Why I Judge Colleges by Their Soda (and What Randolph-Macon Got Right)

Exhibit A. A Pepsi machine, and out of order. I rest roughly half my case. (DePaul University)

When I visit a campus, I'm not just admiring the brick and the bell tower. I'm looking for the things a school hopes I won't notice. The water stain blooming on a dorm ceiling. The dead fountain that's been "under repair" since the Obama administration. The lab with equipment held together by tape and optimism. We call this deferred maintenance, and in my world it's a flashing sign. When a college quietly puts off the upkeep that students actually live inside, it's telling you something about its priorities. If they're cutting here, I always wonder, where else are they trimming the experience where nobody's looking?

So I hunt for the small tells. The places where a school decided that "good enough for students" was, in fact, good enough. And I'll admit I've developed one tell that makes my colleagues raise an eyebrow.

I check whether it's a Coke campus or a Pepsi campus.

I'm half-kidding. But only half. If the fountains and vending machines are all Pepsi, that's a strike against the school in my book, because I think Pepsi is the inferior product. Here's the logic, and I'd ask you to follow it before you laugh me out of the room. Pepsi has the smaller market share. Most people, given a blind choice, reach for Coke. So to win a campus contract, Pepsi generally has to do it the only way a runner-up can, by being cheaper. Which means when a school goes all-in on Pepsi, there's a decent chance somebody in a budget meeting looked at two bids and picked the one that cost less, rather than the one students would actually prefer. It's a tiny decision. But tiny decisions get made by the same people, in the same rooms, with the same instincts, as the big ones.

I come by this honestly, and early. When I was a kid, plenty of my friends' families kept the fridge stocked with RC Cola or Shasta instead of Coke. I can still taste those sodas, and I did not care for them. Even as an eight-year-old, I understood exactly what was happening. Nobody's mom was buying Shasta because the family had taken a poll and declared it superior. They bought it because it was cheaper, full stop. And there's nothing wrong with stretching a grocery budget. But I knew, even then, the difference between "this is what we love" and "this is what we'll settle for." That instinct, the one that perks up when cheaper quietly wins over better, never left me. It just grew up and started touring colleges.

Now, before you write me off as a man who evaluates four-year institutions by their carbonation, let me be clear. I know how absurd this sounds. I'm not telling families to cross a school off the list because of a vending machine. A great college with a Pepsi contract is still a great college. The soda is a footnote, not a verdict. But footnotes add up, and after enough campus visits you start to trust your footnotes.

Which brings me to the school that stopped me in my tracks.

Randolph-Macon’s student center. Both. I may have stood here a while.

I was at Randolph-Macon, standing in their student center, when I saw something I had never once encountered in all my years of visits. A fountain machine that dispensed both Coke and Pepsi. Both. Side by side, no winner declared, no budget meeting forcing a choice. The school had simply decided that if some students wanted one and some wanted the other, well, why not let them have what they actually want?

I may have stood there longer than a grown man should stand in front of a soda machine.

Because here's what that little fountain told me. This was a school that, faced with a small chance to take the cheaper, simpler, one-vendor path, chose instead to spend a bit more to give students the thing they'd actually prefer. And if that's how they handle something as trivial as soda, I find myself a lot more willing to believe them about the things that aren't trivial at all.

A college is a thousand small decisions about what students are worth, most of them made long before any family shows up for a tour. You can't see most of those decisions. But every so often one of them gets left out in the open, humming away in a corner of the student center, telling the truth to anyone paying attention.

I'm always paying attention. Even at the soda fountain. Especially at the soda fountain.