By Dorothy Swanson Blaker
When I got into the University of Oregon, I called my parents to “celebrate” my first acceptance letter. “Huge shocker… guess where I got in… UO!” I said, my voice laden with sarcasm. “Toootally my dream school!”
Whenever I say “I never expected I’d end up here,” I always wince a little. It makes me sound like I think I’m above being here, like I deserved something “better” but didn’t get it. The truth is, though, I did think that.
I started high school on a full-ride scholarship at Phillips Academy Andover in Andover, Massachusetts. It was wonderful: great teachers, high quality education, countless opportunities, rich with diversity (and rich people). It was also an elite, status-obsessed boarding school where, in 2023, nobody could stop talking about how we made “#1 High School in the Nation” on Niche, a popular school-ranking site. (The year after that, we fell to #4, becoming the laughingstock of our rival boarding school). I didn’t pay the $75,000 price tag, but over 50% of my classmates did. AP scores, grades, test results, number of leadership positions… numbers were everything. We all wanted to win: at school, at college, at life.
When college application season finally rolled around — not that we hadn’t been thinking about it since freshman year — numbers still prevailed. Top-20 lists (shortened to T20 for those in the know), acceptance rates, SAT ranges. One number it seemed like nobody else had on their mind, though, was tuition. But my family, and our income, were in what one New York Magazine article called the “dead zone” for elite college admissions: far too rich for financial aid, yet millions away from being able to pay the typical sticker price of $75,000 a year. Graphs for relative acceptance rates by income at Ivy and Ivy-adjacent colleges dip exactly where my family lies. At every other point in my life, I understood the incredible privilege of our income bracket. Now, though, I was devastated. I didn’t trust that I could afford to attend the colleges I wanted to, even if I got in. I had to admit that I’d floated with the rising tide of expectations, and now mine were sky-high. Honestly, I’d been brainwashed. And it would take a lot to get me out of it.
At Andover, the college-elitism firehose was all-consuming. Whether it was comforting a friend after another impossible-expectation-filled call with her parents, or commiserating about the word count of the University of Chicago’s admissions essays, the culture was ubiquitous, persistent, and full of assumptions: we were all on equal merit-based footing; we all wanted the same thing; and we would make any financial, ethical, or spiritual sacrifice to attend a top-tier school. For me, college application season was a bubble of private, highly-privileged hell, as I tried to settle for a list of schools that felt “good enough” but that would want me badly enough to give me merit aid. I never stopped to wonder what went into my qualifications for “good enough.”
***
The further I got into my senior year, the less I found myself wanting the same things as the people around me. As my last days of high school ticked by, I realized that if I wanted good memories to look back on, this was the time to be making them. I stopped staying up so late to finish my essays and making up for hours of lost sleep with cups of coffee. I stopped short of perfect, and then went outside to lie in the grass. I played, climbed trees, painted, and laughed. I began to see that much of the “fun” my classmates had — drinking at school formals, disappearing to Boston, spending money on fancy dinners — was more about forgetting our stress than it was about making memories. Instead of getting drunk at a deafening dance, I stayed in, watched a movie, and ate ice cream with my girlfriend. I stopped following all the rules, both spoken and unspoken, and in doing so, I could feel myself becoming more me.
Somehow, I managed to ignore what this might mean for my college decision. The drive for prestige, disguised as a desire for greatness, continued to motivate my college attitudes, even as I gained perspective on my day-to-day life. Would I rather have a picnic than study two more hours for my math test? Obviously. Did I hate the blind privilege, entitlement, and never-stop academic grindset that surrounded me? Yes. Did I connect the dots? Not yet.
Fittingly, feedback from outside of my environment was the straw that broke the college camel’s back. One day, as my girlfriend helped me research the pros and cons of Case Western Reserve University, her dad called. “I’m helping Dorothy with her college list,” she told him.
She passed the phone to me. “I’m considering the University of Washington,” I told him, “and Case Western is cool, too, but they didn’t give me enough money.”
I asked him where he thought I should go.
“How much would UW be?” he asked.
“Around 40K,” I told him.
“How much would your own state school be?”
“Um, more like 15K.”
“Well… debt sucks,” he said. “My advice is, do whatever you need to not have it.”
It wasn’t just that call, and it wasn’t just the financial situation, but in that moment, something finally clicked. Duh, I thought. If I don’t go to UO, I’ll always regret it. My future was much longer than the next four years — that was all there was to it. Later that day, I remember walking to the store with my friends to buy groceries for our tinned fish dinner, a tradition of sardines and crackers we had begun that senior year. As we walked, I asked them, “Would you guys still love me if I went to the University of Oregon?”
As soon as I asked, I knew the answer didn’t matter. I was about to eat a quirky, fishy dinner with two of my best friends in the whole world, about to bask in the pure joy of good food with good people, and they didn’t care where I went to college.They never had — I did.
I had used the veil of college admissions culture, and the bubble I was in, to pretend that I was nothing but a victim of a vicious, achievement-oriented system. Really, though, I had built the system around myself. I’d spent my whole life being told I was special, that I was going “somewhere.” Then I wound up in the upper echelons of prep school, where everyone affirmed that we were special — we had gotten to “somewhere,” and of course we’d keep going. But there I was, weighing my options between still-not-enough-financial-aid, upper-middle-tier, elite-wannabe colleges, realizing my Ivy League dreams weren’t going to happen, and I still couldn’t let go. A lifetime of unchecked assumptions about my higher education plans left me unable to reconcile with reality: I wouldn’t get the prestige. I wouldn’t be able to let my school name speak for me. There would be no one-word guarantee of my intelligence, my achievements, my ability. No matter where I went, it wouldn’t be where I’d imagined myself. My state school had been an obvious decision for so long. I liked the campus, it was close to home, it was cheap, and I knew I could make it a good experience. But I’d held off for so long, clinging to a fantasy that affirmed my self-worth. Being at Andover made it harder to accept my college decision, but the very hardest thing to accept was that maybe, just maybe, the University of Oregon was actually a pretty good fit for me.
***
After two years at the University of Oregon, my 86-percent-acceptance rate, claustrophobically-close-to-home, middle-tier state school, I’ve been shoved gracelessly out of the nest of the elite, left to flop around on the ground with the other public-school plebeians as my friends soar at Yale, Columbia, Emory, Duke, Penn.
Oh wait—let me rephrase.
After a year at the University of Oregon, my boisterous, just-a-two-hour-drive-away, and miraculously-affordable state school, I am surrounded by down-to-earth people with normal problems. I have dear, loving friends, who have time to hang out on weeknights and Sunday afternoons because, well, maybe they’re missing a few homework assignments, but maybe they’re okay with that. I’m involved in ways I would have never had time for at an elite university: country line dancing on Tuesday nights, roommate dinners on Wednesdays, weekend camping trips, an off-campus job as a math tutor. I try to get as much out of my classes as I can—going to office hours, diving into readings, taking my time on assignments. I have the time and freedom to be in the Honors College and have not one, not two, but three minors, and study abroad in Mexico my junior year.
I am still struck, occasionally, with flashes of jealousy, what-ifs, and a residual bitterness for the weird-ass higher education system. My friends at Ivy League schools are having fun, too, although their reports of crazed competition for an A and getting rejected from elite student clubs tends to remind me that I’m in the right place. If, by some magic ticket, I got the chance to go to Yale for free right now, I’d like to think I’d say no. I’m not truly sure.
Thankfully, I will never have to make that decision, and it’s forced me to realize what I am sure of: That I made the best decision for myself with the resources I had. That nobody’s worth is defined by their choice of college. That I’ll graduate with the confidence that I can succeed, no matter where I got my silly little undergraduate degree. I would never have gone to UO — nor, by extension, reckoned with my internalized elitism — if my family’s finances hadn’t forced my hand, but I’m so glad I did. I’ll begin my life with nary a cent of student debt. And best of all? I love it here.
Dorothy Swanson Blaker is a rising junior studying Linguistics, Math, and Spanish at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. She loves college and can’t wait to see where her experiences at Oregon take her!
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