27  Colleges

My parents had attended college – they met at the Eau Claire Teacher’s College, later renamed University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, in the late 1950s – and growing up I heard enough stories that somehow I just assumed I’d be going to college somewhere, though it was never a topic of conversation at home, never the slightest hint that it was mandatory or desirable. Less than half of my school class eventually graduated from college, though among my best friends all of us were clearly college-bound.

School had no appeal to Gary, and he was happy to call his education complete when he graduated from high school. There were various technical schools that tried to recruit him – welding, electrician, plumber – and I remember one day an army recruiter visiting our house to talk seriously about a career in the military. But he was already making good money at his part-time, now full-time job at the grocery store, whose owner talked seriously about teaching him how to run his own store someday. Why bother with something as abstract and unnecessary as a college degree when you can live a perfectly good life without the time and expense?

At a church youth group meeting one evening, the subject of conversation was about “who do you admire?”. Whereas I mentioned a famous engineer (Jack Kilby, inventor of the microchip), Gary was more down-to-earth and practical. “Norm Foster”, he replied, speaking of the owner of Neillsville’s hardware store. Mr. Foster was an active member of our church, head of the Neillsville Chamber of Commerce, father of two well-behaved children a few years younger than us. Norm had a college degree – he had been a school teacher in Minneapolis before moving to Neillsville – but it wasn’t obvious that the degree did anything more than cost him tuition money and the time it took away from starting a real business.

Another role model, a man who built homes for a living, boasted of the profit he earned – and his goal to become a millionaire by age 30. This seemed far more interesting and doable to my brother than wasting time to get a degree … in what? Gary had no idea what he’d like to study other than some amorphous subject like “business”.

But I liked school, and unlike my brother, I felt little aptitude or interest in the occupations of our small town role models.

My earliest memories of me thinking of adulthood had me at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, the most respectable school we knew, and rich with first-hand accounts from recent graduates. In those early days when I thought I’d be a missionary, it just seemed natural that I’d be at NCBC.

But later, on a family vacation in Colorado, we stopped at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, which made a big impression on me. When I heard about the competition it took to get in, it occurred to me that the standards were far higher than the way I’d calibrated my life to that point. Imagine being in a school where every student was the top of his high school class! I had been interested in airplanes since my hospitalization days, so learning to be an Air Force pilot on the side, at school, seemed like icing on the cake. It was then that I also first heard that, to get to one of these highly-competitive schools, I’d need to start serious preparation during my sophomore year, building up my academic resume, and taking standardized tests while a junior. Until that visit, high school graduation seemed so distant, with college plans even further on the horizon – nothing to be concerned with today.

I learned, though, that what I did in my Freshman and Sophomore years would have a big effect on my application. To be Air Force Academy material, I needed sports credentials – something in which I had no ability, much less interest – and other extracurricular accomplishments too, memberships in after school clubs like the newspaper or the band, and ideally even better differentiators like maybe a significant statewide first place showing in some competition. To top it off, I’d need a Senator’s recommendation, which implied having some experience that would get me some attention.

None of these qualifications would be automatic. My family wouldn’t provide them for me, and nobody at school would tell me what to do. If I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, I knew, I’d have to figure out all these details on my own. The standardized tests that were required? Nobody had told me what an SAT was – my parents hadn’t heard of it – but that was the least of my worries at this point. I was confident, based on my results on other standardized tests from school, that I’d do pretty well. I needed to know more practical issues, like where the test was offered and how I’d submit my results.

Nothing was urgent, and for that I’m glad that my family made that trip because it started me thinking. Without our visit, I may not have known about highly-selective colleges until much later, when it was no longer possible for me to join the football team or do other activities I wouldn’t have done had I not believed it would help my resume.

It was long after this, in a letter exchange with John, that I first heard of Stanford.