Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania by Frank Bruni

Author:Frank Bruni [Bruni, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

“Here’s this Jewish kid from Brooklyn who lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Schultz, the chairman, president, and chief executive of Starbucks, said, recalling his journey in the early 1970s to Northern Michigan University. “I was the only Jewish kid in my dorm. I remember hearing so often, ‘I’ve never met anyone who’s Jewish.’” His tone of voice as he recounted this for me wasn’t bitter or astonished. It was amused, fond, even grateful. While he often jokes that he might have really amounted to something if he’d gone to an Ivy League school, he of course doesn’t believe that. Northern Michigan, he said, served him well, and in ways that aren’t easily measurable and don’t translate into catalogue-ready copy.

Simply going to college was an event and thrill for him, because neither of his parents had been able to take their education that far. As he was growing up, his father suffered through a sequence of jobs that he didn’t like much and that didn’t pay well, at one point driving a truck that delivered and picked up diapers, the smell of which made every workday a misery. The family of five—Schultz has a sister and a brother—lived in the projects. Schultz remembers occasionally being told by his mother to answer the phone and to say that his parents weren’t home, even though they were. They were trying to avoid a bill collector.

They wanted more for him and his two siblings, both younger. “My mother drilled in us that we were going to college, come hell or high water,” he told me. College was the way out, the ladder up. But there wasn’t much chatter at home or among his friends at Canarsie High School about where to go to college. Nor was he sure how to pay for it. So when a football recruiter who had come to one of Schultz’s high school games and had seen him play quarterback asked him if he’d be interested in a scholarship to Northern Michigan, he said a relieved yes and moved enthusiastically in that direction. In Schultz’s autobiography, Pour Your Heart Into It, he writes that his family’s road trip during his last semester of high school to see the campus in Marquette, Michigan, was his first time out of New York State.

At Northern Michigan he majored in communications. He joined a fraternity. He didn’t, in the end, play football, at least not for long: An injury prevented him from making the kind of contribution that he’d hoped to. The scholarship went away, and he had to take out loans and work part-time. He tended bar. He even on occasion sold his blood for money. He put enough energy into his studies to maintain a B average, but not enough to do any better than that. His graduation, he said, was one of the happiest moments of his mother’s life—but she didn’t attend the ceremony. The trip out would have cost more money than she and his father felt they could spend at the time.

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