All in the Family: Multiple Siblings Choose SHU
There are many reasons for college applicants to choose Sacred Heart—a welcoming atmosphere, professors who care and a campus that feels like home. For some, that sense of home even comes with family.
There’s a sign on the wall of a restaurant not far from the Sacred Heart University campus. “Our highest compliment is a repeat customer,” it says. Universities might not like to think of students and alumni as “customers,” but given the cost attached to higher education, applicants and their families have a lot to consider when weighing their choices. A school where applicants have seen older siblings happy and parents have seen eldest children succeed can be a very persuasive argument for both.
Nearly five years ago, Colts Neck, NJ, mom Joann Wilen was touring colleges with her son, Daniel. While on a tour at another school in the region, a parent told her that if they loved that school, they would love “beautiful” Sacred Heart in Fairfield. A few days later, Daniel was approached by a Sacred Heart recruiter at his high school, and the decision to visit was cemented.
“We went to look at it, and we loved everything about it,” Wilen says. “Every person we met was so warm and welcoming. Everyone from the woman in the dining hall to the dean of students. There was this closeness.”
Daniel graduated in 2019 and is now in the process of getting his master’s degree in accounting from the Jack Welch College of Business & Technology. Meanwhile, Daniel’s younger brother Michael will graduate this year with a communications studies degree, and their sister Jenna will find herself playing lacrosse for the Pioneers come fall.
Wilen says a lot of people are surprised that three of her four children will attend the same college, but she says she’s comforted by it. “It says something about the quality of the education.”
It’s a similar story for Joe and Terri Lombardi of Stamford, CT, who first visited Sacred Heart with their daughter, Miranda. “We were shocked by how beautiful the campus was,” Joe Lombardi says. His daughter had visited other colleges, but while they walked Sacred Heart’s campus on a tour, she told her parents, “This is where I want to go.” Her parents told her not to rush the decision as they were going to visit another Connecticut school the next day.
So she waited. They visited that other school. But by the time they were getting back in the car, the decision was made: Miranda was going to SHU.
When it was time for Miranda’s younger brother Paul to choose a college, he thought long and hard about where to go, but when it came down to it, he chose familiarity. “He felt comfortable on campus,” Lombardi says. Two years later, Nick made the same decision to attend SHU.
Flash forward and Miranda is a teacher in Greenwich after having earned her education degrees at SHU, while Paul recently graduated in sports communications, and Nick is on track to earn his degree in finance in the spring of 2022.
It’s not just sibling legacies on the rise. As SHU approaches its 60th birthday, the school has been around long enough to begin seeing generational legacies as well. Martin Swist ‘70, has traveled with his family to live and work in all corners of the world, from the Berkshires to Saudi Arabia to Manila and Japan. Still, the son of this globetrotter chose Sacred Heart for his degree.
“I’m happy they all chose the same college,” Joe Lombardi says, speaking, it would seem, on behalf of legacy families in general. “We’ve all become part of the community here.”
Photo caption: The Lombardi and Wilen families