December 14, 2020
The realization for Mike Velin ’06 came over several weeks in 2002. An excellent student in his elementary and early middle school years, school stopped coming as easily when Mike entered eighth grade. “I was getting straight As all the way through middle school, and then all of a sudden, I was getting Ds,” he says. “Something just switched where I wasn’t engaged. I wasn’t happy or passionate anymore.” In response, the Velin family started thinking about Mike’s education as an investment, and recognized that part of his struggles could be attributed to the fact they weren’t investing in Mike’s education as much as they could be. “Going through that experience was very transformative for our family,” he says. “Because in the end we found MPA, and it influenced the rest of my life, the way that I approach my career, my relationships, how I view the world.”
Throughout this process, the Velins pondered their answers to a fundamental question that confronts many prospective families as they consider their options: is a private school worth the significant investment? Before deciding to pay tuition for something that is available for free, families want the assurance that their investment is worthwhile. Your family has likely wondered about such a question as well. So, what is the answer? Is a private school education worth it?
At Mounds Park Academy, we wholeheartedly believe that it is.
While of course there are quantifiable statistics to back up that assertion, MPA’s ACT score (29) and college acceptance rates (90% of students are admitted to their first or second choice school), are good examples, we hear that parents mostly want their children’s lives to be shaped in ways that can never be truly quantified. They want for their children a life full of confidence, inclusion, joy, success and achievement. So to help bring this conversation to life, we spoke live with class of 2006 alum Mike Velin, along with MPA parent Tobi Tanzer and her son, senior Emmett Tanzer-Tragatsch. Together, Mike, Tobi, and Emmett share more about the returns they’ve received from their MPA investment.
Meet Mike, Tobi, and Emmett
Mike Velin’s transition to Mounds Park Academy did in the end propel him to a successful future! He graduated in 2006, holds an undergraduate degree from St. John’s University and an MBA from the University of St. Thomas, and is now an award-winning financial advisor. He and his wife, Ashley Cooper, MPA’s Middle and Upper School counselor, are the parents of a future Panther, Claire. Mike also serves as the chair of the MPA Alumni Association.
Tobi Tanzer is the vice president of integrity and compliance at Health Partners. She holds an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and a J.D. from Boston College. Her son Emmett, class of 2021, joined MPA in eighth grade in 2016.
Emmett is heavily involved in MPA’s yearbook as well as being a peer leader, admission ambassador, boys’ basketball manager, and avid volunteer. Emmett will be attending Tulane University next fall to study architecture.
A Strong Foundation
Mike and Tobi believe strongly that one of MPA’s most concrete returns on investment is a solid foundation before college. Both addressed a common misconception that investing in college education is more important than investing in primary and secondary education. For Mike as a financial advisor, helping his clients understand the groundwork that goes into planning for college is paramount. “I try to help them see that they can’t just think about college as the end-all-be-all. They have make sure there is a foundation of passion, knowledge, skills, talents, and motivations across the board,” he says. “And that starts when you’re in kindergarten, fifth grade, eighth grade. If you don’t have that foundation, the house could just topple over anytime in college. For my parents, if we hadn’t make that shift to MPA, I may not have gotten to college, much less been successful.”
For Tobi, it was also about creating a love of learning before Emmett went to college. “We had just been saving money for college, but we asked ourselves ‘what if college doesn’t interest him?’ So we decided to invest in an education that we knew would lead him to college and ensure that he actually maintained a passion for learning.”
Focused On The Child
Tobi could see MPA’s focus on each child from the moment she set foot on campus at an admission event. “It started with our first event. I saw that these were educators who respected the children. The faculty took an interest in every child, no matter their age, no matter their talent, no matter their abilities,” she said. “When we visited other schools, we saw the same thing that we had experienced at Emmett’s previous school. A focus exclusively on grades, test scores and facilities. There was never talk about my child, or any of the children. I realized from the very beginning that at MPA, children were the focus and that really struck me.”
For Emmett, being at MPA with an increased attention and focus from his teachers buoyed his confidence, showing him early on the value of his family’s investment in his MPA education. “The biggest thing that I’ve seen in myself the past couple of years is confidence. I’ve become really confident in my schoolwork and who I’ve become,” he says. “In eighth grade I was really hesitant. But my teachers encouraged and helped me along the way through freshmen, sophomore, junior and now senior year. The confidence that I have with myself, in my ability to actually do the school work, is not something that I’ve learned, it’s something that I’ve experienced.”
Understanding The Bigger Picture
Making an investment in MPA means participating in a 21st century global education. Mike attributes his now broad worldview to his time at MPA. “This tremendous level of acceptance and tolerance is created at MPA and I have carried that through the rest of my life,” he says. “I credit MPA with the understanding that there’s a lot of different people from a lot of different walks of life, not only overseas and around the whole world, but here in Minnesota. I just know how to engage both in my own community and in the greater community and I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that if I had just continued on the same path that I was on.”
As someone who is constantly seeking out more information, Mike also credits his lifetime love of learning to his MPA education. “Whether it’s from a professional standpoint or from a personal standpoint, I can never have enough knowledge. I’m constantly looking at how to better myself by learning more,” he says. “It’s a level of curiosity where I am always trying to figure something out. I always ask, ‘what else is out there?’ ‘How do I do this?’ ‘How do I resolve that not only on my own, but also within my team?’”
For Emmett, the bigger picture came from leaving a classical education school and joining a progressive school environment at MPA. “At my old school, it was all about jamming facts into our heads and teaching us what to think, not how to think,” he says. “At MPA, they are teaching us not what to think, but the steps and processes to understand the bigger picture. I definitely had to kind of catch up and it wasn’t easy in the beginning, but now, I can take the steps and processes that we use to understand the big picture and I can apply them to my everyday life. It is challenging but it’s definitely been worth it.”
Identifying Values
Tobi emphasizes the importance of matching a family’s investments to their values, and investing in Emmett’s education represented a transformation of her principles. “Coming to MPA felt less about going from, ‘okay, before we didn’t have to pay for education and now we are paying for it’, to, ‘okay, well, we are investing in our child.’” Being the product of, and a big believer in public school herself, it wasn’t always easy for Tobi to justify paying tuition. But with the Emmett, she realized that education was not something just for him to endure, but rather something to for him to enjoy, and that meant changing the priorities of where their family invested.
“How do you justify spending a lot of money for education? You have to make choices. You have to say, okay, well we could take fancy vacations, or we could buy cars more regularly. But again, what do we want for our child?” she says. “There were definitely conversations where I would say, ‘let’s redo the basement.’ And my husband, the voice of reason, would say, ‘well, we have a tuition to pay.’ We had to think much more carefully about how frequently we replaced our car, and I’ll admit that I like my clothes and my clothes purchases. So it was a question of do I go with the fleeting joy of a shopping trip or continue investing in my son? And it really wasn’t a choice. Because once we were at MPA, we couldn’t imagine not being here.”
The Return On Investment
Speaking with Mike, Tobi and Emmett, it’s clear how much return they’ve seen on their investment in education. Tobi feels particularly strongly that MPA was worth it for her son. “MPA is part of who Emmett is. He really shines. For us, it’s about the confidence in being who you are, regardless of where your path takes you. MPA allows kids to shine and feel great about what they contribute,” she says. “This should be the kind of education every child receives. Every child deserves this.”
