In “Breaking Home Ties,” the cover that he painted for the Sept. 25, 1954 Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell went out of his way to capture the anxiety that a family experienced when a son or daughter gained admission to college. “Breaking Home Ties” shows a son and father, along with the family dog, sitting beside a farm truck waiting for the train that will take the son to college. The father, who slumps forward and is dressed in work clothes, is a portrait in sadness. His son, wearing an ill-fitting suit, looks over his father’s shoulder and seems lost in his own thoughts.
Even if Norman Rockwell’s style of painting were to become popular again, it’s hard to imagine a picture like “Breaking Home Ties” appearing on the cover of any of the many recent books on the struggle to get into college. What makes families anxious about college admission these days is not the threat of fraying family ties but a son or daughter not getting into the “right” school—be it an Ivy League college or a flagship state university.
In the early 1950s, when Rockwell’s picture takes place, just graduating from college was by itself a singular achievement. In 1952 only 8.3 percent of men and 5.8 percent of women had completed college compared to 35.4 percent of men and 36.6 percent of women today. Rockwell’s freshman seems sure to end up better off than his farmer father, and in going to an in-state college (there is a small State U pennant on his suitcase), he is doing what is expected of him; 96 percent of public school students and 80 percent of private school students did that in the 1950s.
