College is arguably one of the most transitional times a young adult’s life. It is the stepping stone to education, experience, and self-awareness that shapes developing students into working and functional adults.
It is a time when teenagers are put in a parent-free environment for the first time and are forced to be curious about who they are, what they want to do, and where they will go. The world is at students’ fingertips, but only if their nails are strong enough to burst through the mental, and sometimes physical, college bubble.
“Every institution of higher education can exist in a bubble – but it is up to each college or university to make that conscious choice,” said Elon University’s Associate Director of Kernodle Center for Service Learning and Community Engagement, Bob Frigo.
At Elon University, I would argue that this college bubble is ever so present. According to Elon’s 2016-17 factbook, the university’s student body is just under 6,000 students, and an overwhelming 80 percent of them are white. Students can often be seen wearing name-brand clothing, Greek life T-shirts, or fashion’s latest trends.
Every building on campus is built with beautiful red brick and landscaped with perfectly manicured flowers. The physical campus is isolated, with the nearest city of more than 60,000 residents a 30-minute drive away.
While none of these characteristics necessarily hinders one’s curiosity about the outside world, collectively they perpetuate narrow perspectives that, depending upon who you are, manifest utopian ideals or pessimism for life after college.
Frigo, however, was quick to point out that Elon, specifically Elon Volunteers! (EV!), has numerous opportunities for students to engage with our surrounding community.
“These opportunities range from an afternoon volunteer experience with our Get on the Bus program at organizations such as Boys and Girls Club or Allied Churches, to a postgraduate year with a community agency such as Alamance Achieves with our Elon Alamance Health Partners (EAHP) program,” Frigo said.
The issue is that a large number of students are either unaware of outside realities, or do not take advantage of these possibilities. This is the first step to busting the bubble: tackling student’s lack of awareness. The bubble creates a small, enclosed community with a multitude of support from faculty and staff in which students are able to hold leadership positions in many organizations on campus, and seek out programs like EV! – but this isn’t enough.
Elon Alum Ali Broadbridge can attest to this. Broadbridge graduated in 2018, and the effect of the Elon bubble on her transition to the real world was harder than she expected.
“At Elon, the education bubble helps you advance your network with alumni and colleagues,” she said. “But the social awareness aspect of the bubble does not prepare you for the wide range of situations life throws at you.”
If students are not aware or interested in engaging in opportunities like EV!, the bubble is inherently stronger.
Elon is virtually its own town with its own police system, post office, and even movie theatre. There are three dining halls serving food all the time, exercise facilities equipped with student-run workout classes and a health center all located right on campus.
Students could never step foot off of campus and still live a perfectly functioning life, creating a bubble that suffocates students need to seek out programs like EV! that offer exposure to realities of social and economic differences. This is especially true if you don’t have a car.
“If you were to go into Burlington, the bigger town here, it’s a totally different environment than at Elon and most people would never know that,” said Elon senior and Student Director of EV!, Amanda Corso.
In 2006, Superior Court Judge Howard Manning threatened to close an underperforming school in Alamance County, just seven miles from thriving Elon University. Alamance County, where Elon is located, is an area that lives with numerous low incoming housing units, 15 Title I schools, and a 14.4 percent poverty rate. But some Elon students will go their whole college career without ever seeing or knowing that this different reality exists just beyond our manicured red brick pathways.
Corso works with student-run volunteer programs as director of EV!. She notes that while a small portion of students do take advantage of these programs, more times than not the bubble seems to curb the desire to look beyond the suffocated campus, and hinder the development of diverse views.
Corso finds that many students who do volunteer are also largely unaware of the difference in communities outside of Elon. Further, a majority of the students who do go out into the outside community are there to complete mandatory service hours for classes, and seldom return after hitting their numbers.
“You'll see the service classes working at after-school sites for their hours, and then just like that, we will have no volunteers again after they complete them," she said. "The people that stay long-term throughout their four years are the ones who make the largest impact, learn the most and gain real-world experience.”
Because of our bubble, the students who don’t actively seek out these engagement experiences are left with unattainable ideas of perfection and expectations of reality for life after college.
Broadbridge, a cinema and television arts major, struggled with this as she left the University bubble for the first time. She now hosts at two different restaurants in New York City while simultaneously searching for a job in her field.
“Everyone seems to graduate with the same mindset of ‘You need to get the best job at the most recognized company in the field that your degree taught you,’ but that’s not how life works,” she said. “It took me months to find the best job and experience out there. Then my contract was up and I was back at zero looking for what’s next. At Elon, everyone is so caught up in their own experiences in the bubble that the idea of the future mimics what we know to be true at Elon; it’s this idea of a perfectly manicured life.”
What Elon needs is exactly what EV! already offers: more integration of the outside community with the university so students can interact with and become aware of the importance of engagement opportunities that expose these different realities lying minutes away from our campus.
“The Kernodle Center for Service Learning and Community Engagement and Elon Volunteers are instrumental in connecting campus and community,” Frigo said. “They provide a way for students to move beyond campus and experience our local community through classes with a community engagement component and volunteer opportunities with nonprofit organizations.”
We students need to be exposed to reality. We need to be challenged, not coddled – pushed, not protected.
We must be curious of the world beyond our red bricks and tall fountains, and we must be strong enough to pop this bubble we so innocently float in. It is programs like EV! that will bring true growth, knowledge, and experience to us as we march confidently into the real world.
Photo pulled from The Kernodle Center Website