Why college still matters
A week ago, I sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking a creek lush with cottonwood trees and scattered stones. Beyond that stretched the arid hills of the desert, slowly rolling out towards the horizon, telephone lines looping across the blue sky towards metal-roofed homes and a field with two horses. My partner and I were on a trip to Arizona, five days filled with saguaro cactuses rising from the land like hands in offering, sleeping in a tent in 20 degree weather on the rim of the Grand Canyon, eating tamales above a deep, cold swimming hole carved out of red rock, waking up at dawn to the croon of wolves at a sanctuary outside of Sedona, and exploring the rust-colored spires of Cathedral Rock.
I first fell in love with the high-desert of the Southwest during my time at Colorado College. A school known for its adventurous spirit, it wasn’t uncommon for students to pile into cars and drive the five hours to Utah or New Mexico. Every time I went, I had a distinct feeling that the desert could never be my home: I was born and raised in New England, and the deciduous forests, glacial ponds, and cyclical spin of seasonal changes felt lodged in my bones. But the desert offered expanse, perspective, long roads, canyons, churches made of rock, green chiles, and adobe buildings. I couldn’t resist the pull.
I’ve never been able to fit neatly into a box (nor do I think we should), and my curiosity relentlessly pulls me in many directions. When it was time to declare my major, I felt pinholed—so I designed my own, called “Creative Writing for Social Change.” One of my wishes was to take as many classes in the field as possible; I believed that the heart of storytelling was about coming face to face with the world. More often than not, those classes took me to the desert.
During my first year, I took a class called Writing Wild: The Literary Journalism of the Outdoors, taught by well-known writer Hampton Sides. We spent a week in Santa Fe, met the entire editorial team at Outside Magazine, interviewed a dear friend of renowned photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams, and spoke with Jon Krakauer, mountaineer and author of “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air.” Another class, Environmental Justice of the Southwest, brought me to a farm run by Indigenous activists outside of Albuquerque, and yet another to the high plains of the San Louis Valley, where our professor—a journalist at the Denver Post—coordinated our visits to buffalo ranches and superfund sites.
When people think of the border, they may think of the endless, scorched desert. The rippling heat waves. I wrote this for a project in my Junior-year class called “Borders and Borderlands,” a class where we loaded into a van and drove 17 hours to the U.S.-Mexico border. But as you drive down a one-lane highway into the Rio Grande Valley, located in the southern tip of Texas, you see tall grasses, prickly shrubs, and the occasional palm tree with its thick, shaggy coat of brown leaves draping over the trunk. The horizon stretches between flat farmland and an expansive sky.
The valley is alive. It’s a borderland, a place of cultural hybridity formed by millennia of movement, war, settlement, colonization, independence, acquisition, combination, and separation. Mariam El-Haj, a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), says, “This place is a lot more beautiful than it seems, and as I got older I was able to realize that. I think a lot of people forget that this region even exists. They think that there’s nothing here.”
If I’ve learned anything about the desert, it’s that what seems to be nothing is actually filled with resilient life in the most unlikely of places.
My hunger to keep learning hasn’t abated, and for the past semester I’ve been auditing a class at Williams College, the picturesque and top-ranked liberal arts school nestled in the Berkshire mountains. Twice a week, I walk across campus and look around at students in amazement: They’ve won the higher education lottery, I think to myself. I’m acutely aware that every single one of those two thousand students made it through the meticulous, competitive application process, reviewed and scored by Admissions offices, each class shaped by subjective institutional priorities—a process I help dozens of students navigate every year. Through nothing short of hard work and magic, these students made the cut.
This week, our class discussion segued into the current state of higher ed, which is increasingly threatened by the current administration’s budget cuts, anti-DEI crusades, and lawsuits. When I asked my professor if he still believes in the value of going to college, he was resolute in his answer. “Careers in the new era are precarious,” he said. In the past, your major would turn into a throughlined career. Nowadays, change is constant and students will most likely hold several (if not many) different, unconventional jobs. Adaptability is key—and critical thinking is the anecdote to misinformation.
Now more than ever, I believe that preserving the freedom to learn—for everyone, no matter of class, gender, race, or political affiliation—is an urgent undertaking. But I also believe we need to reimagine its possibilities. My own experience at a liberal arts college made me ask questions, seek, challenge, explore, listen, and widen. Instead of trapping me inside four walls, it brought me to the desert, and to the stories of Americans we’re keen on forgetting.
