A couple of weeks ago I accompanied my niece, a junior in high school, on a college tour through Boston (Tufts, Boston College and Harvard), Connecticut (Yale) and New York (Columbia and NYU). Aside from the unusually cold weather (especially for us, spoiled South Floridians) walking through the campuses of some of the world’s most prestigious learning institutions and learning more about them from the young and bright students conducting the tours was an enlightening experience.
I couldn’t help but comparing the college experience in the US vs. my years of college in Peru during the mid eighties. For me, college was just a tougher version of high school. I was still living at home, frequenting the same places, and surrounded by the same people. My choice of careers was basically limited to four options: engineering, law, economics or business administration (I ended up choosing engineering because I was good at math), and only one or two decent schools.
The college experience prioritized almost exclusively the academic aspect, and the rigid course progression offered very few options for students to design a customized learning path.
Needless to say, we didn’t have the resources (technological or otherwise) available to college students in the US today (I remember times when I and ten of my buddies had to share the only library copy of a book to study for an important exam).
College in the US is a completely different experience: it’s a rite of passage where you learn about yourself and about life in addition to the things you learn in class. Your choice of college is also much broader (20 or 30 top ones plus hundreds in the mid tear) with hundreds of interesting and creative majors to choose from.
The liberal arts education kids receive here also allows for a more well rounded personal development: in all the schools we visited students were required to take at least 25% of their course load outside their preferred area of concentration. Therefore, it was not uncommon to find molecular biology students taking classes on native American poetry, or others dividing their focus between physics and English.
In some cases, you’re not even required to declare a major until after your second year, which gives you enough time and exposure to make a good career decision.
Bright kids in top schools have an impressive array of resources at their disposal: libraries, labs, research facilities and a faculty that often includes Nobel prizes. Also, most schools are now promoting study-abroad opportunities, facilitated by partnerships with learning institutions in every single continent. Many students are taking advantage of the opportunity to immerse themselves in other cultures and learn another language.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the student body, which I think adds an interesting dimension to the learning environment, and contributes to the vibrancy of neighbouring communities like Cambridge, where students from schools like Harvard, MIT, Boston College, BU and Tufts converge.
Another pleasant surprise was the amount of financial aid. Top schools generally cover the difference between the cost of tuition, room and board and what the parents can contribute, while doing away with the need for expensive student loans that saddle graduates with a crushing debt for years. The flipside, of course, is that it is extremely hard to get in, with rates of acceptance of 10% or less being the norm.
By doing this comparison I am not complaining about my student years. With all the limitations and difficulties we had to face back then those were some of the best years of my life, and served me well later as I forged a new life in a new country where I’ve had a successful career, make a good living and travel the world visiting fantastic places and meeting interesting people.
But if I were seventeen again today, and I had a shot at getting into one of these top schools, I would be very, very excited and would sure work my butt off to try to get in, just like my talented niece is doing.
