Connecting the Dots
Sometimes the thread through a career is not a job. It is a question.
An article from the Understand Series
In 2019, I enrolled in an MBA program at the College of William and Mary.
The first course was called Renaissance Manager, and it opened with an assignment I did not fully appreciate at the time. Every student had to identify a wicked problem: a real, unsolved challenge from their professional life or their industry, something with no clean answer and too many competing interests. That problem would then run through the entire program. Finance would touch it. Operations would touch it. Analytics, organizational behavior, economics, all of it would circle back to the same question for two years.
I chose mine and wrote it down.
Then I spent seven years answering it without once saying its name.
The Question
Here is what I asked in 2019, in the language I used then.
When will the commitments independent schools have made about access and community composition stop holding, not because anyone stopped believing in them, but because the demographic and financial math overwhelms the stated commitment regardless of intent?
I was asking about the families who cannot write the full check. I was asking whether schools that had promised those students a place could keep that promise inside their own economics.
That was the question. It was not a moral argument. It was a structural one. Schools can mean every word they say about belonging and still watch the model decide against them, because tuition dependence, discount rate, full pay demand, and demographic reality do not respond to anyone's intentions.
I spent two years threading that question through business coursework while working inside the very institutions it was about.
And then I graduated, and the question went underground. It did not stop. It stopped being a sentence and became the work.
Where the Question Actually Came From
Here is what I did not say in that first course, because I am not sure I understood it yet.
I was not asking a theoretical question about an industry. I was asking about my own family.
I arrived at Episcopal High School as a freshman in 1997. Tuition was about $24,000 that year. By the time I graduated in 2001, it was about $28,000. My parents were federal employees in the Washington area. My father held a senior grade. My mother was earlier in the schedule.
Put the official numbers beside that. In 1998, in the Washington-Baltimore locality, a GS-7 Step 1 earned $26,532 and a GS-13 Step 1 earned $55,969.
Which means one year of my high school education cost slightly less than my mother's entire annual salary, and close to half of my father's.
I was on financial aid. Our family filled out the SSS forms, School and Student Services, the assessment independent schools have long used to calculate what a household can afford. Today most schools use Clarity, which follows guidelines set with the National Association of Independent Schools. Different name, same machinery, same question asked of families every single year: show us what you have, and we will tell you what you can pay.
I know what it looks like when a family sits down with those forms. I know what it costs to get through that door, and the money is only part of it. The rest is what it does to a household to be assessed, every spring, for the privilege of staying.
I could have stopped there and written this from memory. Memory is where it started. But memory is not evidence, and I have spent five years telling people their stories matter without once asking my own to stand up next to a number. So I went and pulled the tables.
Now run the same comparison today. Episcopal tuition for 2026 to 2027 is $77,700. In the same locality, a GS-7 Step 1 now earns $57,736 and a GS-13 Step 1 earns $121,785.
My mother's grade no longer covers one year of tuition. It falls nearly $20,000 short. My father's grade, a senior federal professional, would now surrender 64% of gross salary for one child for one year, and that is at the first step of the grade.
Between 1998 and 2026, federal pay in that market roughly doubled. Episcopal tuition roughly tripled. Put the two lines on the same chart and they cross in 2003, two years after I graduated. One year of the school I attended passed the entire annual salary of a federal employee at my mother's grade, and never fell back below it.
Two things need saying before anyone takes that comparison further than it should go. Episcopal is not a typical independent school. It is one hundred percent boarding, enrolls 440 students, and sits on a large endowment, and conclusions drawn from it do not automatically transfer to the school down the road from you. And boarding tuition is not day tuition. That $77,700 includes housing and meals, costs a family carries in some form anyway. When I later worked in admissions at a day school, the comparable figure was around $45,000.
Run that day school number against the same salaries and the story does not change, it only changes scale. Forty-five thousand dollars is still 78% of what a GS-7 earns today in that market.
And I am not the only one doing this math. Mark J. Mitchell, who runs access and affordability at NAIS, has run it for the whole country. Using a formula like the one School and Student Services uses, the same system my parents sat down with, he found that a family of four with no net worth needs to earn about $190,350 before they are considered able to pay the median day school tuition, and close to $310,000 for median seven-day boarding. Just under 10% of American households earn $200,000 or more.
Mitchell's calculation already assumes two parents, so run it that way. Two federal professionals in that market, a GS-13 and a GS-7, both employed, earn about $179,500 combined, and still fall short of the bar. His figure is national and those are Washington-Baltimore salaries, the highest locality pay area in the federal system. I am holding a national threshold against some of the best-paid federal salaries in the country, and they do not reach it.
So this is not just my family and not just my school. My family is one house inside a number that covers the whole country.
Now here is the part that keeps me honest, and it is the reason I insist this is a structural problem rather than a moral one.
Episcopal is trying. The school is in the middle of COURAGE, a $150 million campaign, with nearly $30 million of it earmarked for financial aid endowment and sixteen new named scholarship funds. This year, 140 students out of 440 are receiving aid. Roughly a third of the school.
I want that on the page, because it kills the easy version of this argument. Nobody at my school stopped believing.
It also requires me to say something about the comparison I just made. I never paid the sticker price. My family paid what the SSS formula said we could pay, and the school covered the rest. So the honest version is not that a family like mine gets handed a bill for $77,700. It is that they apply, and submit the forms, and wait to find out.
But turn that ratio around. If 140 students receive aid, then 300 do not.
Two out of every three families at my school pay the full $77,700, every year, out of what they earn.
The sticker price is not a hypothetical number that nobody actually encounters. It is what most of the community pays, and more to the point, it is the number a family sees first. It is the number that decides who applies at all.
And tuition is still $77,700. And my mother's grade still does not cover it.
A family exactly like mine, holding exactly those jobs, in exactly that city, would have a materially harder time walking through the door I walked through. That is the wicked problem, and it turns out I had been living inside it since I was fourteen years old.
The Chapters That Looked Separate
In the first article of this series, I wrote about looking at my own career and seeing chapters from different books. Basketball coach. Admissions officer. Dorm head. Educator. Project manager. Founder. Consultant.
What I had not done was line them up beside one another and ask what they were all reaching toward.
Every one of those roles turned out to be a different seat at the same question.
In admissions I was the math, deciding family by family who got access and at what price. In the dorm I saw what that math did to a kid at ten o'clock at night, fifty ninth graders down the hall, including the ones I had recruited. I had built the files that put them there. I was also the adult they came to.
In the MBA I got the words for how the whole thing runs. Through BLAC I heard what it felt like from the people who had lived it, in more than forty recorded interviews and 180 published alumni accounts. And now I sit with schools and see it from their side of the table, because I cannot separate enrollment from belonging. The question I asked in 2019 never let those two things be separate.
Different seats. One question.
Say it that way and it stops sounding like a person who could not settle down. Not one of those seats could have shown me the whole thing. That is why it took all of them, and most of my working life, to see it.
We talk about connecting the dots as though the hard part is finding them. It is not. Living hands you the dots. You collect them by showing up.
Connecting them is the other work. It means asking what a gym, a dorm hallway, a finance course, and a podcast have in common, and then staying with the answer when it turns out to be a question you asked at fourteen and never put down.
And the numbers are dots too. That one surprised me. For years I thought my memories were the story and data was something you added afterward to sound serious. A salary table from 1998 sits in this story the same way the dorm hallway does. It just took me longer to go get it.
Here is what connecting them gave me that no single one of them could.
Enrollment and belonging are not two problems. They are one problem, seen from the front door and seen from the hallway.
Who gets in and who can stay are the same question asked twice, and a school that treats them as separate offices will keep solving one while the other quietly comes apart.
Every seat I sat in had been telling me that. I could not hear it until I put them beside each other.
Why It Took So Long to Come Back
I have been asking myself why it took seven years to say that question out loud again.
The honest answer is that I never stopped working on it long enough to notice I was working on it. A wicked problem does not announce itself in daily practice. It shows up as a family that cannot make the tuition work. A student who got in and never settled in. A budget meeting about discount rate. A conversation with an alumnus who loved the place and also carried something from it. Each of those is a Tuesday. None of them feels like a thesis.
In the last article, I wrote that we experience our lives at ground level, and that proximity can hide the scale of our own work.
This chapter taught me something harder. Proximity can also hide the question. You can spend years answering something you have stopped consciously asking, and mistake the answers for unrelated jobs.
And the return happened twice over. I came back to a question I had posed in 2019. And in coming back to it, I understood something I had not understood when I posed it, which is that I was asking about my own house.
Connecting the dots is not the same as collecting them. I had the dots the whole time. What I lacked was the distance to see the shape they made.
What Reflection Actually Does
This is where the second pillar earns its name.
Individually, my roles read like a person figuring things out. Assembled, they read like a research agenda. Nothing about my history changed when I saw it. No new job appeared. No credential was added. I simply stood far enough back to see that the chapters were arguing with each other, and had been for years.
That is the difference between having experience and understanding it.
Experience accumulates on its own. Meaning does not.
Meaning requires someone to stop and assemble it, and most of us never stop, because the next Tuesday is always waiting.
And once assembled, a pattern does something a memory cannot. It points forward. If every role was approaching the same question, then the next one is not a departure. It is the next position from which to ask.
What I Finally Understood
What I finally understood is that good faith does not close this gap, because the gap reopens every year.
Families are working harder to gain and keep access. Schools are working harder to sustain enrollment.
Both are trying, and the two economies still do not meet in the middle, because the model reopens the distance faster than any campaign can close it. That is what makes it structural rather than moral. Nobody has to stop believing for it to keep happening.
I did not need to predict that. I had been documenting it the entire time, from inside admissions offices, dorm hallways, business coursework, and the interviews and alumni accounts I had been collecting for five years without calling it evidence.
I just had not yet put the pages in order.
And when I finally did, the first page was a set of financial aid forms on a kitchen table in 1997.
What I Am Not Answering Here
If you run a school, you have been waiting this whole time for me to tell you what to do about it. I know, because I have sat on your side of the table and had that same reaction to people who show up with a problem and no next move.
I am not going to, and not because I am withholding it.
Understanding is its own piece of work. A school that jumps to solutions before it can name what it is actually facing usually solves the wrong thing. It cuts a program, freezes tuition for a year, launches a campaign, and the underlying math keeps doing what math does. I have watched that happen. I have been in the room while it happened.
This piece does the naming. The next one does the rest.
Before You Go
Most people are told to find their passion, as though it is waiting somewhere ahead of them.
Mine was behind me. It was written down in a course assignment in 2019. Before that it was sitting on a kitchen table in 1997. In between, I answered it from seven different jobs without once recognizing that I was answering anything.
The roles were never the thread. The question was. And a question you have been answering for years does not need to be found. It needs to be recognized.
Your chapters are not as separate as they look.
A note on sources and method
Federal salary figures come from official OPM salary tables for the Washington-Baltimore locality pay area. The 1998 table incorporated a 2.3% general schedule increase and a 7.27% locality payment, putting GS-7 Step 1 at $26,532 and GS-13 Step 1 at $55,969. The 2026 table incorporates a 33.94% locality payment, putting GS-7 Step 1 at $57,736 and GS-13 Step 1 at $121,785. I used 1998 rather than 1997 because it is the closest year for which I could obtain the full official locality table. Step 1 is the entry rate for each grade, and I use it for both grades in both years so the comparison stays consistent across twenty-eight years. Federal employees advance through ten steps within a grade, and pay at the top step runs roughly a third higher than at the first. So the percentages here describe the heaviest end of the range. A family further along the step scale would carry less.
Episcopal High School tuition for 2026 to 2027 is $77,700, and the school's endowment figures and COURAGE campaign details come from Episcopal's published annual report and campaign materials. Episcopal is an unusual institution by any measure: founded in 1839, one hundred percent boarding, 440 students, and an endowment above $382 million. Conclusions drawn from one school of that profile do not transfer automatically to the sector, which is why the national NAIS figures appear alongside them. The 1997 and 2001 tuition figures are approximate. They come from what my family paid and from conversations with my parents over the years, rather than from a published source, and I have noted them as recollection throughout.
Mark J. Mitchell's affordability calculations appear in "Tuition: Ability to Pay vs. Willingness to Pay," Independent School, Fall 2022, drawing on NAIS DASL data, School and Student Services methodology, and Census Bureau household income distribution. His figures describe a two-parent family of four with no net worth, and they are national rather than locality adjusted. The federal salaries here are specific to the Washington-Baltimore locality pay area, which carries one of the highest locality percentages in the federal system. That mismatch works against the argument I am making rather than for it.
The chart uses actual figures at the endpoints. The interior years are interpolated at a constant annual rate to show the shape of the divergence rather than to report specific annual values. The 2003 crossing point is where the interpolated lines meet, not a figure taken from that year's published tuition.
The interview and alumni account figures refer to BLAC's own collection: more than forty recorded conversations and 180 published alumni accounts gathered since 2021.
Comparisons use gross salary before taxes, and boarding tuition, which includes room and board. Single salaries are used for the year over year comparison, and a combined two salary figure where noted. Most families draw on more than one income, savings, extended family, and financial aid, which is precisely the point: the gap is closed by something, and what closes it varies enormously from household to household.
Jonathan E. Lee is the founder of Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC), where he collects the stories of how people find their way through educational and professional life and studies why those journeys succeed. This article explores the second pillar of The BLAC Framework™: Understand. Next on the blog: Who Helped You Get Here?, from the Listen series.
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