# The College Crisis No Christian Parent Can Afford to Ignore

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/refining-rhetoric-with-robert-bortins-5054945/the-college-crisis-no-christian-parent-can-afford-to-ignore
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/refining-rhetoric-with-robert-bortins-5054945/the-college-crisis-no-christian-parent-can-afford-to-ignore.md
Podcast: [Refining Rhetoric with Robert Bortins](https://stenobird.com/podcast/refining-rhetoric-with-robert-bortins-5054945)
Published: 2026-04-15T20:35:00+00:00
Episode link: https://f5cb5cc3-2fc4-4efd-b324-efc0ff5dd1de.libsyn.com/the-college-crisis-no-christian-parent-can-afford-to-ignore
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/f5cb5cc3-2fc4-4efd-b324-efc0ff5dd1de/RR_Sattler_College.mp3?dest-id=3314576
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/refining-rhetoric-with-robert-bortins-5054945/episodes/the-college-crisis-no-christian-parent-can-afford-to-ignore
Duration seconds: 3224

## Resource

What happens to your child's faith when they leave home for college? On this episode of Refining Rhetoric , host Robert Bortins sits down with Dr. Finny Kuruvilla — Harvard MD, MIT engineer, homeschool dad of nine, and founder of Sattler College — to discuss the crisis in Christian higher education and why he built a tuition-free, classical Christian college in downtown Boston. From the iron law of discipleship to Greek and Hebrew in the original languages, this conversation is essential listening for any homeschool family thinking about what comes after graduation. Dr. Finny Kuruvilla grew up in Southern California in the public school system — and what he saw there shaped everything that came after. Two things stayed with him: the exposure to harmful content and ideas during those formative years, and the creeping shift from caring what his parents thought to caring what his peers thought. When he and his wife Laura started having children, they were determined to reverse that dynamic. Today they homeschool nine children in Boston, from college age down to nine months old. The conversation opens with Dr. Kuruvilla's counter-cultural view of children as assets rather than liabilities — a biblical recovery of the idea that children are a heritage from the Lord, not a threat to the rainforest. His older kids run a snow shoveling and lawn raking business. The family's goal is human flourishing, not the accumulation of experiences that require both parents to work full time. From there, Robert draws him into the crisis he observed from the inside: seven years as a resident advisor at Harvard, watching bright young Christians have their faith "crash and burn" under the weight of an environment where 99% of faculty would not identify as born-again. The official statistic be…

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