The Cost of a Great Education

Elite education is overrated. I went to an Ivy League university. I enjoyed it. I broadened my horizons, met brilliant people, and had transformative intellectual experiences, just like I was supposed to do. I learned how to study, and where my strengths lie, and that there are things (like advanced mathematics) that I am really not cut out to do. My degree has opened doors for me, and when I mention the name of my alma mater people always look impressed.

But there is a cost to choosing such an ambition-drenched environment. It is a cost that means little when you’re eighteen and itchy, a cost whose full measure I am only learning now. It comes from consistently choosing opportunity over community, among peers who all do the same.

My husband and I both left home and family to go to college. (We met at the aforementioned Ivy League institution.) It was what was expected of us, and what we expected for ourselves. We were smart and eager, with no experience saying no to something that was within reach. As promised, we received top-notch educations and made lifelong friends. But here is what no one told us.

No one told us that those friends—amazing people all—would scatter to the corners of the earth, following the same winds of ambition and achievement that brought them together in the first place. No one told us that we might want to go home again, and that once you have chosen an elite and specialized field, going home is a whole lot harder than you would think. No one told us that by following our academic destinies we would end up in the middle of the country with our immediate families planted firmly on both coasts. And no one told us how much this would matter once we had a family of our own.

This is all a little raw for me right now. Last weekend I went to the wedding of a college friend. She is a doctor, tethered to the rigorous demands of her profession. She lives on the east coast now, and is probably headed to the southwest soon. I haven’t spent much time with her in years, and had forgotten how deeply she is my friend, and how much I miss her. I have no idea when I’ll see her again, and no expectation that we will ever settle near enough to really be part of each others’ lives.

As I write, I am on a plane somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, headed to visit my parents. This is the second of six trips our family has planned for this fall. (Work travel excluded.) Travel is the second largest line item in our household budget, behind our mortgage. And yet it’s nowhere near enough. We usually manage to show up for the important life events of our nearest and dearest. We spend major holidays with one set of family or another. But this hit-and-run version of connection is no substitute for the true closeness that comes from geographic proximity.

At the risk of being maudlin, it is too late for us to solve this problem now. It is structural and impossible, and one of the most profound sources of sadness in my life. We could (and may) choose to settle near particular family members, or a beloved set of friends. But we have forged connections in too many places to knit our loved ones together into anything like a real community.

I wish that someone had painted this picture for me when I was eighteen and setting my sights on the horizon. I wish someone had told me what I was choosing. I wish—in hindsight—that I had gone to a solid but unremarkable state school close to my home and befriended people who were closer to theirs. My education would surely have been more ordinary, and my opportunities might have been diminished, but right now I would take that trade in a heartbeat. I have no idea if I could really have been persuaded to make this choice at that moment in my life, but I know that if I ever take my daughter on college tours, we will visit every decent school within a hundred miles of home, and I will tell her why.