I was intrigued by Claire Suddath's piece in New York Magazine this week on Vanderbilt's ascent to "elite institution" status, so I asked my colleague Natalia Battaglia, a Vanderbilt alumna, to share her thoughts.

— Thomas

I graduated from Vanderbilt two years after Claire Suddath, whose terrific New York Magazine piece chronicles how the university deliberately transformed itself from a very good Southern school into one of the country’s most coveted institutions.

Reading it felt like a walk down memory lane: the outsized role of Greek life, student traditions, and Gordon Gee, the bow-tied chancellor who treated every stroll across campus like a parade. I arrived as Vanderbilt’s strategy of attracting more students from the Northeast and Jewish communities was taking shape, when the Hillel Center opened and campus was becoming more worldly in both ambitions and student body.

Like Chancellor Gee, my professors were brilliant but approachable. They showed up to campus events, turned interdepartmental rivalries into running jokes, and projected confidence, curiosity, and most importantly, enjoyment. Vanderbilt never felt like an untenable pressure cooker – it felt like a university that believed learning should actually be fun.

That feels like a forgotten lesson today. Higher education has become so convinced of its own importance that many campuses seem to have forgotten that joy and rigor can coexist. We hear criticism that college has become an engine of anxiety, burnout, and financial ruin, and some of that criticism is warranted. But when only about four in ten Americans say they have much confidence in higher education, a place that made excellence feel worth it is worth studying.

That culture still seems to matter. In a recent Freakonomics interview, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier argued that universities should focus on “magnets rather than wedges,” building institutions around what brings people together instead of what divides them. He stayed optimistic by hosting regular dinners with students and encouraging them to embrace civil discourse. He also made long-term bets on bringing students closer to economic opportunity, opening campuses in innovation hubs like New York and San Francisco.  

Which brings me to the article’s larger point. At a moment when the perceived value of college is at an all-time low, Vanderbilt asserts that it spent decades increasing the value of its degree. Speaking for myself, my Vanderbilt degree is worth considerably more today than it was when I received it twenty years ago. It’s the product of a long-term strategy that recognized something many institutions seem to have forgotten: prestige isn’t built by making college feel harder. It’s built by creating a place where excellence, community, opportunity, and genuine enjoyment reinforce one another.

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