Searching for Rigor in the Age of Budget Cuts
As any high school senior can attest, choosing a college is a stressful experience. When the decisions start rolling in, all students have to rely on are meaningless buzzwords and effectively identical mission statements. And yet, they’re expected to make a binding decision that will determine their life for the next four years.
We all have to find a way to cut through the noise. So, what are the factors that actually inform students’ college choices?
For me, the answer is highly specific. I am a current high school senior, graduating in the Class of 2026. My central, life-defining interest has always been literature. So naturally, my college search was uniquely subject-driven. I knew what I wanted from the beginning: a substantial, difficult literary education emphasizing scholarship across time periods with high analytical standards. In my search for schools, I scoured dozens of professors’ publications, university lit journals, and course catalogs. I wasn’t looking for a pretty campus view or a winning athletics team; I was searching for complex, well-funded humanities programs with the resources to give me an education worthy of my tuition. My search was laser-focused and deeply informed by my interests.
But that desire for academic rigor was hardly limited to me or my humanistic pursuits. At my academically intensive high school, whether a university’s academics would prove challenging was the biggest factor influencing nearly every college decision in my graduating class. Schools invariably stressed how easy and laid-back their programs could be in an attempt to draw us in with the prospect of easy “A”s. Yet more often, this had the opposite effect. When we heard buzzwords like “accessible” or “made easy,” what we inevitably heard was watered down. That was the last thing my classmates and I wanted from a university. No serious student wants to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years of their life coasting through easy courses just to be handed a degree. No diploma is worth that much money. What we want is the rigor, the struggle, the actual learning—not just the passing grade.
For humanities students like me, that often meant crossing off schools that once had brilliant reputations. My peers increasingly sensed that universities weren’t dedicated to the same goals of scholarship and challenge that we were. Funds were increasingly being moved away from the academics we valued, leaving us with underfunded and unappealing programs. Too often, schools boasting a position at the “cutting edge of thought” lacked fundamental courses in English, history, and political science. For example, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s (ACTA) What Will They Learn?® initiative, only one of the seven Ivy League schools has a sufficient Literature requirement —leaving most with their core curriculum scored at a C or below. In schools at every level, humanities programs suffered from underfunding. Across schools with shrinking humanities budgets, extensive literary period-based courses were crowded out by easy “A” pop-culture classes, and writing courses were geared towards STEM students fulfilling distribution requirements. My classmates and I were pushed away from these schools towards those that still feature Great Books tracks, maintain substantial manuscript libraries, and offer theory training at the undergraduate level.
My classmates did the same across their respective fields, hunting for legitimate undergrad research and the most advanced courses. When talking with friends, the most common reason I heard for taking a school off their application list was a course catalog in their field that was too limited or elementary. College representatives often touted shiny new dorms and pamphlet-ready facilities, but that wasn’t what we were looking for. Time and again, it was the academics that drew us in: well-resourced libraries, dedicated humanities centers, and extensive faculty research.
While schools were advertising their streamlined degrees, we were looking for the opposite. In the end, it wasn’t flashy marketing language or the offer of passing grades that was the deciding factor. Rather, it was invariably the learning itself: the opportunity to write, argue, decode, dream, recite, and struggle with the greatest heights of human art and thought.
By Alina Amin