The Sniff Test: How to Pick a College

Any serious reader will tell you that the scent of paper and ink is not only often intoxicating, but also keenly connected to our experience of the text.  Scent is the first thing we notice.  Once, when I asked my friend Linda to look over some science materials I was considering for homeschooling, she immediately flipped the pages in front of her face to take a big sniff.  "Well.  Smells good.  That's a start."  And I nearly ditched a grammar program because the workbooks positively reeked. 

The other night I was clearing the table for dinner and picked up the pile of my son's slick college promotional publications.  The newest one was on the top and especially fragrant. I lifted it to my face and inhaled.

"Mother!  Really?"

"Well, honey, if you were going to pick a school based on how their publications smell, this one is the winner.  Take a whiff!"

He sighed.

When I shared this story with colleagues, two of my music history professor friends, they started riffing on the sniff test.

Professor One: "What if you embedded the viewbook with various odors?"  Here she feigned turning pages and inhaling, "Ah!  A brisk ocean breeze!  [turn, turn]  Vanilla latte! [turn, turn] Mountain air!"

Professor Two: "I wonder what ours would smell like?"

Professor One: "FEAR!"

Professor Two: "No, no!  Fresh cut grass!"

Professor One: "Oh!  I wonder if you could put in one of those sound chip things like in greeting cards, to play a leaf blower engine?!"  

(Sidenote: We do have the most finely manicured lawn in the Pacific Northwest.  In fact, I think we won a prize for that recently.)

We had a good chuckle, but do you see?  Do you see how easy it is to for even those of us who are serious about education to give ourselves up to the absurdity?  Humans don't like to be reminded that we are animals, for a start, and scent is a big deal. But then there is the general sense of absurdity that all of us working in higher education feel.

Is sniffing to choose a college any more outlandish than, say, the fact that the average college student graduates with about $30,000 of debt, up 25% since 2008, (according to Google)?  Any more ridiculous than the fact that these graduates will be paying upwards of 8% interest on those loans? Or what about the fact that the sticker price for tuition, room, and board at my alma mater is pushing $60,000 a year, up 500% since I graduated in 1989?  And a student's "aid award" is a combination of loans and grants.  As my friend Sarah, another college professor, has said, "Permission to borrow money at interest does not equal financial assistance.  A debt ≠ An award."  But we pretend it does, and we continue to not ask the right questions.    

Frank Bruni recently wrote a thoughtful piece in the New York Times about how to survive the college admission madness.  Evidently there are students and parents still in a "frenzy" about admission to posh colleges.  Shoot.  My children are eligible for massive tuition exchange scholarships, and even with those scholarships, we're still concerned about being able to afford to send them to any college at all.

Sure, yes, I absolutely agree with this lovely bit:

"...there’s only so much living and learning that take place inside a lecture hall, a science lab or a dormitory. Education happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways, and college has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional achievement or a life well lived."

Of course.  But for those suited to college, the ordinary scholars, those who would have everything to gain from a lecture hall or lab experience—even the less posh schools are increasingly inaccessible.  Instead of worrying whether Junior will get into Harvard—and Mr. Bruni rightfully points out our "warped obsession"—we need to ask why tuition and debt are rising at such an unfathomable pace, and what can we do to make it stop.  I don't know the answers, but I know there are smarter people than I am who can help sort out this mess.  But we need to agree, culturally, that we value an educated populace.  In my less hopeful moments, I despair that we do not.  I would like to be wrong about that.