College decision process prompts pause and questions for students and parents
'You can’t control everything. You have to really help them and make sure that they feel protected — because in a way, that’s what we’ve always been doing'
Faced with the ever-challenging question of what to do next, Pittsburgh Allderdice High School senior Aviv Davidson made a choice. Throughout the monthslong college selection process, Davidson, a star runner at the Squirrel Hill-based public school, considered several factors: To what extent would he run in college, how far was he willing to go from home, and, perhaps most difficult of all, what did he want his next Jewish experience to look like?
For Davidson, and scores of other students, parents, counselors and administrators, the task of ascertaining the character of Jewish life on campus — often before heading into a cafeteria, holing up in a library, singing a capella, attending a communal seder or tabling beside a leafy green quad — has been both enlightening and polarizing.
Near daily media reports coupled with digital chats have detailed numerous episodes involving college Jewish students. Illuminating and sobering anecdotes largely shared in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, have fueled communal conversation, congressional inquiries and presidential action.
Davidson, like scores of other applicants and decision-makers in this year’s pool, followed related news and social media chatter. About a week before the May 1 deadline, Davidson chose American University.
As for being Jewish on campus, “I didn’t want to go to a school that doesn’t care,” he said.
Leaving the nest
“The thing that’s on students’ minds is are they going to go someplace where they feel safe,” Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh interim principal Yikara Levari told the Chronicle.
Prior to becoming interim principal last month, Levari spent more than a decade leading Hillel Academy’s Girls High School. Being a secondary school administrator delivered a bird’s eye view on how students and parents approach an academic milestone.
There’ve always been questions about which schools offer which amenities — like kosher food, regular prayer services or Jewish studies programs — but since Oct. 7 and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, many of the inquiries about life on campus concern one’s ability to practice Judaism safely, Levari said. “But what that means could mean different things.”
Levari said she’s noticed more interest in predominantly Jewish spaces, including Yeshiva University and Touro University, and praised University of Delaware and Penn State University as “places that have taken efforts to make sure Jewish students feel safe.”
One wrinkle is the growing role of college in Israel.
Both as a school administrator and parent of a high school senior, Levari has seen greater enthusiasm for post-secondary studies abroad.
Applicants and Israeli admissions officers seem to be sharing and requesting “a lot more information than ever before,” she said.
Pursuing college overseas won’t be right for everyone — much like no decision will be universally correct — but it’s important to provide students and parents with viable options, she continued. “We have a range of where students go, and as a school we don’t push one place.”
Each fall, admissions officers, Israel advocates and a slew of speakers pine for attention, and this year’s application and decision process has been no different, Levari said. “My job as an educator in sending these kids off to the next stage of life can be scary. You can’t control everything. You have to really help them and make sure that they feel protected — because in a way, that’s what we’ve always been doing: protecting them for their entire schooling.”
For parent Dana Blitstein, the college decision process wasn’t terribly taxing.
“I have a pretty easy child. She’s very self-directed and motivated to do a lot of things,” Blitstein said.
When it came to determining where the Allderdice senior would go next, Blitstein said her daughter identified schools with “larger, more diverse campuses,” friendlier tuition rates and sizable Jewish communities.
The process required choosing between Binghamton University, University of Maryland, The Ohio State University and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Blitsein’s daughter selected the latter.
The Squirrel Hill-based mother is happy about her daughter’s decision — of Penn State’s nearly 40,000 undergraduate students, about 10% are Jewish, according to Hillel International — but worry still exists.
“There’s no campus that’s going to be perfect or ideal,” Blitstein said. “Stuff is going to happen everywhere.”
Possessing that mindset propelled Blitstein to prepare her daughter for college by exposing her to “misinformation” and encouraging her to “be a participant in the Jewish community on campus.”
Fox Chapel resident Margo Litwin described the past year as a “fraught process.”
Watching her daughter choose where to go post-high school led Litwin to say, “There’s a lot of pressure on kids.”
At the same time, it’s not so simple for parents.
“You’re just trying to figure out where it is safe to send your kid,” Litwin said. “You want to make sure that they are able to go to the school they want to go to, and they have the best options available, but you also want to keep them safe. That’s kind of the hardest balance to strike.”
For months, Litwin and her daughter applied a multipronged approach to determining a future choice.
After identifying potential schools, Litwin and her daughter spoke with “as many students as we could,” then followed up those conversations with calls to students’ parents as well as chats with representatives from Jewish organizations on those campuses.
Results were compared but not before employing a once popular means of fact-finding.
“We started reading school papers to understand what the dialogue was like on campus, what the mood was like on campus and what was really happening. Because sometimes, the national news will blow things out of proportion or under-report on things,” Litwin said.
Now that the process is complete — Litwin declined to share where her daughter chose — the mother has mixed feelings about the endeavor.
“It feels like it’s one of the biggest decisions in your life when you’re 17 or 18 years old. And as a parent, you realize it’s a big decision, but it’s not the big decision of your life,” Litwin said. “I think the process has gotten to be a lot for a teenager. It’s a lot of work. It’s asking for a lot of self-reflection at a very young age.”
Go your own way
Hillel Academy senior Miriam Levari faced multiple choices this year: Where in the U.S. should she apply; where in Israel should she apply for a gap-year program; if she wanted to stay in Israel, should she apply to college there now; as an American-Israeli citizen should she register for national service in the Jewish state; should she enlist in the Israel Defense Forces; and, of course, what happens next.
Behind the alternatives were years of preparation.
“The first three years of high school, I acted as if I was going to apply to college here,” she said.
Levari opted for the school’s most rigorous classes, registered and completed multiple Advanced Placement courses and enrolled in several seminars at Chatham University.
“When I was in 11th grade, a few of my teachers thought that there was the possibility for me to get into maybe a more competitive or an Ivy League college. And that was an exciting idea to me,” Levari said.
The high school student, who volunteered for a congressional campaign, completed a national fellowship with StandWithUs and hopes to become a professional writer, continued on a path that might facilitate admittance to an elite university, she said. “But when I really thought about it, it wasn’t something I wanted.”
Levari decided not to apply to college in the U.S. or in Israel. She elected not to register for national service or join the Israeli military. She chose to spend the next year at a seminary in the Jewish state, live abroad and gain perspective on what might follow, she said.
“The past four years, I’ve been working pretty hard in high school, and I’m pretty burnt out;” in lieu of heading “straight into a college environment, I feel like what I need now is a little bit more real life experience,” she said. “It’s not about getting peace of mind, kind of just an opportunity to work on myself before I enter the crazy situation that we have to as students.”
With most of next year’s college freshmen having already committed to their schools, Lauren Lieberman, a Pittsburgh-based college guidance counselor with more than 20 years of experience, is looking ahead to the next cycle.
Speaking with the Chronicle, Lieberman urged students and parents to meaningfully engage in the college admissions process by obtaining as much information as possible.
“There’s really a lot out there,” she said. “My biggest suggestion is to take some time to think about this as a long-term project for your family.”
Whether it comes to experiencing Judaism on campus or expressing one’s views about Israel or other matters, “there is a real fear, but you have to be able to talk about it,” she said.
Making an informed decision — whether as a student or parent — requires seeing campuses, speaking with current students and parents, pausing and determining personal preferences: “There’s so much noise in this space, and you have to do what feels the most right for you.”
With so much weight surrounding what to do next, the imperative sounds daunting, but “families do this all the time,” Lieberman said. “It’s what you’ve been doing since you had a toddler.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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