Last week a reader wrote with a question on which I’ve never seen data: What percentage of public college employees’ kids attend the college at which their parent works?
The subtext of the question, I think, was sniffing out hypocrisy. OK, you’re an advocate of the place you work, but would you send your kids there?
I have anecdotes, but no data. I don’t know if anybody tracks that. Individual colleges keep data on tuition waivers, of course, but I don’t know that those data are compiled anywhere. I’m not sure why they would be, particularly now that data is often weaponized against institutions.
If a high percentage of faculty and staff kids attend the colleges where their parents work, that could indicate any number of things. It could be taken as a vote of confidence in the institution, as a sign of fear of debt, as a perk of nepo babies or as some combination thereof.
We’d also have to define “attend.” Neither TB nor TG matriculated at the college where I worked, though TB did take a summer class there. In their cases, they both wanted to have the “full” college experience and live apart from Mom and Dad. It had nothing to do with the perceived quality of Brookdale. They just wanted to spread their wings away from home. (Frustratingly, they defined “away from home” as “out of state,” so they both turned down very generous scholarship offers from Rutgers. Sigh.) At some level, too, I think neither wanted to attend an institution where they’d be known as the VP’s kid. They wanted to make their own names, and I wanted them to have that opportunity.
More fundamentally, I didn’t see them as extensions of myself; I saw (and see) them as their own people, with their own goals and preferences. Forcing them to go where they didn’t want to go to make some sort of political point on my behalf would have seemed petty. They wound up matriculating at the Universities of Virginia and Maryland, respectively, and both thrived. TB starts med school next month, and we couldn’t be prouder.
That said, I’ve known many colleagues over the years at various community colleges whose kids did attend where their parents worked. The reasons were often either financial or personal. The idea that college necessarily involves moving away from family isn’t universal; in fact, most students stay within an hour of where they went to high school. For a young person just starting out who might be prone to homesickness, or who is venturing into a high-risk field like the arts, there’s something to be said for living at home and using the employee tuition waiver for all it’s worth. If they go straight into the work world after college, they probably won’t have any loan payments; if they transfer for a four-year degree or more, they will have cut down their eventual debt burden by the first two years. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
I would think that the point of gathering this sort of data nationally would be to drive improvement, but I’m not sure what would constitute improvement in this case. Would it be better to see a higher percentage of faculty kids at their own schools? Would it be worse? Given how personal these decisions are, I’m not sure. Institutionally, tuition waivers are a real cost, typically not reimbursed by the state, so there’s that.
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there something valuable to be learned from a national figure on how often faculty and staff kids attend (and/or matriculate at) their parents’ employer? And if there is, has anyone seen that number? Please let me know either via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com , or on Bluesky . And thanks to one wise and worldly reader for a thought-provoking question! Good questions are always welcome.