March 20, 2025 | Read Online

What do we want American higher education to be?

If college athletics are the actual front porch of the university, it's time to use it.

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

I hope you’ll indulge me here for a moment, because I know the NCAA Men’s Tournament is about to start and there’s a zillion other things happening in higher education at the moment…but there’s something else that has been weighing heavily on my heart these past few months.

I’d like to quickly tell you a little bit about my parents.

My mom immigrated to the United States from Brazil when she was a little kid. She ended up going to NYU on a lark, dropped out to marry my dad, and didn’t get around to finishing her undergraduate degree until she was in her late 20s, with three children. She went to our local community college, The Ohio State University’s Newark campus, and then never stopped going to college. While she worked as a middle school teacher and principal, she got a masters from Ohio State, a second masters at Dayton, a PhD at Wisconsin, and finally, became a professor at East Carolina, where she taught educational leadership.

I grew up on college campuses and never really stopped. I spent my teenage years in Granville, Ohio, home of Denison University, where we’d have all our school band concerts, swim meets and major ceremonies. Our whole family spent a lot of time at Ohio State’s Newark campus as well, not just to help my mom study for exams, but to see art exhibits, perform with local orchestras, and use the library. I’d later do my sophomore year of college there.

These connections didn’t stop after I graduated from Ohio State and moved away from Ohio. I wrote most of my book, What If, at various libraries at the University of Maryland-College Park. The book would not have been possible without community interlibrary loan programs the university offered. When my mom was dying of cancer, her life was extended thanks to clinical trial programs run out of the University of North Carolina health care system. When my oldest needed back surgery, we did it at Northwestern. My youngest was born at UIC.

And shoot, in two months, I’ll be able to look into my Chicago backyard and see our garden, full of native plants and vegetables, that we planned thanks to advice from the University of Illinois agricultural extension programs.

I mention all of this because I think it’s important to be explicit and clear about how higher educational institutions have benefitted me and my family. Sure, I write about this industry for a living, so colleges indirectly provide the roof over my head, the granola bars in my daughter’s backpacks, and the gas in our car. But it also provided my family with access to the arts, to recreation, to healthcare, to the social capital needed to change generations. And not just my family, but thousands and thousands of other families.

All of that would have been true even if we never went to any college sporting events.

I am not the only American with stories like this. And I think it’s increasingly important to talk about the holistic impact of higher education…because these are not bright days for American colleges. And we can’t have healthy college sports without healthy colleges.