Removing application fees

Doing it wrong: Learning to ignore practicality in a liberal arts education

As students living in a time of relative crisis regarding the economy and employment, we are constantly reminded of how hopeless our post-college lives are bound to be. In fact, one of my professors basically told my classmates and me that we were better off taking online classes.
Those of us who don’t major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects are even further ridiculed for our “foolish” attitude regarding education. “You need to be more practical!” online blogs and our parents shout simultaneously. And sometimes, it’s hard to explain or even justify our majors when they don’t seem to lead to a specific career path.
We need to question what we even mean by practical. Is majoring in economics practical because it might lead to a lucrative career in finance, or because you will be able to learn from and question economic processes? Is a major in computer science practical because you want to list coding skills on your resumé, or because you want to learn a new way of understanding and organizing information? To value practicality in the first way is to take a liberal arts education for granted.
We are not lacking in intelligence or work ethic here at Bowdoin. What we lack is a sense of curiosity, enthusiasm and openness. You shouldn’t come to Bowdoin with a fixed idea of what you want to study. Arguably, the reason schools like Bowdoin exist is to offer alternatives to a rigid approach to education.
We are lucky enough to have mobility in our studies. In my two and a half years here, I’ve taken classes in subjects ranging from oceanography to museum studies. While my parents seemed concerned that I didn’t have a major until recently, I learned to revel in the confusion of seeing the world in different ways.
We have four years here to explore anything that piques our interest, and we are privileged enough to have amazing professors, facilities and peers to help us do just that. We shouldn’t treat our education as just a means to a job or as just another section on our LinkedIn profile.
What makes us human are our abilities to consciously create and to think independently. When we prioritize doing what is expected of us and qualifying for a certain position, we aren’t using our full potential at all.
Working hard and memorizing facts won’t help us explore our intellectual capacities or think deeply.
On a different note, while students should feel encouraged to explore their options, educational institutions should be more accepting of those who don’t fit the well-rounded mold. To expect someone to be a committed athlete, an excellent student, a musician and biology expert is asking too much. Perhaps some students fit this mold, but what about people who are just passionate about one thing? Why is it that schools want so badly for their students to be everything?
Once again, I must stress how unique our situation is at Bowdoin. Think of how few people in the world get to go to college, and out of them, how few go to liberal arts schools.
If you came to college to learn a skill and leave with a job offer, you came to the wrong school. There are plenty of technical schools that will do that for you for a lot less money.
If I’m not mistaken, we’re here for something beyond that, which Bowdoin kindly outlines for us in the “Offer of the College:” “To be at home in all lands and all ages”. That is an offer that means a lot, and you won’t take advantage of it by sticking to a comfort zone of practicality and stressing out over a B+.

Doing it wrong: Enabling the self through conscious reflection

This past weekend, I was one of 500 student activists who attended the National Students for Justice in Palestine conference at Tufts. I attended a workshop on Black Liberation, which introduced the following quotation to us: “Caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is an act of self preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”
These are the words of Audre Lorde, the renowned black, feminist and queer poet. These are words that are important for any woman, person of color or anyone else who has ever been marginalized in any capacity, to hear.
We exist in a society that marks idleness and lack of activity as laziness, acts of self-care as selfish. Marx argues that conscious labor is essential to our humanity. I propose that in addition, conscious acts of meditation and peace, as opposed to unthoughtful ones, are just as essential. Too often my breaks from work consist of scrolling through a social media feed, or going to a party I feel an underwhelming desire to go to.
In our action-oriented lives, there is too much time spent doing and not enough time spent thinking. We are always expected to define who we are and what we want to do, but not allotted enough time to really think about these things in an independent way. We tire ourselves out trying to do everything we can fit on our plate, and so we are not able to give ourselves over fully to those things and people we really care about.
The system we are a part of privileges a very specific type of person. We all know him well: the straight, white, upper class, cisgendered man. As a believer in the whole “gender/sexuality are a spectrum” thing, I’m unsure if this elusive man really exists. The important thing is, however, he exists as an ideal. Not an ideal in the way Beyoncé is an ideal because she seems perfect, but an ideal in the way that it is easiest to succeed when you are that aforementioned person. People who do not fit that ideal often feel the weight of the system working against them, consciously or not. So to care for ourselves, in a society that has, in some respects, failed to care for us, is like Lorde said. It is an act of political warfare.
Preserving ourselves, caring for ourselves, spending time thinking about ourselves—these actions, when done consciously, make us better fit to serve others. There are endless ways to actively engage in a healing process, whether it is through reconnecting with nature, taking a yoga class, going for a run, or just being alone and thinking about who we are. The important thing is that we attempt to feel some sort of renewal and introspection and resist a society that tells us we must be productive at all times.
We often partake in processes that have the potential to be healing, but unless we go in with the intention of trying to revive something within ourselves, they won’t fulfill their healing potential. As I attempt to approach life in a manner of “self-preservation,” I encourage readers to do the same. We can’t be agents of change or resistors of oppression unless we enable ourselves to be resilient, and caring for ourselves in a conscious manner is essential to that.

Doing it wrong

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 17, 2014

Since my freshman year, I have worked at the Upward Bound office at Bowdoin. Upward Bound is a federally funded program that provides college preparation services, summer programs and academic counseling to low-income students. Every year, I help out with sending fee waiver requests to colleges on behalf of students in the program.

During the college application process, these students, are lucky enough to have a support system and to know that they can apply for fee waivers. An application fee for Bowdoin is $60; Stanford ranks highest in application fees with a $90 price tag. Applying to around 10 schools could cost you upwards of $500, maybe even more.

Imagine being a low-income student faced with this prospect. What would you do in that situation? When I was applying to colleges, I knew I couldn’t afford to pay application fees, and there were two college counselors for a class of almost 1,000 students at my high school—getting one of them to help me with this was next to impossible.

It took a frustrating amount of research and explaining for me to figure out ways to apply to the schools I wanted to without placing a burden on my family.

But what if a student is too ashamed to ask? That situation is hardly out of the question. Having to say you can’t afford something, especially as a teenager, is not an easy thing to do. Applying to college, trying to give yourself a fighting chance at intellectual development, or at least a career, shouldn’t be something you have to pay for.

The idea that we have to pay to go to school is questionable in the first place, but paying a fee so that you can be told whether or not you are worth attending and paying even more money? How is that in any way fair to people who dread the cost of paying for college in the first place? Imposing an application fee is basically a warning to low-income people: education isn’t cheap.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was finalizing my study abroad application, I was once again confronted by an application fee. Since I am privileged enough to have the knowledge that application fees are somewhat bypassable, I sent an email the day the application was due, explaining why I couldn’t pay the fee.

I was relieved to find out, around a week later, that the program was fine with this. But for that week, I was anxious that I wouldn’t get into the program because I hadn’t paid the fee. People in economically needy situations have enough on their plate regarding finances—worrying about whether they will be able to pursue an opportunity shouldn’t be one of them.

Removing an application fee is a legitimate effort to increase economic diversity. If colleges really cared about promoting diversity, they would try to make it as stress-free as possible for anyone from any economic situation to apply. Application fees filter out students who are either unaware of how to get around paying them, or are too embarrassed to express their need.

Comments are permanently closed.