The Castle on the Hill's Business Model

The Castle on the Hill is what most people think of when they hear the word "College", although this kind of college experience of grassy quads lined with mature trees and well-maintained historical buildings is rarer than you might think. Although I never taught there, Colby College in Waterville Maine is a good example of The Castle on the Hill type of school. In fact, its address is actually Mayflower Hill and when it relocated from the center of Waterville in the 1940's its isolation from the even then declining micro-city center was complete.

Castles on the Hill are great places for adults to visit and relive the kind of life they imagine they might have had if they'd gone there in their youth instead of attending Beer-Bong U or Hardscrabble State. The facilities are immaculate, the library is extensive, and the wingback chairs found in every campus niche invite reflection and contemplation of the bigger issues of life beyond earning a living, raising a family, and avoiding being mugged in the process.

As you might expect, none of this comes cheap! The student services rival the physical plant maintenance for extravagance. (One grounds worker at Colby told me how the school trucked in several loads of special sand for a mid-winter beach party, and then paid overtime to have it trucked back out the following morning.) Yes, you do get a lot for your money at the Castle on the Hill, but then you can expect to pay a lot of money for what you get.

Perhaps the biggest operational problem confronting The Castle on the Hill is student diversity. The combination of good grades and capacious checkbooks does not come easily to the African-American and Hispanic students that the college needs to avoid being considered elitist. The Castle on the Hill will try to fill this gap with as many American minority students as it can lure, and fill in the rest of their requirement with international students. The latter have the advantage of being diverse yet still well-prepared academically. The student from Kenya who enrolls in the Castle on the Hill is probably closer to the top of the Keynan distribution of income than the average Castle on the Hill American student is to the U.S. distribution of income. Yes, language may be a problem (though not as much as you might think, since most international students have studied English extensively in their home countries), but the Castle on the Hill has lots of English and Foreign Language resources to help with that. Besides, American minority students from Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles have even more problems with English yet are much less amenable to correcting them.

But back to the money... There IS some good news for students interested in the Castle on the Hill: financial aid can be quite generous for some students. The same white-bread guilt which inspires such diversity angst also extends to under-represented non-minority Americans. You may get a deal if you're a well-prepared rural white student from a modest background and a public school. Male students may have an additional leg up, since like most liberal arts colleges, students with a Y-chromosome are in shorter supply these days and the colleges worry about becoming female ghettos. (Why they never worried about becoming male ghettos in the 1940's and 1950's is a question for another day.)

Here again, though, the Castle on the Hill may do things its own way. Back in the early 1990's many Castles were charged with anti-trust violations for doing things their own way, namely by forming an 'overlap group' which would control how much financial aid they would offer students who had applied to more than one of the group's colleges. See this article in the New York Times, followed the next day by this article.

PITFALLS FOR PARENTS:

• Be prepared for gadget and spending creep. If you send your student to the Castle on the Hill they'll be swimming with wealthier students and there will be pressure to compete on the same playing field. (I warned you about my penchant for mixed methaphors in the first post on this blog, so stop rolling your eyes.)
• Financial aid for tuition may be generous, but watch those fees!
• The political atmosphere at the Castle on the Hill is more liberal than at other colleges. This ain't no business school, after all.

PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS:

The quality of education here is generally quite high:

• Virtually no large lecture classes;
• Little to no pressure on faculty to pass unprepared students;
• Peer pressure, while annoying, is usually in the right direction academically speaking
• Positive perception by future employers