Though Communication junior Rachel Hirsch wasn’t sure she wanted to go to college where her father teaches, when she applied to Northwestern in high school, she assumed she would get in. She didn’t. “It was extra salty because my dad works here, so I thought I might be admitted – but I wasn’t,” Hirsch says. “Not all sons and daughters of faculty have a free ticket.”
Hirsch never really pictured herself taking classes where her dad works 9-to-5, but after a year at NYU, she decided to reapply and was accepted as a transfer. Because her father is a SESP professor, Hirsch receives a hefty tuition break and now views her father’s on-campus presence positively, occasionally stopping by his office to chat, a luxury most students don’t have.
Having a parent employed by NU does not have to mean the end of wild college antics, either. Andy Seay, a McCormick senior whose father is an engineer in Facilities Management, lives just a stone’s throw from his dad’s office. Yet despite their close proximity, there haven’t been any awkward run-ins, apart from his father walking into Seay’s party-torn house the morning after. “My girlfriend and I were working so hard to clean up,” Seay says. “He just laughed.”
But just because your mom or dad is on staff doesn’t mean university rules don’t apply. “I’ve had friends who’ve had my dad as a professor and they would literally call me at midnight and be like, ‘Can you please go get the midterm? Can you please just drive home and go get it?’ ” says Rachel Eichenbaum, a Weinberg senior. “I’m always like, ‘No, definitely not.’ “
And Eichenbaum has gone out of her way to prove her qualifications as an NU student outside of the family connection, she says. “I’ve always been self-conscious when people think I got in to Northwestern because of some pull that my dad might have,” Seay says. “My dad definitely doesn’t have any pull with admissions, so I know I got into the school based on my own volition.”
NU does offer an incentive for children of staff members to attend the school. All employees, not just faculty holding prominent offices, are eligible for a dependent, usually a child’s, tuition reduction. Reductions span from 30 to 90 percent of a student’s tuition, after any financial aid has been subtracted, and are based on how long the employee has worked at NU, according to university Human Resources.
Besides reduced cost, students with parents working at NU say the arrangement results in more perks than embarrassment. “Actually, it’s a nice setup,” Seay says. “My dad and I get lunch about once a week and he always has a care package from home. Either something I need from the house, or fruit that my mom sends … we’re all really happy with how it’s worked out,” Seay says.
Some families set limits on visitation rights beforehand. “My parents were really, really good about it,” explains Eichenbaum. “When I decided to go here, they were like, ‘We promise we will absolutely never drop by. We’re going to treat it like you’re in Wyoming for all we care. You’ll come home when you want to come home,’ and they’ve been very respectful of that.”
