Future Business Leaders of America

 

A perk of being so physically close and relationally connected to Penn is staying in touch with campus trends, including the thought process of this generation of undergrads as they decide where to go to college, navigate making the most of their four years as a student, and then think about the start of their careers. Needless to say, when I was in their shoes was literally a generation ago, so while some things remain the same other things change dramatically. 

Maybe my high school friends and I were exceedingly nerdy, but what drove a lot of us was getting into the most prestigious and academically rigorous school possible, with no regard for how far away from home it was or what kind of community it sat in. I tell people that Penn could’ve been on Mars, if it had the number one undergraduate business program in the world I would’ve said yes. 

It did help that, as I was deciding where to go to college, Philly had a national reputation for being pretty cool – the early 90’s were the apex for entertainers like Fresh Prince and Boyz II Hood, and even the most grizzled Philly sports fans would admit that the Eagles, Phillies, and Sixers enjoyed some success during this era – but the only other impression I had of Philly and the Penn campus was that it was a big city at a time when that meant crime and blight and grittiness, a far cry from the relatively well-manicured suburban existence I hailed from. 

Today’s high-achieving students similarly have a lot of choices of where to go to school for four years. And those choices represent a wide range of community types: 

* Campuses are set apart amid a largely suburban form – Duke, Stanford

* Urban form at a small scale (i.e. college towns) – Cornell, Michigan

* Big city – Columbia, Hopkins 

The Stanford-Penn comparison is worth diving into a little, especially since I grew up less than a 30-minute drive from the Stanford campus and now live 5 blocks from Penn. Two amazing world-class institutions with sterling reputations in scholarship, science, and innovation. And yet consider how the differing forms in and around campus influence the undergraduate student experience: 

* At Stanford, it would take a significant amount of intentionality to interact with contemporary urban issues, observe municipal government in action, and participate in diverse social and cultural activities.

* Conversely, at Penn, it is almost impossible to not engage on such things since they are all around us, and it is quite easy to get involved in the inner workings of how things get done in the public or business or civic space. 

And, as noted above, to each his or her own. We will always sort in ways that are consistent with where we feel we will be happy and comfortable. Perhaps Penn students are more clued in to the fact that their collegiate experience will more easily involve engagement with an urban experience in the form of the city of Philadelphia, warts and all, while for Stanford students those opportunities are not as important and/or they prefer and are therefore intentionally choosing into a more suburban and set-apart environment. 

But, I do think that while some people will choose Stanford and other people will choose Penn until the end of time, there is something to be said about how it matters what tomorrow’s leaders and innovators are exposed to during their formative undergraduate years. Will they have anything to draw from when empathizing with our most vulnerable households or will such perspectives be only theoretical? Will they have access to a wide range of lived experiences, cultural backgrounds, and entrepreneurial ideas, or will their social circles be narrower? Will they even have any direct and tactile connection to the outside world while they learn, or will their learning experience feel distant from the outside world? 

There is no doubt that places like Stanford and Penn and Princeton and Notre Dame and UChic and WashU will produce a large proportion of tomorrow’s leaders in politics, business, and science/technology. I wonder if there will be material differences in how they view the world based on what community form they were exposed to when they were 18 to 22, and how easy it was for them to interact in meaningful ways with that surrounding community. I am obviously biased based on the life choices I made, to come to Penn and then to make roots in Philadelphia, but I do think that it behooves students to consider how where you learn needs to relate to what you are exposed to and can do real engagement with. The future of our country, our business competitiveness, our scientific innovation, and our cultural expression hinges on this.