If you’re a member of Blue Key, working in the Office of First-Year Experience or just someone who regularly walks to class, you have probably been made aware that it is everyone’s favorite time of year: college acceptance season. I know. Hold your applause.
All jokes aside, the college admissions process is a time that many of us would probably like to forget. It is a time filled with tears, stress and carpal tunnel from writing too many essays.
Once I came to Villanova, though, I realized something: college admissions may not have been as nerve wracking for everyone else as I may have thought. At many prestigious institutions such as Villanova, a good-sized portion of the student body is made up of “feeder school” alumni. But how exactly does one define a feeder school? And, how do we judge the ethics of this process?
I’d like to preface this with a short personal story. The summer before my senior year of high school, I was accepted into the St. Paul’s School Advanced Studies Program. This is a program meant exclusively for New Hampshire high school students to experience a boarding school, a prestigious education for five weeks of the summer. I knew that getting in was a big deal, and that it would be very helpful when it came to college admissions. I showed up alongside 140 other (mostly) public-school students, marveling at the facilities that the students of St. Paul’s got to use. A brand-new science building, complete with a greenhouse added onto the side, a sports dome, a pond, a dining hall that looked like something out of Harry Potter and, most remarkably, a college counseling and essay writing workshops.
Schools like St. Paul’s host students who are incredibly bright, which cannot be argued. But the chances of a bright kid who comes from a financially unstable background getting to a place like that? They are slim to none.
This raised the question: Is this equitable? I mean, if a student is intelligent enough to go to a school such as this, have the resources to apply and then be able to pay, should they be frowned at for then getting into a prestigious university? No, it is not that black and white.
An article written by Finatic described feeder schools as schools that are “…primarily designed for getting students into top schools across America as they have an abundance of resources… They are primarily private schools with the students attending them being mostly from the middle and upper classes.”
When it comes to marginalized groups (a majority of the U.S.) not being able to attend private schools, it’s not as superficial as simply not being able to pay. With the endowments that these schools have, they could easily provide scholarships, if not sustain a small European country. The blockades that are placed before lower income students come into play much earlier than the application process.
As you already know, I am from New Hampshire. Considering that two of the top 10 boarding schools in the country are located there, it feels strange that I’ve never even considered the possibility of attending one. This is because for me, and most of my peers back home, the option of a private education was never advertised or presented to us.
The truth is, feeder schools have a target audience, and that audience consists of two groups: people who are extraordinarily smart and extraordinarily lucky, and people who are decently smart who will not need to pull from the school’s endowment.
So, if you think about it, a student who has been given the worst deck of cards, who is still very smart, may not ever get the chance to even apply to one of these schools. And therefore, this same smart individual may be, for lack of a better word, screwed out of ever attending a university like Villanova.
I want to make clear that Villanovans who previously attended “feeder” schools are not undeserving of their place here. However, there is a slew of students who, if given the same resources from the beginning, could also be here with the rest of us. In fact, there are many students here who have come from public schools who are a part of marginalized groups and/or are lower income. They have been given less to work with yet have still made it to the same place.
“I was one of the only kids from my school who went to Villanova,” freshman Gianna Lauria said. “Everyone else ended up at Rutgers, Rowan, Catholic. I sometimes wish that I had gone to a high school where it was more guaranteed that I had a chance to end up here,”
So, this year, as we welcome our newest class of prospective students to campus, I urge you to reflect on the privilege that may have gotten you here, as well as the hard work of your fellow classmates.
