You might have listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast called 'Food Fight', an examination of what he considers to be the moral aberration of colleges daring to serve high qualify food to their students. In his opinion, he feels that a school should not be spending dollars on amenities and should instead be spending dollars on financial aid. And if his message was that general message, I'm with him. Absolutely-- if the decision is between lowering student debt for low income students or adding a rock climbing wall to the gym, I'm on board with scrapping the rock wall.
But for some reason, he didn't decide to do research about those types of amenities. Instead, in my opinion, he offered a grossly simplistic comparison of two schools, Vassar and Bowdoin, where he felt compelled to go so far as to tell listeners not to go to Bowdoin because their evil dining hall is the root of America's education problem.
My initial problem with his comparison of these two schools is: if you want to criticize schools that are being unfair to low income students or have their priorities in the wrong place, maybe don't start with a school with need-blind admissions that pledges to meet 100% of demonstrated need for all admitted students. (Bowdoin is need blind and meets 100% of demonstrated need). You can make the argument that their version of demonstrated need isn't fair or should be revised. But that wasn't the topic of this podcast. In fact, there didn't seem to be an ounce of research about admissions policies or recruitment practices. The only staff interviewed at Bowdoin were from dining services.
My next problem with this comparison is that while yes, both Bowdoin and Vassar private liberal arts colleges I would hardly call them identical. Vassar has been successful in recruiting and enrolling Pell Grant recipients (which is, by the way, to be applauded and I'm certainly a huge fan of the progress they have made). But, Vassar is also located in Poughkeepsie, which conveniently happens to be the last stop the Metro North train from New York City. Vassar is 200 miles from Boston. 85 miles from Albany. 170 miles from Philly. 75 miles from New Haven. Bowdoin's only major urban center within 200 miles is Boston, compared with Vassar's significantly more centrally located geographic location. Saying that a college in Maine has the same pool of low income applicants as a college in upstate New York just feels lazy.
If we want to talk about morals, what about the morality of food? When a huge corporation provides low quality cheap food to students with outsourced ingredients, chemicals, hormones, and low paid staff, where is the moral outrage there about the local, national, and global impact of what we eat? I'm curious to know exactly how expensive the Bowdoin dining services program is? What impact does it have on their local economy, helping to keep local farms in business and respecting the environment by using higher quality healthier ingredients? Yet this podcast never delves into that. It never shares exactly what the dollars and cents are of the Bowdoin dining program. It just says that there is a correlation between good food and lower financial aid budgets. I'm not convinced.
Had Malcolm Gladwell interviewed any person from the part of Bowdoin's administration that deals with institutional goals. I suspect they would have learned that Bowdoin, like virtually every small liberal arts college with a large endowment and need blind admissions, is hungry to enroll as many bright low income students as they can find. Because income is not considered in admission decisions, if Bowdoin suddenly had a 30% increase in high ability low income applications, they would accept 30% more students from these income brackets. To say that having cheaper food would suddenly increase their Pell Grant recipients is a fundamental misunderstanding of how admissions works.
The condescending tone he uses when suggesting the students have better things to say about the food than they do about their classes is a low blow. Instead of mocking them, why wouldn't he go ahead and ask them about their classes instead of making an assumption?
If Malcolm wanted to make this argument, he could have selected a Need-Aware school. Why he didn't is beyond me, as there are tons to pick from. If we want to argue the morals of college admission, crucifying Bowdoin feels like the wrong place to start.
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