Curb appeal is not hospitality
If you have sold a house recently your realtor has instructed you about curb appeal. To sell it quickly, and for the highest price, you must heighten its curb appeal, you will have heard. This means uniformity in the yard–cut grass, trimmed bushes, discreet flowers–and simplicity inside. You will have been told to reduce clutter, remove quirky things, and eliminate any evidence of your specific presence there: no family photos, outre book choices, or colors that fall outside of this year’s palette.
The purpose of curb appeal is to invite people to buy your house by imagining that it can serve whatever purpose they bring to it. To do so, they must feel like the house is attractive but bland. Stylish without being trendy. Upscale but (just barely) affordable. The aesthetic is “nice hotel lobby.”
Colleges and universities have been focused on curb appeal for years, with the same goal: getting people to purchase their product, the same approach: making people feel like the school meets whatever desire they have, and the same style: upscale blandness, that realtors and hotel chains prefer.
Improving the attractiveness of a campus is a good thing. But the implications of curb appeal are problematic, both for students, who cannot actually do whatever they want at your school, and for schools, for whom the cost of keeping up curb appeal is ever increasing and hardly affordable. The commitment to ever better curb appeal risks conflating fancy lobbies and well-cut grass with things of actual meaning.
A week ago we visited a winery in rural North Carolina. It was a family-owned producer, the tasting room was in the basement of a house. The wine was decent, but what made the experience meaningful was hospitality. The owners made the wine themselves. We learned their particular story. The wine had the quirks of place and time. You couldn’t buy it anywhere. They did not invite us to imagine that we were wherever we wanted: Napa or Bordeaux. Instead, they invited us to join them briefly in their project–making decent wine with family and friends from the fruits of western North Carolina. They welcomed us with hospitality, not curb appeal. We bought a case of wine. We will go back.
My point is not to tell schools to abandon curb appeal. Don’t stop cutting the lawn, updating buildings, and staying up on higher education trends. It is to say that those things, alone, do very little of real importance. They indicate that your school is a possibility. But they do not convey what makes your school meaningful. Nor do they offer hospitality. That comes from welcoming students to join you and your school in a shared, personal, particular project.
If you face tension between spending on curb appeal, or spending on the things that make you distinct, pick the latter. Choose hospitality over curb appeal every time.
How to misunderstand college admissions
Take these steps if you want to misunderstand college admissions.
Assume that all colleges are or want to be like Harvard. There are nearly 4000 post-secondary degree granting institutions in the United States. There are maybe 200 institutions that are like Harvard, in that they are highly selective, highly prestigious, and have massive endowments. (The be more specific, according to NACUBO there were 129 college and universities with an endowment more than one billion dollars in 2022. According to USNWR, 80 colleges and universities admitted fewer than 25% of applicants.) Many schools unlike these elite schools may wish to have some of their wealth, resources, or students. But few want to be like Harvard. They have other missions, other visions, and other ways of being in the world.
Assume that all students are or wish to be like those that go to elite universities. It is undoubtedly the case that more students want to go to elite schools than are admitted. But the vast majority of college students do not want to go to an elite university. They have other commitments. They want to stay local. They want a particular career. They cannot afford it. They don’t really like school. Their talents lie elsewhere. They don’t want the pressure. All of these are legitimate reasons for selecting one of the thousands of non-elite institutions in the US.
Assume that all colleges follow the admissions practices that elite institutions follow. The vast majority of colleges and universities admit all applicants who meet their admission standards. A plurality admit all students who complete their applications. Among these schools are the most racially, economically, and culturally diverse institutions in the nation. Almost none of them have used affirmative action to build that diversity. For schools with generous or open admissions policies, legacy admissions are not a tool of discrimination but of keeping faith with families and place over the generations. The admission challenge for elite schools is to determine who to reject. Most admissions offices (and student affairs offices and faculty and administrations) do everything they can to recruit, fund, welcome, and retain all students who wish to attend.
Assume that changes in the admissions policies of elite schools will change society as a whole. It is possible to imagine that through goodwill, legal mandates, and public pressure, highly selective institutions will enroll a more representative slice of American students. But they will still only educate a tiny, elite minority of Americans. Changes in their policies will have spillover effects, it is true. But if your goal is to have more students go to college, or reduce skepticism about the value of college, or improve the diversity of college attendance, or to better prepare college graduates for work, or to reduce income inequality, or to improve civic life, or improve moral life, or heighten academic attainment, or to achieve any of the laudatory outcomes ascribed to a college education, changes in “Harvard’s” admissions policies are not going to help you reach your goal.
Learn about college admissions from sources that hold the assumptions above. Last week the New York Times morning newsletter carried the headline “Behind the scenes of college admissions.” What was the story about? Admissions at elite colleges. The same blind spot was evident in most national coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision about affirmative action, and the current discussions about legacy admissions. Much of the reporting was clear and thoughtful, regardless of its position on the policy question at hand. Nearly all of it was narrowly focused on elite institutions. You cannot understand college admissions from these sources.
If you want to rightly understand college admissions, drive to your local community college. Visit the admission office of the liberal arts college in your town. Write to the director of admissions at your regional public university. Talk to the leaders of HBCUs and MSIs. Ask them what they do and who they serve. You will be impressed by their work. You will be moved by their dedication. Talk to the students who go there. You will be angered by the challenges their students face, and inspired by their resilience. You will have a sense that you’re in the real world. Then you will have begun to understand the real work of college admissions in America.