CC “middle income” is well above the real middle income.
Gladwell is an interesting writer and thinker, who often uses generalizations to illustrate a broad truth. That said, the "good food vs. financial aid’ argument is unfair to Bowdoin. First, Bowdoin’s need based financial aid program is better than most, and roughly equivalent to Middlebury, Williams, Colby, Bates and other peer institutions. Bowdoin is one of a small group of colleges and universities (probably less than 50 in the country) that could fill every seat in its freshman class with smart, full pay students, each paying $60K+ for the privilege of attending. Nevertheless, Bowdoin provides need based aid (grants, not loans) to 45% of the freshman class…better than most. Gladwell should not have singled out Bowdoin to make his point.
Second, yes there is a college “arms race” for the latest and greatest student amenities, including gourmet dining hall offerings. However, the reality is colleges compete with each other for the best students. Gladwell also ignores the positive impact these amenities can have on the fiscal health of a college. We visited 20 or so campuses in the last year with our daughter, and found attractive campuses enhanced by palatial recreation/wellness centers, gorgeous new residence halls, outdoor brick patios with gas fire pits and Adirondack chairs, and elegant landscaping with perennial flowers (framed by endless mulch delivered by the truck load!). The business school buildings at Wake Forest and UMichigan have soaring atriums with exotic sandstone walls and tropical hardwood trim. Gladwell might argue that all of these amenities were at the expense of need based financial aid. However, the quality of the campus experience, including the buildings, food, athletics, etc., is a big part of what attracts full pay students. The revenues generated by full pay students help subsidize financial aid budgets for smart students with demonstrated financial need. Selective colleges are “Marxist” when it comes to who pays what. The bottom line is that strong academics + high quality of student life = demand from full pay students… which helps fund the aid/economic diversity Gladwell argues for.
mr. gladwell who gave a great talk one time on college several years ago that I enjoyed watching on youtube…
he seems to push weird angels to be different and has been batting zero on a whole host of subjects as of late.( IMO) I get that is how he stands out and makes a living by bringing odd or new angels to subjects…but just because he has crazy hair and round glasses does not make him a super intellectual. mr gladwell has probably earned enough money to fund a full scholarship at say Bowdoin College. instead of telling them to serve mediocre food to increase low income students. (ironically I bet he got paid $$$ for his podcast in which he maligned Bowdoin College on how they allocate their money. ) step up mr gladwell. .
“To be honest, some very wealthy schools are awful, like Wash U, Notre Dame and NYU…”
And those schools aren’t located in Maine. Bowdoin is a tough sell to poor kids who aren’t from upper New England. Relative to St. Louis or Poughkeepsie, it’s more expensive and inconvenient to get back and forth. It’s possible that Bowdoin could be doing a lot more to attract Pell kids, but it’s not a fair comparison to a school that’s a 90-minute train ride to NYC, and food has nothing to do with it.
Mr. Gladwell should have examined the amount of money spent by colleges on marketing. Money spent on something that adds absolutely zero value to the educational experience. Money spent for the sole purpose of increasing the number of applicants to improve statistics.
Gladwell simply used Bowdoin and Vassar to make a point about how elite colleges can be misdirected in their investment strategies. Food is literally not really the issue. No doubt Bowdoin has great food, but Vassar’s is not that bad (and compared to the college food of 20+ years ago it is relatively gourmet). Vassar’s proximity to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) means that many of the eateries on the edge of campus are staffed by world-class cooks. But yes, the schools do seem to have different priorities.
Gladwell often uses hyperbole to drive home his salient point(s). It’s a powerful strategy and shouldn’t be taken literally. I’m sure if I were a Bowdoin parent I’d be pissed, but the point is still a good one.
It is? I don’t think so. He’s singling out a school that isn’t an outlier in any meaningful way. If his point is a broader one about democratizing higher ed, then framing it as a “takedown” of Bowdoin is a very, very poor rhetorical strategy to accomplish that goal.
(No skin in the Bowdoin game; I have no personal connection to Bowdoin at all.)
@wcmom1958 What exactly do you see as Bowdoin’s “different priorities” than Vassar? And what point is a good one? The premise of Gladwell’s piece is fundamentally wrong, not just hyperbolic. Perhaps it may not be wrong for a college somewhere, who knows, but not for the one he profiled. It seems like he or his producers started with a premise and worked backwards – reading through a list of non-academic things a college can be ranked on, thinking food sounded particularly trivial and then assuming that if the food is good it must mean they are wasting money on it at the expense of something more important. Then find a single stat to justify that claim, take it out of context and intentionally ignore all the facts that contradict it. If the root assertions are false, as they are here, it’s really impossible to judge if the overall thesis is legitimate. Perhaps some schools do waste money on food, dorms, or whatever, at the expense of student aid. But since there is no correlation at all in the one example he gave, how do we know?
In a later episode, Gladwell skewers Stanford President John Hennessey. But, in my opinion, it was like a bad 60 Minutes interview with loaded questions and responses edited to paint Gladwell’s picture. That was the last episode for me.
Never invade Russia in the winter, never play poker with a man named Doc, never take food advice from a Canadian.
MG’s righteous judgement of people from decades past using today’s standards is exhausting and pedestrian.
This is what I was going to say, but probably less eloquently, so I’ll just quote it and say I agree 100%.
Malcolm Gladwell writes opinion pieces.
Upfront–I haven’t read all nor listened to the podcasts.
But! We visited a bunch of colleges a few years back where the meal plan was required. It was basically a tack-on to tuition prices. To the tune of 3500 per year. You can eat a lot of ramen for 3500 dollars. Just saying.
@gouf78,
At the schools I know of that require the full meal plan the cost is rolled into the cost of attendance assumed for FA. A kid on full FA will have coverage for the full price of 3 squares 7 days a week. My kids’ school calls it the “comprehensive fee” and it allows for unlimited visits. The result is an equalizing effect-no “haves” with the full meal plan or spending a lot of money on “food bucks” fast food and “have nots” eating ramen 4 times a week.
I’m sure there are others schools that I don’t know that don’t do it this way but I like this arrangement.
“You can eat a lot of ramen for 3500 dollars.”
And you wouldn’t build any relationships with your classmates and professors over meals. That’s the point of shared food service at college.
I like the system where everyone has a full meal plan and everyone has the same plan. I think it’s ridiculous to "incent"kids to not eat breakfast, or eat cereal in their rooms. I agree w Hanna that shared meals are part of the college experience - not sequestering away eating ramen.
@Pizzagirl true, but the prices of these full meal plans (like tuition, R/B and everything else college related) is ridiculous. At the current rates and rates of increase, college will soon become unaffordable to most. A big driver of these increases is fancy food service, high end campus improvements etc. I’m all in favor of quality food and believe colleges are responsible for providing that… But there can be good quality affordable food without going to the extreme of both Bowdoin and Vassar. I don’t eat at Capital Grill every night, but do expect the schools to produce good healthy food for my kids… But it doesn’t have to be 5*.
This is making me hungry. I had the good fortune to eat at Bowdoin’s dining halls a few times while visiting S. They have recipes on their dining site for anyone interested:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/dining/what/favorite-recipes.shtml
My S did not have a car on campus, and it would have been very difficult for him to go to the grocery store and bring groceries home on his bicycle. I am very thankful Bowdoin’s generous FA/grants cover the cost of attendance, which allowed him to eat in the dining halls with other students.
@suzyQ7 I’m not sure that spending on food service is a big driver of increased tuition. Have you read anything that backs that up? If so I would be curious to see. Thanks. I read a study a few years ago that looked into the drivers of increased college cost and what it concluded that the vast majority of the increase was driven by an explosion in the size of non-faculty school administrations. It was shocking how much larger “management” has gotten in proportion to student or faculty populations. And it’s a vicious cycle because the expanded administrators need to justify themselves so they creation programs, initiatives, etc. that further increase costs. Accordingly the proportion of the total budget that goes directly toward either professor salaries, research or academic classrooms is smaller and smaller. Anecdotally it’s also been my experience that room and board haven’t risen proportionately to tuition and other education expenses. What I’m paying for R&B for my son is barely double what I paid as an undergraduate almost 30 years ago. But tuition is exponentially more. Also, I would say college ALREADY is unaffordable to most. The only thing making it work is financial aid and student debt. And at school’s like Bowdoin where they have full need financial aid and need blind admissions, food service isn’t making it unattainable for anyone. Essentially the half that don’t need financially aid are helping pay for the the financial aid of the half that do. BTW, I wholeheartedly agree that college costs are a massive problem. I’m just not sure I would call food a big driver of that. Certainly the food is far better than when I went to school. Though at Bowdoin they don’t have the fancy new dorms many schools do.
The point of Malcolm Gladwell is just that… Every dollar spent on luxury food service (we can all agree that Bowdoin has luxury food service, right?) Is a dollar not spend on “other things”. So, yes, fancy food service has to be paid for, either from higher r/b charges and/or factored into tuition. There is no such thing as a free lunch.