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.”
