I haven’t looked back over my posts to see how much I’ve talked about this here, but if you know me at all, you know that we have been trying to get out of Texas ever since we moved here. Well, God has other plans for us, and it looks like we’re staying put for awhile.
One of the first things my husband said to me after the shutdown began in 2020, was that he feared for the private colleges around the United States. College tuition has been rising remarkably over the years, and that is what most education news stories and articles are about these days. But part of the problem in secondary education is the ever lowering enrollment. This is happening for a number of reasons. One is the high cost. One is the fact that the current and upcoming generations of college aged students is much smaller than any past generation.
With a much lower, and expected future lowering, of enrollment, many small colleges are finding it impossible to make ends meet. They rely more and more on endowment, which is always a huge factor in private colleges financial wellness. I know of no private college who relies solely on tuition for operating costs.
Because of this financial stress, some colleges are shutting down. Almost all are relying much more heavily on adjunct professors than in the past. These two issues combined mean that the number of jobs for a PhD physicist in private academia are shrinking rapidly.
My husband could leave academia… but this is absolutely a place where he thrives. He has a gift for teaching, a love for teaching, and a love for student well being that cannot be fulfilled in any industry outside academia. And we absolutely love the small, Christian college life. The caliber of student is excellent, we can be open about our beliefs and help students as they navigate through a post-Christian world, and we enjoy the devotion to God that the entire institution has!
This is not true of all private colleges, but LeTourneau fits all of these qualities well. We’ve always said that we love LeTourneau. We just wish we could pick it up and move it above the Mason-Dixon line.
The reasons we have wanted to leave Texas are not because we hate Texans! I want to make sure you understand that. The things we struggle with in Texas are: weather (we ARE northerners), bugs (there are so many things that can bite/sting you here it is ridiculous), and allergies (they are literally debilitating to my husband for most of the year). Granted, it is also frustrating to have moved to a place where politics is so slanted and cultural Christianity lives to loudly that it is hard to find deep understanding of theology (less so on a college campus), but that is not what makes it hard to live in Texas.
Despite our desire to leave, my husband has gotten very few interviews from the myriad of applications he has put out over the years. Every job he applies for will have 100+ applicants. He looks pretty good on paper, and he interviews well. But with the reliance on adjuncts and the need to keep costs low, many places are going toward just-out-of-college PhDs or MSs who can be paid less.
Because of these factors and my husband’s foresight as to what will likely happen post-pandemic in academia, he said that we should probably start looking for a more permanent home right here in East Texas. I began looking that day…
And found our dream home!!
Calm down. We didn’t get it. It was slightly out of our price range, needed a new roof and windows, and would not have fitted our lifestyle quite as well as the one we actually purchased. But, MAN! Was it gorgeous!
This is the house we did buy:
And it has be practically perfect for us!
Molly told me that she did not want to move unless we got a pool. Check.
Edward wanted woods. Check.
I wanted a patio, garage, and library. Check. Check. Check.
We also wanted to be able to have goats and chickens. Double Check.
Edward and Milli wanted a long driveway for playing in. Check.
And on and on. This house has spaces for entertaining, a room we rent out to help with costs, a game room, space for sewing, a pantry, and so much more. It has an outbuilding for goats (although, we need to improve the fencing out there before we use it), plenty of space for gardening and an orchard, room for outdoor play, and woods for adventuring and a club house! It is also within biking distance of LeTourneau’s airport location, so Edward can continue to be a bike commuter most days by cycling the first mile and taking the shuttle between campuses.
It took us nearly a year to find this place. We looked at tons of homes and even put money down on one. But this place was meant for us! We plan to stay here until Edward retires. Granted, the whole point of this article is really that God has plans that may not be ours- but they are GOOD!
