A compelling podcast by Malcolm Gladwell http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight. “Suck it up and go to Vassar.” Yes!!
I listened to this podcast. Quick summary:The podcast starts out comparing student dining room food at Bowdoin vs. Vassar, and says Bowdoin’s food is vastly superior (humorously described as Michelin star at Bowdoin vs. laxative effect at Vassar ). But this comes at the expense of financial aid at Bowdoin. Vassar has 23% Pell grant students vs. Bowdoin at 13% Pell grant. The argument is that perks like high quality food, nice dorms and updated facilities often come at the expense of dollars available for financial aid. The gist of the podcast is praising Vassar for making a conscious choice to educate more low income students even if it means cutting expenses and not having the greatest amenities. The trouble is that Vassar still needs to attract a certain percentage of full pay students to make the finances work. That is becoming increasingly difficult as Vassar competes with other schools that provide full pay students with single rooms, fancier dorms and facilities, and better (more expensive) food options, etc. Students on tour visit Vassar and eat soggy pizza for lunch, then tour Bowdoin and eat artisanal cheeses, homemade peanut butter, lobster bakes, eggplant parmesan pancakes, venison during deer season, etc. Gladwell says this is “everything that is wrong” with American colleges. He says go to Vassar not Bowdoin to send a message to the Bowdoins of the American college scene that they have the wrong priorities,
I think Gladwell makes an interesting point. I don’t feel too guilty though because my kid goes to Pomona which has 22% of students on Pell grants in the freshman class, and pretty good food although not as over the top as at Bowdoin.
But is food in the dorm dining hall relevant to the colleges that most attend, either as commuters or as residents living off campus?
I thought I saw Bowdoin’s response, at least on Twitter, noting that Gladwell had not spoken to Bowdoin financial aid office, only its food services, and that its food services is self-sustaining (presumably funded through student board fees) and does not take funds which could be freed up for financial aid.
Vassar does a great job on economic diversity, as do a number of other schools like Grinnell. But arguing that good quality food at one school means it should be, essentially boycotted, certainly seems overly simplistic and designed to stir controversy.
I like Malcolm Gladwell’s novels and agree with some of his views on American colleges, but I agree with @Midwestmomofboys that his argument wasn’t well researched and was overly simplistic. I also looked into Bowdoin’s food situation and found that it is indeed self-sustaining.
@ucbalumnus at least on Bowdoin 91% of all undergrads live on campus. It’s probably not too different for most LACs (it’s 96% for Vassar).
My S just graduated from Bowdoin. Yes, the food is fabulous. One reason we permitted him to apply to Bowdoin ED is their generous need based aid. They have need-blind admission, meet the full need of all who qualify for need-based aid, and do not include loans in their aid packages.
Here is Bowdoin’s response to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast:
http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/2016/07/bowdoin-responds-to-malcolm-gladwells-food-fight-podcast/
I find Gladwell entertaining, but he often squeezes/ignores data to make whatever point he’s trying to sell make.
Bowdoin has 100% need-blind admission and offers full demonstrated need aid to anyone admitted, with no loans. So how could the quality of the food service have any impact on the financial aid at all? Wouldn’t admission need to be need aware or the level of aid need to be less than demonstrated for there to even be any correlation possible? It seems like an inherently faulty logic premise.
^I came here to say this. It doesn’t make any sense. Bowdoin and Vassar are both need-blind in admissions and meet 100% of a family’s financial need, so aside from food dollars being separate from financial aid dollars this reasoning doesn’t make sense.
I think there’s a whole set of other reasons why Vassar has more low-income students. Lower-income students tend to go to school closer to home and go with what they know. Vassar is in New York and in short driving/commuting distance to NYC. 26% of Vassar students are from New York; I don’t know whether anywhere public there is a breakdown of where their low-income students are from, but I’m betting it’s an even larger percentage. New York also has other cities with impoverished urban cores - Buffalo and Rochester can provide that context. (I know that poor children don’t only come from cities, but there’s a larger concentration of them in any city vs. a rural area.) Bowdoin only has 9% in-state students. Even for kids who aren’t from New York, the prospect of going to a small college in a small city very close to a very large city (Vassar) is much different from going to a small college in a very small town in a pretty rural area.
Among the general public Vassar also has better name recognition. if you asked your average, non-CC posting person to list some small colleges off the top of their head, they are far more likely to name Vassar than Bowdoin.
I’m generally a bit skeptical of Malcolm Gladwell, tbh. He writes a lot of pop psychology, which is not bad in and of itself, but sometimes the stuff he writes is either inaccurate/exaggerated or sensationalized. For example, in Outliers he writes about the “10,000 hours rule,” in which he posits that people have to practice something for 10,000 hours before they can achieve true mastery. First of all, there’s absolutely no support for any arbitrary number of hours it takes to become an expert. There’s not even any reason to believe that every skill on the planet requires the same level and amount of practice for every person, regardless of prior experience and exposure. Secondly, psychologists have studied practice and skill for a really long time and have found that practice alone only explains a small part of achievement. It differs per field and skill, of course.
Another Gladwell overgeneralization is here: http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/
Basically, he suggests that the structure of number words in the Chinese language is helpful for learning and doing math. E.g. 24 is 二十四 (two ten four). But he then generalizes it to “Asian” children doing well in math.
You can see that the generalization is an overstretch on a translation web site. For example:
https://translate.google.com/#en/zh-CN/two%0Afour%0Afive%0Aten%0Afourteen%0Afifteen%0Atwenty%20four%0Atwenty%20five%0Athirty%20four%0Athirty%20five
Now switch to different Asian languages. Even if you cannot read the languages, you can note the patterns in the words to see whether Gladwell’s claim about the structure of number words is true in the other languages.
I was excited to subscribe to Gladwell’s Revisionist History. But after listening to a few podcasts I feel I’ve fallen for the bait and switch routine. Not much history in the series, and nothing eloquently revised. He should rename the series Revisionist Social Justice Lessons. So far the series is a bust.
“I’m generally a bit skeptical of Malcolm Gladwell, tbh.”
Me too. Bowdoin has a smaller student body (~1800 vs. ~2450) and a 40% higher endowment (1.393 billion vs. 980 million). So the endowment per student is almost twice as high at Bowdoin. I’m not bothering to look up current donations, but having almost twice the per-student resources is a darn good explanation for offering better luxuries on campus before you ever look at financial aid.
Gladwell’s goal seemed to be to make full pay parents and students feel guilty for opting for Bowdoin over Vassar. His argument is that Vassar needs a certain percent of full pay students to be able to afford to fulfill its commitment to lower income students, but it’s hard to get those full pay students when those students can go to Bowdoin and get lobster bakes, venison, eggplant parmesan pancakes, etc instead of soggy pizza. Pretty simplistic reasoning and it seems to be taken for granted that the Vassar food service can’t do any better than soggy pizza.
The premises used for determining what is actually good food may be different for students inclined toward a vegan diet. By a peta2 standard, a school such as the public, presumably lower budget, SUNY at Geneseo out-performs both Vassar and Bowdoin.
Well, it is both thought-provoking and over-simplified.
It is remarkable to see how fancy campuses have become since the “old days” 
He is right that colleges are spending tons on the amenities that will attract full pay students.
It’s worth noting tho that their fin aid methodologies are different. I have run numbers on net price calcs and in some scenarios Bowdoin would actually cost less than Vassar because of their slightly higher income threshold for packages containing no parental contribution and no loans. Of course maybe Bowdoin can afford to be so generous because so few Pell kids end up attending.
Vassar definitely attracts more diverse students from across a wider economic spectrum – in both greater numbers and proportion – and in that Gladwell is correct. If Vassar has almost a quarter of its students on Pell grants, that does set a different tone than a school where only 13% are recipients. I would also echo observations in #10 and #13.
The situation still leaves a huge gap for the middle income kids. This story comes from a few years back and I remember it because the student impressed me with her maturity:
http://www.thecollegiateblog.org/2013/07/24/student-stories/
Gldwell may be overstating it, but he is correct in noting that Vassar has put much more of its resources into aid for lower income kids than Bowdoin has. Vassar, Amherst, and Pomona rank at the very top in economic diversity among private colleges. Bowdoin is middling, but not terrible. To be honest, some very wealthy schools are awful, like Wash U, Notre Dame and NYU…
@ThankYouforHelp Vassar doesn’t do much for middle income students though.
Vassar’s net price calculator suggests that, for a student with two parents earning $65,000 but with no assets, the net price would be $12,035 ($3,500 student loan + $2,150 student work + $6,385 parent contribution).