A lot of schools have religious beginnings. Pomona College’s slogan used to be “Our Tribute to Christian Civilization”, even through the early 90s. The current influence varies of course at many schools. @homerdog I’m giggling a bit because you know as soon as you say you’d prefer your child not become attached to [insert category here], you know instead he will end up falling in love with a half Jewish/half Latina pansexual citizen of Spain determined to have a career in conflict zones with the Foreign Service, and life will be complicated anyway. I think we’re all essentially agreeing that our kids will encounter all sorts of people of all sorts of backgrounds in college and beyond. I know from my own experience at a diverse residential college, meeting kids from around the world and from a huge spread of socioeconomic realities was part of what was enriching and educational.
I’m living vicariously through D19 and DH this weekend as they enjoy their daddy-daughter (aww) weekend in DC before D19’s institute begins. They apparently found some amazing Indian food last night. This morning they are at Georgetown, which D19 is describing as “really pretty.” She went back to sounding nervous last night about roommates and making friends, and I do think this is all a proxy for the Real Deal in a year. I know she’s been nervous this year about what awaits next year in college. Part of me last night wanted to just remind her that well, even if you get literally the quirkiest human of all time as a roommate, this is only a one week program so you will survive. But I’m definitely sensing that she’s actually looking ahead 14 months and feeling uncertainty about that – which is normal and probably adaptive.
@mom2twogirls Aww Franciscan schools! You’re right that the Jesuit schools do tend to dominate the narrative, along with Villanova and Notre Dame. I’m glad you had a great experience at yours! I enjoyed your description.
I’m developing an interest in working to open access to community college to kids from under-resourced backgrounds. I’ve decided to piggyback off the advocacy and enrichment work D19 has been doing with younger kids, and I’m going to organize one or two community college tours with 11th and 12th graders in the early fall. Just a personal interest of mine that’s developing. For these really disadvantaged kids who also have cultural and language barriers, they’re going to need a lot of support to continue past high school. Sometimes I think we should think about K-14 education for many kids instead of K-12. They’re just not ready to contribute with what they have after 12th grade. Lately I’ve enjoyed thinking about what career I would do if I had it all to do over again. These days I’m much more interested in public policy and public health and the related issue of guidance counseling in disadvantaged communities. Not that far afield from my psychology major, but a little more focused.
@SDCounty3Mom ugh. I think I’m still not being clear. I never said I didn’t WANT S19 to get involved with someone who is Catholic or any other religion, race, etc. We were discussing Jesuit schools and I said we weren’t Catholic and those schools weren’t the best fit with up to 70 percent of kids Catholic. He has plenty of Catholic friends. I just don’t know that it would make sense for him to go to a college with such a large percentage of any religion. I have absolutely no opinion on who S19 is involved with romantically. Up to him. Hopefully we can move on from this discussion. Or at least leave me out of it.
@homerdog I meant to be lighthearted in tone (which I know isn’t always easy to tell in print). You said a Catholic school wouldn’t be a good match for your son, one component of which included the concern that it would be “incredibly complicated for him” to be involved with a Catholic girl. I just meant to say that “incredibly complicated” could come in many forms with the inevitable meeting of classmates from all sorts of different backgrounds, origins, practices, etc. Sort of a ha ha, “complicated” could get kicked up a few notches…? I was actually just trying to bring in a little levity and then say that we all agree that our kids will meet kids from many different backgrounds – and for me back in the day, that was a great feature of college. Anyway. Enough said. I’m sorry to cause any offense.
@homerdog, only 40% of the student population at Georgetown is Catholic. My daughter strongly self-identifies as Jewish (my husband is, I’m not, we celebrate both sets of holidays), and she went to see Georgetown fully expecting the Jesuit thing to be a problem for her. But it wasn’t, and she actually loved all the discussion of how the Jesuit principles get incorporated into the school, primarily regarding community service. I would agree, though, that BC feels much more ‘Catholic’ than Georgetown does.
Does anyone consider the actual religious leaning of a campus that is not specifically affliated? For instance…I seem to recall that more than 50% of students at U of Rochester identify as Catholic. So would there still be hesitation about attending U of R if the concern is the possible complications of getting romantically involved with someone outside of your family’s faith?
Regarding religious leanings, Muhlenberg while being a Lutheran school, has one of the largest percentages of Jewish students. Brandeis often gets incorrectly branded as a Jewish religious school. I suspect many of the southern schools are predominantly Protestant.
My grandmother always said “you can just as easily fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.” So following her theory, it wouldn’t matter if you attended a school with a majority of students outside your faith, you could “just as easily” fall in love with someone of your faith instead. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that anyone other than my grandmother ascribes to this theory, or certainly not these days anyway. Nonetheless, I have a hard time imagining that too many people worry about the religious faiths of their child’s fellow students, at least from a romantic perspective. Luckily, the era of attending college to get a “MRS” degree is long past.
I think there is a lot of misconceptions about religiously affiliated schools, both positive and negative. I think I am poorly articulating the point that it may be short sighted to dismiss a school solely because of it perceived affiliation(s). CAVEAT… I have a student at Jesuit affiliated Marquette U. As wholly atheist/agnostic family, we (and our student) have had no conflict of interest issues, unless of course you find an emphasis on community service and open mindedness offensive; and alas my kiddo has indeed fallen in love with a (insert gasp) Catholic on the 61% Catholic campus. Frankly, as a northerner born and raised and transplanted to Texas, I might be a bit more concerned about what lays ahead for my kiddo about to start at Texas A&M in this fall. O:-)
@labegg I had to laugh a bit when I read your post #9044. I sent my little heathen off to Rochester three years ago. Her best friends from freshman year identify as Jewish and Buddhist. Her boyfriend is Muslim. I think the Catholicism is more related to cultural regionality than a true reflection of the religious tenor of the campus.
And, my husband, who never attended a school that was not Catholic, met me—a born-and-bred evangelical Christian turned atheist—at a Jesuit university.
Our July mission trip is up in the air due to recent unrest. Our team met last night and although nothing has been decided, really emotional time, yet preparing as though it will still occur. I guess we always need reality checks.
On a plus, the highlight of they day is that I’ve been convinced that D19 hasn’t even been reading her college email account. She’s been away since before Memorial Day, and I haven’t seen any progress on anything. But today she texted about the essay prompts from Chicago. Not even on the list anymore, but she thought the prompts were cool. So, maybe she’s even clicking the links in the relevant emails.
If I were doing one of those “Message to my younger self” exercises, it would definitely be to say that “Life doesn’t always work out as planned.” I even wrote an essay about this in 2016 on the occasion of my third funeral of the year, all in the same church of my childhood. I want my kids to be flexible and expect the unexpected, and adapt to what comes. (Bleep) will happen. They have to learn to roll with it all and integrate it in healthy ways. That’s related to my earlier point, that you can send your child to a certain setting expecting a certain set of parameters to exist or not exist, and it may well be different than what you thought you were getting. And it does sometimes seem like God/the universe has a sense of humor and a strong enjoyment of irony…
I was curious…a friend just today dropped off her daughter at one of those “Pre-college summer programs” at a famous campus so today out of nosiness I looked up the tuition. $4500 for two weeks. That’s more than 7 times what D19’s two weeks’ worth of campus-based summer programs are costing – both of hers are grant-supported, thank goodness. I was feeling smugly frugal about our contrasting summer expenses until I thought about it…$9K a month is basically full sticker-price tuition for the 8 months of the college calendar year, so that’s what we’d be paying to send D19 to a full sticker price school. Somehow, I think I’ve become numb to the $70K+ sticker price, which now just seems like an abstract big number, but when I think of it as $4500 for two weeks, that seems astronomical. Good moment of clarity for me actually…
@peachActuary73 Sorry to hear about the uncertainty introduced into your mission trip plans. That sounds challenging. Another example of life not always working out as planned…! Wishing you a peaceful decision making process. The trip I’m taking with D19 to visit midwest colleges has also encountered some wrinkles. We will be visiting my aunt, who is the older sister of my late mother, and right on cue, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in mid-May and was just hospitalized with a seizure. I’d romanticized a visit consisting of chatting with her in her big familiar house while her great granddaughters play, then going out to her favorite restaurant and having everything be very 1985. Now it’s looking like her condition is worsening rapidly and I don’t know how it’s all going to look in two more weeks when we arrive. I had to have a little cry about it all the other night actually.
And YES, those U Chicago essay prompts are awesome! My mentor went to U Chicago and basically scared me off of even researching it for my kids, but dang, those were some great essay questions that have blown away every other question that I’ve ever seen. Another school on D19’s list had the question “What’s your favorite word?” which seemed sort of dumb because who genuinely HAS a favorite word? But the U Chicago question about creating your own word had me nodding in approval. Bravo.
No peeps from D19 since this morning, and I did hear from DH that he left the campus several hours ago, so I’m taking that as a good sign. DH saw her dorm room but not her roommate so jury is still out on whether she was paired with the world’s quirkiest human or not.
@SDCounty3Mom when we were at Northwestern, we figured out how much each hour of class cost. And then we would giggle when we skipped class to watch All My Children. Ugh. I still wouldn’t fess up on that to my parents. And that’s hourly rate would be way higher now!
@SDCounty3Mom I’m so sorry. I didn’t read your whole post as I just glanced through the last few posts. I didn’t read the part about your aunt until just now. We’ve lost family and friends this year and it’s tough. I’m so sorry about your aunt.
@SDCounty3Mom Wishing your aunt well. We had that diagnosis in our family last year and it’s a tough road for sure. But she may appreciate the visit and any help you can provide.
Joining in late on the religious college discussion…
We’re Quaker, and we only have one Quaker school on the list - Swarthmore. Haverford doesn’t have theatre, Bryn Mawr is a women’s college, and Oberlin, Wilmington and Earlham are too rural for the kiddo. Oberlin is pretty secular nowadays anyhow. George Fox has a poor rating from Campus Pride, which disappoints our entire Meeting let me tell you.
From what I read Swarthmore doesn’t force religion on anyone because that wouldn’t be Friendly, except for a class-wide Meeting for Worship disguised as silent candlelight meditation during freshman convocation.
@ninakatarina. Not on the religious topic actually, but small world - I was a scholarship student at a Quaker school. There were probably only a couple dozen Quakers attending the school but it was a unique experience.
I think we’re all essentially agreeing that our kids will encounter all sorts of people of all sorts of backgrounds in college and beyond. I know from my own experience at a diverse residential college, meeting kids from around the world and from a huge spread of socioeconomic realities was part of what was enriching and educational.