How to Fill a Leaky Bucket
Photo by Haley Bordelon
The prospective students always have these big, wide eyes as they’re ferried around campus by the Student Ambassadors. They ask a lot of questions. They make a lot of comments. They are planning on getting at least a 28 on their ACT and want to know how that will impact their financial aid. They want to know if it’s required to take a class in Paris or if they can more or less just do their own thing. The prospective students say the dorms are bigger than expected but would like to hear more about the idea of getting a single and creating the mythical “megabed.” Their parents think the showroom is tastefully decorated and can imagine buying out Bed Bath & Beyond to replicate it. The prospective students won’t be going into the bathroom to scope out shower size and mirror lighting—of course, that’s a private space… unless they ask nicely or invite themselves in. In that case, we’re not going to stop them. They deserve to know what they’re getting into, don’t they?
If Centenary has an established procedure for placing an admissions showroom in an already occupied suite, it is not a very good one. After living with an empty room in our suite for the better part of a semester, my roommate and I eventually realized someone was doing something in there when people started letting themselves in the suite early in the morning before either of our alarms had gone off or leaving trash-cans full of plastic in the hallway while we were both in class. It made us twitchy, not knowing who was coming and going, who had keys to our room, who we would be stuck living with for the rest of the year. I didn’t get much of an explanation until I came home one day, a couple of weeks into the confusion, and found our suite door hanging open.
The empty room had been transformed from a typical, barren pre-move-in dorm room to a charming maroon and grey setup, complete with a plastic plant and a laundry hamper that would never hold anybody’s clothes. I couldn’t stop noticing the fact that both dressers had been pushed under one bed.
My old admissions counselor seemed much less surprised to see me there than I was to see her. She paused unspooling a set of string lights to cheerfully ask, “So, has anybody told y’all about your new suitemates?”
It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that, since that day, I have not known peace.
Photo by Haley Bordelon
I remember being a prospective student. I remember counselors coming to my high school and explaining application due dates over Chick-Fil-A, being offered a coffee when I got interviewed at Rhino. I remember getting near-instant answers to all my texted questions about AP credits and housing forms. I remember going to my second-choice school’s preview day, thinking, Yikes, this sucks compared to Centenary. I remember being so excited for Scholars Weekend, where a passel of us got to eat for free at a restaurant I happened to know was frequented by the mayor.
The next morning, at a student panel, a boy from my high school raised his hand. I remember wishing he would just be quiet. He’d confessed a few days before that he wanted to see how much money Centenary would offer him but had no real intention of going for a list of reasons that I didn’t care to hear him explain.
“I noticed that Centenary’s graduation rate is, like, really low. Why is that?”
If the Student Ambassadors were taken aback, they didn’t show it. One quickly chimed in with an answer: There had recently been a shakeup in the way these things were measured, and the number was artificially low. It would bounce back in a few years as the new system took hold. There was no reason to be troubled by the fact that, according to Google, fewer than 50% of any entering freshman class would walk at graduation.
It seemed a good enough explanation to us, dazzled high schoolers in the middle of a weekend of VIP treatment. Good enough for everyone except the boy who, of course, had long since made up his mind. I remember feeling, at that point, that anybody who left Centenary without graduating probably just wasn’t cut out for it. The academics were rigorous, and some people were inevitably going to decide they’d rather be at a party school. Centenary was just too expensive to waste time if you weren’t meant to be here.
Three years in, I do not struggle to believe that something approaching 52% of the people I entered with are no longer here. I do somewhat struggle to believe that this is the result of some quirk in the system. Off the top of my head, I can name a dozen people who dropped or transferred. It’s how my roommate and I ended up in the showroom—a suitemate dropped, we picked another, and she left to go live with a friend whose roommate transferred. The next set of people Res Life tried to move in simply never materialized.
Each set of goodbyes came with an explanation that they were leaving for personal reasons, which meant something different each time. Family issues, social drama, and, over and over again, finances. Centenary is too expensive to waste time if you’re not meant to be here. One by one, these people were all deciding they weren’t meant to be here anymore. Most of them tried to tough it out: they did the rounds with student support services, they stayed long past the first time they said they wanted to leave. But one by one, I watched them decide they had to jump ship before they went down with it.
Three years in, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard fellow students say some variation of I hate it here or said it myself. It’s mostly a joke. Finals are too hard. Caf food wasn’t quite up to par last night. Hot water is out in James again. There have been a few times I’ve heard it said seriously: during that spate of armed robberies my freshman year, at the beginning of the covid response where there were no right answers, those cold snowpocalypse days where we had to take breaks from melting snow in the toilet tanks to attend our Zoom classes. We might have meant it, then, but we didn’t really do anything about it. Three years in—as much as we complain, we aren’t going anywhere.
I eat comfort food in the Caf and smile back when the workers tell me to have a nice day. I spend hours complaining to my professors, and they sigh with me, ask me every time I see them if things have gotten any better. When I can’t stand to be in the dorm, I walk through the arboretum, sit in the gazebo, and chase the feral cats until I feel better. There is good at Centenary and a good bit of it. I know the prospective students see it. We make sure of it. It’s just that, after a couple of years of accrued bad days, I wish it were a little easier for the rest of us.
