Coffee Stops and College Visits

A reflection on why we need to protect - and fund - the college ambitions of outliers with dreams.

Last week, I drove through Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Southern Michigan to visit a few colleges for work, and to hang with some close friends for the weekend. I like to stop a lot along the road, because I have an older man's bladder and also a younger man's curiosity about the people in those places.

You can tell you're getting closer to a college town when you start seeing Starbucks among the roadside food signs. I used to home in on that logo; a predictable cup, a relatively clean bathroom, generally nice - if young and oddly pierced - people behind the counter. But knowing how Starbucks treats its employees, I now aim for the local gas stations - the smaller and less 'national' the better. One such place was right off the Hoosier Highway, a mile or so back from where I took this picture.

There was a bank of glass between the shop and the cash registers. I don't think it was bulletproof; this little town didn't seem that hard. I walked over to the coffee urns and filled a cup, then grabbed a water and went to pay. The woman behind the counter was my age, lean and tough in that rural way. Blond and heavily tattooed, she was someone I had no trouble imagining at any number of politically-repellent rallies. She mumbled something which I asked her to repeat.

"Coffee's on me," she said. "I just started my shift, so I didn't make it. Not sure how fresh it is."

I smiled and thanked her, mumbling something of my own about not minding as long as it kept me awake. That was it - back out to the road. But as I drove on, I considered what I had heard, and what I might have inferred about this woman if she were just a picture in my social media feed. Some of it would surely have been accurate. But there was a pride in what she had said that I could not shake off.

Making my way to West Lafayette, I saw all of the usual totems of college life: small cafes, large academic buildings, smiling students. I know a decent number of these kids had spent their whole lives in Indiana, and represented some of the best and the brightest that their towns had produced. Some of them went home for the holidays to mothers like the woman I had met, to conversations laced with assumptions, tense with conflicts that had little to do with the people right in front of them.

I don't write this to make any kind of apology for the bilious ignorance in which our society is locked, or to romanticize some noble image of rural poverty. It's ugly, and it has been part of our country from the very beginning. But it's also getting better, or was until a few weeks ago. In-state base tuition at Purdue has been frozen at less than $10K since 2013, and remains so. A kid from Bluffton who works hard and closes the cost gap with federal aid can access a world-class education; a life-changing education. She would not have to make coffee for tired travelers like her mother does.

Over the past few decades, the foundational truth that college is the single greatest pathway to success in America has been eroded by political propaganda. The budget cuts made by our current leaders are not being protested broadly, or really even acknowledged by the people who are hurt most by them. My guess is that people are too busy working to bother with politics, or too overwhelmed by the constant drumbeat of negative news to pick out this one note. But to me, the threat of defunding broadly-accessible higher education based on the thinnest of political pretenses is the most dire one we face.

If it were not for quality public education and a little bit of skill at football, I would never have seen the inside of an Ivy League school. The first person in my family to get a college degree was my father, who went to night school on the G.I. Bill. At that time, there were plenty of factory jobs in Newark, NJ where he lived; he was an outlier with a dream. Those jobs went away, but his degree did not. In today's climate, he might have been convinced that an education was not as important as a ready paycheck. Where would he be now?

The spark of pride in that woman's eyes as she talked about the coffee she might have made sticks with me. Nobody I ever met at a Starbucks did their job that way. We can't afford to lose that spirit, or to allow it to find expression in the cynical politics of retribution. Without question, she has a lot of reasons to be pissed off at people like me. But she wasn't, at least for that moment. We have to protect and support that spirit, and the institutions like quality public education that allow it to propel kids from towns like hers to their greatest potential. Our country was built by outliers with dreams, funded by leaders with vision. We need that again now.