If You Get Hit by a Bus, You Get Free Tuition. Wait, What?

Kayla Hoovler has big goals for her freshman year at Yale University: Pick a major. Make good grades. Get hit by a campus bus.

That last one is a joke — for the most part. “Any time we’re crossing the street, my friends and I are like, ‘Oh, hopefully someone will hit me.’”

Why? A pervasive myth — found on campuses from New Haven, Conn., to Lawrence, Kan., to Knoxville, Tenn. — says that if you get hit by a bus, your university will give you free tuition.

It’s a decades-old legend thriving like a weed in the crevices of college dorm rooms, dining halls, and libraries at colleges in Georgia, Ohio, Virginia — and just about everywhere else. In all of those cases, officials have roundly assured students that it’s just not true.

Nonetheless, the college rumor mill keeps feeding the same myth. And about a month ago it invaded the University of Illinois, when Miranda Sun collided with a bus on the Urbana-Champaign campus.

“I finally achieved what every single college student in America has dreamed of, yet can only hope will happen to them. That’s right. I got run over by a bus on campus,” Sun wrote in a viral tweet.

“So like do you get free tuition, tho,” one Twitter user asked.

Nope.

Karl Gnadt, managing director of the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, which also oversees university transit, squashed “the myth of free tuition and a big pay day” as nothing but “a fairy tale,” the local news station WCIA 3 reported.

So how and why does this “fairy tale” persist?

Like most legends, there’s a “kernel of truth” buried within, said Elizabeth Tucker, a folklorist at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York system. Tucker, whose book Haunted Halls explores the ghostlore living at institutions of higher learning, said her research suggests that “kernel of truth” derives from a feeling that “colleges and universities truly do care about the well-being of their students. … So if something difficult or tragic happens, then certainly university administrators would do the very best they can to help students feel better.”

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, for instance, did establish a compassionate refund policy in 1991. It remits partial tuition to students who withdraw past the deadline if they experience “compelling circumstances beyond their control,” which can include the death of an immediate family member or other life-threatening conditions. The dean’s office overseeing the student’s program of study evaluates each case individually.

Any refund issued thereafter is just designed to “cushion the blow,” said Christopher Lee, assistant dean in the College of Letters and Science. Lee also said the sheer misfortune of being hit by a bus does not guarantee tuition reimbursement, and emphasized that the university’s policy has no capacity to waive future tuition costs.

Tucker is teaching an honors-level folklore course this semester and recently polled her students to gauge the prevalence of the legend at Binghamton. “I was actually surprised to learn that so many of my students have heard this hit-by-a-bus story and have repeated it themselves,” she said. “There’s a much easier way to get free tuition now,” Tucker said, referring to New York State’s recently established Excelsior Scholarship program, which offers free tuition to in-state students whose families earn up to $125,000 per year.

Sophia Valerino, a native of Syracuse, N.Y., and sophomore at Binghamton, is one of Tucker’s students who knew of the rumor. “It’s mostly been said in a joking manner. Though it’s kind of a dark thing to joke about, honestly,” said Valerino, who has friends at other colleges who’ve heard the same story. “I wouldn’t want to sacrifice personal health for that, though.”

‘I Was Gullible’

But the bus myth isn’t the only iteration of tragedy-begets-reward campus mythology. In 1971 a far more macabre legend caught the future folklorist Simon Bronner’s attention at his freshman orientation: If your roommate takes his or her own life, you’ll get straight A’s.

“I was gullible,” said Bronner, who is now dean of the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. “It seemed credible, and I thought if older students were telling me this, then it must be true.”

Bronner, who examined the origins of that and other folktales in his book Campus Traditions, traced the first mention of that particular legend to the 1960s, “though that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist earlier.” He theorizes that college campuses became breeding grounds for legends of that ilk after the GI Bill spurred the rise of mega-campuses after the Second World War.

As students began to feel more and more like “a small cog in a big wheel,” Bronner said, legends fostered a sense of belonging and created a kind of “cultural guidance” about how to “navigate the increasingly complicated web of rules and policies.”

Good grades or free tuition — with the popularity of the latter rumored prize surging as tuition costs rose — morphed into fictional currency for correcting campus tragedy. Further, as colleges increasingly developed into transition grounds, Bronner said, “legends arise because of this liminal state students find themselves in: between work and home.”

In 1985 the Skidmore College sociologist William Fox surveyed hundreds of students and found that a majority believed that the trauma of losing a roommate to suicide would earn them either perfect grades, a nicer dorm room, or a semester off. Although there’s no evidence that the suicide rule exists in any of those varied formats, its ubiquity has driven the plot of two feature films, Dead Man on Campus and Dead Man’s Curve, both released in 1998.

A string of campus newspapers have, over the years, collectively devoted dozens of pages to debunking this line of thinking, with the Marquette Wire writing in 2013: “To anyone out there hoping that their roommates might meet untimely ends and take the pressure off their student loans, that urban legend is just that: a legend.”

Bronner’s academic career has brought him to colleges in California, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, and suicide-related follies have followed him everywhere. “Very often, the suicide is about somebody who was a straight-A student but couldn’t take the stress of working so hard,” Bronner said. “So it becomes a cautionary tale of, ‘You’re doing fine, don’t work too hard.’”

He’s heard the hit-by-a-bus variant less frequently, correlating its popularity with campus-congestion levels. “Between buses and cars on College Avenue, I can definitely see how this kind of questioning arises,” Bronner said of Penn State’s University Park campus, where 46,270 students were enrolled as of the fall of 2018 and where he first encountered the legend.

“I saw a lot of near misses,” he recalled. It’s impossible to know for sure, but some of those close calls could have been intentional.

About 300 miles to the northeast, in New Haven, Kayla Hoovler said she and some of her fellow Yalies “never look both ways,” only after making sure there are no cars coming, of course.

But if a car is approaching and it starts slowing down while they’re crossing the street, “we’ll say, ‘Maybe he’ll hit the gas.’”

She swears they’re just joking.

Kathryn Palmer is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @kathrynbpalmer, or email her at kathryn.palmer@chronicle.com.