real about what represented a burden for my family, and that many, many families around the world would love to call that a burden. There's simply no way, with the endowment that most colleges draw from, that aid could cover enough of the portion to make it worthwhile for me to bite the bullet on $70,000/year and incur any attendant debt to make up the shortfall.

I can't even say that it would be worth it. Because what enlightenment upon a grassy knoll could possibly be worth shouldering that kind of financial burden? What kind of career guarantee, what kind of network assurance is worthy of that kind of economic yoke? I know that medical and law school students ask themselves and their families these kinds of questions all the time. And the answer has to be, it will be worth it. It will all be worth it.

I'm just not sure it is anymore. Not state schools, not private schools, not Ivy League or Ivy League-caliber schools. I'm not sure that the rest of the world doesn't have it all a little bit or a lot bit right. There are other means by which an educated adult can be built. Perhaps through conscripted service as in Israel. Perhaps in taking a gap year to figure out what on earth a person actually enjoys enough to study and pursue on a full-time basis, as is popular in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Or how about first-rate government-subsidized university education as in Scandinavian countries. Those all sound worthy of our earnest consideration.

Kendra is not the greatest economist or thinker but education is supposed to be the great equalizer. For many it has never been an equalizing force, much less accessible. But it seems to me that every strata of education in this country is privileging the privileged more and more, and if we aren't already paying for it, we are about to. What are your thoughts?

Sex Education, revised and updated (?)

I got the kind of Sex Education that some people might say makes parents into grandparents when they are still in their thirties. That is: effectively, I received none at all. I do not consider this a chief failing on my parents' part, though. Because I? Was a nun. You would not need to equip a nun with information about reproduction. She took a vow of celibacy, after all. And I was a nun for all of the years I lived under my parents' roof. It is only with some hindsight that I understand better the kind of education my parents did impart. 

Had I asked my parents as a teenager, probably whilst riding through a very loud car wash, what an erection was or how I could get on the Pill, please believe they would have talked to me about it. I just had no interest in mining information from them on these and other matters (Teen Embarrassment, Population 4.6 Billion). The fact that the internet was not accessible to me in all the years I lived under their roof would imply that I must have been a patient child. However, this was patently not the case.

I was wildly curious. I was also wildly busy being a Very Pious Good Girl at my all-girls Catholic high school. You could not defy my surefooted rhetoric around the importance of abstinence.  I cut out a badge from the newspaper that said "Proud to be a Virgin" and taped it to my daily planner (that I had any friends in high school is a complete miracle). I was a vehement pro-life crusader (even my locker senior year bore a magnet that said, "Choose Life! Your Mom Did!" and again with the miracle that was anyone who agreed to be seen near High School Kendra).

The irony in all this is that I had to be on birth control during the latter part of high school. I hated this since I was so abstinent and so anti-contraceptive, but my anxiety and overachieving zeal caused a perfect storm of the loss of much weight and much menstruation. So by the time I went to college, I was 17 years-old and had never used a tampon but I took the Pill every day and could tell you all ways you should not have an abortion.

In the spring before I graduated from high school, a rent-a-cop visited our theology class to warn us about the hazards of being a female living on a university campus. It was like Scared Straight: Sex Ed edition. The rent-a-cop presented several case studies of young women who had been just like we were (overachieving, overprivileged) and they were all basically pillaged and raped because they left their dorm rooms alone at night. Probably to do laundry. 

The intentions of the rent-a-cop and the school that hired him were well-meaning. There is a place for precautionary training, and law enforcement plays a meaningful role in helping to prevent sexual assault. But it's problematic to me that this was, up until this time, perhaps the most direct an adult had ever spoken to me about sex. And it was not about sex, per se. It wasn't about relationships or physical boundaries or pacing or pleasure. It was about sexual violence and its inevitability. The angle was basically, you, as young females away from your parents, are a vulnerable population and you will be preyed upon and the best thing we can do for you is to prepare you as to what to do when an assault occurs, either to you or someone you know.

***

I only wish that things appeared to have changed in the twenty years since I graduated high school. But it still seems to me that the pervasive message about sex education is directed at girls and women, and it is still one that places us on the defensive. The Law sees us as both the preyed upon as well as the gatekeepers, so we best know how to react when we're in a situation that could become a sexual one. Otherwise, things are going to get pretty (choose your own adventure: messy, awkward, uncomfortable, harmful, hurtful, unable to be remembered).

I don't purport to know about the sex education imparted to my male counterparts in high school.  Was a rent-a-cop hired to speak in the theology classes at our brother schools? If so, did he or she remind them that curiosity and hormones and strength, especially when mixed with alcohol, can be a potent cocktail of poor decisionmaking? What did their parents tell them before they hung out with girls? What did they ask them after they drove girls home? If they got a girl pregnant, were they ever asked whether or not they intended to finish high school?

I only know what it's like to be told to never leave a party alone, to be taught how to use my car keys if an attacker is holding me down, and to know how to detect whether my drink has been rufied or not. I only know what it's like to be afraid, constantly, of not being able to get out of a situation that I might have consented to being in, initially. I only know what it's like to feel freighted with responsibility and to remain  vigilant at all times that sex might happen and that it won't be good.

***

Now that I have taught university and am raising a daughter and a son to eventually leave home and attend university, I am a bit more circumspect about the sex education. I now see it as a mere thread in a more holistic education in helping to raise a capable and contributing member of society.

Whereas my parents did not address, say, the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases with me, they fed and clothed me, took me for regular physicals, asked me about my friends, encouraged me to pursue hobbies, and they constantly showed that they cared about my well-being. This is all a part of educating a person as a healthy physical, social, spiritual, and eventually a sexual being.

But I still have such angst for the two-pronged messaging we are constantly imparting to young people about sex. If you are male, sex will probably be something you'll be interested in pursuing, either with a female or male or both. Just make sure it's consensual. If you are female, you should be very prepared. Because it could all go very wrong, very fast.

I trust that no one is surprised about the Aziz Ansari story that is having a moment. By this I don't mean, based on Ansari's comedy, one should deduce he is an aggressively sexual person. I mean that it all adds up: both the the account of the anonymous woman who alleges he would not take no for an answer, as well as her guilt and shame after the fact. They had both received the memo. Ansari, as a male, would be the one who pursues. And she, as the female, should be ever vigilant as the gatekeeper. And when things don't go the way she wanted them to have gone? Well. Pay no mind. He, like so many of his peers, weren't given the holistic portrait that sex is about more than consent. It is about respect and affection and mutuality.

Master of None, indeed.

Required Reading: What Made Maddy Run

I haven't visited Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam and seen where she and her family hid in the annex until the Gestapo found them. I have, however, imagined many times what it was like for her father to return to that place and find her diary. I understand if you visit the house, you will watch a television clip of Otto Frank saying how surprised he was to finally read Anne's "deep thoughts, the seriousness, especially the self-criticism." I am always so amazed at the honesty, the humility it must have taken this loving father who had lived in the closest of proximity that any parent could imagine to occupy with his or her teenager for years to say, "My conclusion is...that most parents don't know --really--their children." Madison Holleran kept an Anne Frank quotation in her inspiration log on her MacBook. This is what journalist Kate Fagan found after Holleran committed suicide and Holleran's family gave Fagan the laptop. Fagan first reported on Holleran's tragic death in an excellent feature, "Split Image" on espnW. Fagan has expanded the piece into a book, What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen that I believe should be required reading for anyone living in 2017.

I think this book is so important because Maddy is every kid who has ever put pressure on himself or herself to not just do well but to be excellent in order to make her parents proud. This passage by Fagan resonated with me:

Those lucky enough to grow up envisioning college start hearing about the building blocks of a college resume (the boxes that need checking, the optics that need preserving) from the moment they enter high school, and sometimes even sooner. Too often, kids are herded into commitments and activities that are born not of passion but of obligation. These obligations can continue for years because stopping is not seen as a possibility. Those who do stop risk being perceived as lacking fortitude to push through when the going gets tough.

I was Maddy to the nth degree, working two jobs in high school while pulling a 4.0, leading every imaginable service club, and crushing it with the extra-curriculars. The chief difference is that I slid into my depression/anxiety valley in which I stopped eating and menstruating and generally wanting to be alive well before I left for college. My parents helped me to get the extra support I needed. I believe my story could have been Maddy's story had I not already been in therapy by the time I left for school.

The other chief difference is that Maddy came of age on social media. Fagan does a first-rate job of explaining the paradox of overconnection and undercommunication. Although we are in touch with one another all day, few of us are engaged in face-to-face communication with each other, or hearing the deep, heaving sigh on the phone. We are constantly decoding what is uttered between the emoji. Fagan's indictment of this 24/7 texting, posting culture is accurate and she concedes that she has admittedly perpetuated it at times.

What Made Maddy Run is part communication scholarship, part journalism, and part mental health exposition. It is a book that comes alongside a grieving family and asks them to share what they knew then and what they know now. It is not a parenting guide for how to launch a teen into a safe Instagram filter. It is not a playbook for suicide prevention. It is simply a necessary book that has made me feel less alone, not only as one who battles generalized anxiety/depression, but as one who is shepherding kids through uncharted territory. Like every parent who has gone before me, I'm just trying not to be in the dark.