My grades were all over the map in high school. Many were very good but in some subjects like science and math, I was a perpetual C student. Biology was the only science I got a B in without serious effort. I just really liked it. Overall my average in high school was about 83-84.
I still managed to get into my first choice college in 1998 through a combination of a decent amount of good grades, excellent board scores, recommendations, and extracurricular activities.
I don't think this would happen today. The competition is way too select. My top-tier college can probably fill their class-size several times. IIRC someone from Harvard admissions said they can easily make 5-6 Harvards every year.
Why is this bad? What is wrong or horrible about giving young people the chance of having some kind of pseudo-adult/emerging adulthood period where they can explore a bit, have fun in the city (or whereever), do cool and interesting jobs, etc?
This used to only be the provenance of the very rich (William S. Burroughs was a trust fund kid and so were many other avant-garde bohemian artists) or the truly misfit, the kind of person who could never hold a 9-5 job if their life depended on it. I think it is a sign of a wealthy society that allows many people to have wastrel periods and turn out okay and do the marriage and kid thing later in life. We live much longer now. Why does this mean more decades need to be dedicated to work and conservative-vision adult things?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the period of 18-29 being about exploring.
Why is this bad? What is wrong or horrible about giving young people the chance of having some kind of pseudo-adult/emerging adulthood period where they can explore a bit, have fun in the city (or whereever), do cool and interesting jobs, etc?
This used to only be the provenance of the very rich (William S. Burroughs was a trust fund kid and so were many other avant-garde bohemian artists) or the truly misfit, the kind of person who could never hold a 9-5 job if their life depended on it. I think it is a sign of a wealthy society that allows many people to have wastrel periods and turn out okay and do the marriage and kid thing later in life. We live much longer now. Why does this mean more decades need to be dedicated to work and conservative-vision adult things?
I don't think there is anything wrong with the period of 18-29 being about exploring.
"1. These kids are growing up in a society that has pushed “adulthood” somewhere back into your mid to late 20s, maybe even early 30s, making them even more unprepared for that first step to quasi-adulthood."
Probably true but how do you change this. I've seen a lot of articles in the past few years (often in center-right publications but sometimes in center-left ones) bemoaning this change. The articles often bemoan the fact that it is no longer possible or probable for young people (largely men) to have a good-paying factory/real he-man job out of college and also to have kids and house by their mid-20s. A permanent job/career, mortgage, marriage, and kids being considered the real hallmarkers of adult life.
These articles strike me as hypocritical for two reasons:
1. They are often published by magazines or think tanks that played a heavy role in the destruction of well-paid blue collar labor. Usually through a lot of drumbeating for "deregulation, deregulation, deregulation."
2. The articles are often written by the kind of paradoxical conservative who epouses traditional values while living the lifestyle that they decry. Mainly the East Coast, "elitist", professional class of working hard on education and job and then having kids later in life, once settled in a professional career.
For better or for worse, we have created an economy that pushes adulthood back to your 20s and 30s. We did this through policies that helped encourage a post-Industrial, high knowledge, information technology. This means that the best hope for a good job or a chance at a middle-class and above lifestyle is through education and internships. Someone had to pay their dues for a long time before having a decent life. In many ways it makes more sense for people to wait until they have been working for a while and on a good trajectory before they have kids. Why would someone want to plan having kids while still in a residency that requires 80 plus hours a week at work including overnight shifts?
'If they miss a deadline, it’s often (but certainly not always) because life rained down some travesty on them, not because nobody ever taught them that they need to meet deadlines. OTOH, the more advantaged kids are more likely to be all “What do you mean the deadline isn’t negotiable?”'
True but from what I've read, the poor expect these travesties more often and create a support network that also perversely acts like an unbreakable cycle that keeps them in poverty. Let's say Bob works as a meat-packer and can be easily sacked for not showing up to work. Bob has a friend named Fred whose car is in the shop. Fred calls Bob up one day and says "I need you to take me to the emergency room. I think my appendix burst". Bob was getting ready to leave for work and will be fired if he does not show up. From the studies I've read, Bob is likely to take Fred to the Hospital and risk getting fired because he knows he can be in Fred's shoes one day.
In my white-collar world, I don't know if any of my friends will not show up for work if I have a medical emergency like a burst appendix. However, I think my employer is likely to be understanding and not fire me for my medical emergency. And I am just a contract attorney working on a long project, not a full associate. Working class folks do not often have that luxury of thought.
"Apparently working in high school is something that a lot of the more advantaged kids don’t do, so they don’t get those experiences. When I see white suburban kids with professional parents displaying all of the helplessness and cluelessness that you describe above, I don’t think we can blame it all on class and let our hearts start bleeding like some of my colleagues do."
I did not work at high school at all. Neither did many of my classmates who fit your description. Nor did I have a work-study job in college. Though I did work during the summers between semesters of college and during my Masters program. My parents did not want me to have a typical high school job like working at a record store. They thought there would be more value in me studying and doing summer programs at a university where we took college level courses. I think they were right. Though for some people, I think working in high school can give them more direction.
The problem with these debates is that it often seems that everyone (myself included) can only come up with a one-size fits all solution. This can be sending everyone to the Marines, or requiring everyone to do a year or two of backbreaking labor right after high school, or my solution of keeping things as is but having more guidance/advocacy for poor students.
I think kids from well-to do backgrounds can be just as directionless because they are used to their parents micro-managing their lives and then get to university and need to do it for themselves and this a shock.
I learned a lesson like this the hard way during my sophomore year. A class had a term paper. I took out all my books, got approval for subject matter, and then it just escaped my mind until the day it was due. I had no idea how this happened but I woke up and thought Oh Fuck!!!
I scrambled to turn in a horrible piece of writing that got a D and turned my B plus in the class into a B minus. I was too ashamed to write to the professor and tell him what happened and to beg for mercy/getting an incomplete. I was too ashamed to tell my parents what happened and ask for advice on what to do.
This hasn't happened since and will hopefully (knocks wood) ever happen for something like a court filing. But I learned the hard way.
"The study found that the vast majority of graduates had to be away from their university for an average of fifteen years before they’d even consider giving a dime to the place. Reasons cited? It took them that long to get over the bad feelings about how they had been treated – the contempt, lack of courtesy, pure tuition-fodder with no obligations on the university’s side. And these were the people who graduated!"
I feel this way about my Masters program but not my undergrad and law schools. I loved my undergrad and law schools. I wonder if this is another advantage that small and/or elite institutions have over large universities. They have the resources to make the system seem more humane and individualized and this gives them even more resources from alumni giving.
Vassar was a small school but they make sure that I know "we still think about you" through alumni programs, happy hours, networking events, etc. And I am 3000 miles away from the university. Even large elite universities like Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Penn, know how to do this.
Those schools also benefit because most of their students really want to go there especially the smaller ones. You don't pick a school like Vassar, Swarthmore, Colby, Amherst, etc unless you know it is really for you. Many state universities are really great schools but I imagine they also have a lot of students who pick them more for tuition than a desire to attend.
I agree and someone (or really a lot of people) need to break the cycle but we don't seem very good at picking the right examples.
Everyone likes to point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as success stories for being college drop-outs but those were two extraordinary examples. Both had the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. They also came from advantageous backgrounds. Gates Senior was one of the most respected corporate lawyer's in Seattle, possibly in the nation. I think his mom served on IBM's board.
Or people talk about Peter Thiel and his plans to give grants to people if they promise not to attend university but Thiel is selecting geniuses in math and science, not ordinary kids or even somewhat above-average kids. He is picking people who make everyone hear seem like lag-behinds and this is a very well-educated crowd.
Perhaps a tax-credit towards apprenticeship can work. Though credentialism is probably here to stay largely. You might see fewer people try to get credentials (hence the drop in law school applications) but I don't think employers are going to follow the lead.
"This has huge (SES) class implications. I am a believer that it’s absolutely for the best if you can send your kid to college without working and living on campus. I am uncomfortable requiring that, though, because what’s ideal for some people is a dealbreaker for other people."
I hear you. However as far as I know, it is very common for many colleges to require students to live on campus during their freshman year at least. Though I think colleges/universities can and should give out more financial aid than they do. IIRC studies also show that going away and staying on campus is more likely to make them graduate on-time or even graduate. Basically, a poor student from Detroit has a much better chance of graduation if they attend Michigan State or U-Michigan than Wayne State in Detroit.
"The most important factor isn’t total enrollment but rather how many warehouse classes you have, general faculty-to-student ratios, and so on."
Good point but my experience probably says that Emory would have a lot of warehouse classes ;)
That makes sense to a certain extent but I still think it is a chicken and egg problem. I've certainly only lived in areas where college and advanced degrees are not hard to come by.
Yes and you force them to live in the dorms freshman year as well.
"I’m not sure how you fix that."
Me neither.
"I went to a huge state university. I’d imagine that this sort of thing is much more likely to be accomplished at a smaller school. Which kind of makes me surprised that it was an issue at Emory. That’s exactly the sort of school I would expect to get it right."
According to wikipedia, Emory has nearly 14,000 students. Around 7400 are undergraduates. This is not large compared to Michigan or Ohio State but still seems like a huge beast compared to my undergrad alma mater. We had around 2500 students and all were undergrads. That is the kind of school that can get the hands on approach right. Though the liberal-arts experience is not for everyone.
Admitedly my undergrad experience makes it hard for me to understand the whole education debate in this country. I went to a school without majors like business, engineering, accounting, fashion merchandise, etc. For "practical" majors you were either econ, a pure science (bio, chem, physics), or computer science. The school was filled with people who were looking for educations and not just a degree to get you a job. We were a precocious lot and as you write below, the type of students who would be tracked towards college.
I agree with your last paragraph but the problem is that I think this will require a lot of government action that will make a lot of people very nervous. The government action would be telling a bunch of private employers that for a bunch of jobs (and they will need to be decent jobs) is that they cannot discriminate based on education. There are a lot of jobs where the ER says "BA required" even though this is not the case. The Government is going to need to disallow that.
The other part might be a bit of a force march of people into plummer and electrician apprenticeships.
I think it would be more ethical for schools to point these out to students and to do so well in advance of financial aid forms and the like.
My law school has two orientations. One was for everyone and then there was a separate one earlier in the summer that was for kids (usually first in their family to graduate from college types) to give them a little extra boost. It also came with fairly regular meetings during 1L year. The proactive response seems to have largely worked. Everyone or almost everyone I knew in that program graduated on-time and did not flunk out after 1L year.
I grew up in a town where there was the opposite issue, we did not have a vocational track. The Home Ec classrooms were turned into science labs during my senior year (1997-1998) because no one signed up to take Home Ec for years. There were some traditional tech/car shop classes but only a small number of students took those.
How about people who just need advocates to help them navigate the system?
My hunch is that for the woman in the article, the one who dropped out of Emory is that it was not her intellect that held her back but that the system was alien to her and her family. I think she would have done fine if she had an advocate on her behalf. Someone who could review financial aid forms and the like and then check up and argue if Emory fucked up.
Is this patnernalism? Perhaps but plenty of middle-class and above kids have parents who advocate on their behalf to university administrators, why not find a system that provides similar support to the poor.
Excellent post. I have a hard time with this issue because I grew up in a suburb where most of the parents had college or advanced degrees and as far as I can tell most of my classmates have done the same. We were the top 1 or 10 percent in this regard. My college GPA was all over the map but I graduated in four years and then was able to do a Masters and Law Degree in the requisite amount of time as well.
"They are rudderless. Many seem to have no idea why they are in college. I often ask this of students at the beginning of the semester. They really seem to have no clue. It’s not that they are there for the goal of a liberal arts education in itself and are not yet career-focused. That is a perfectly legitimate goal. They literally have no fishing clue why they are there"
This is true and again hard for me to relate to. I feel like many classmates from high school knew why we were there and what was expected of us. This includes those who wanted a serious education and those who knew from day one that they were heading to law, med, or business school. What's the solution though? How do we give young kids aim? I'm not a fan of the right-wing blowhards who just want to send everyone to the Marines and this will teach them a sense of purpose. It might work for some but the leftie in me suspects that many will just become infantry-runts and finish their service with no real skills learned. I am skeptical of the Be all You can be campaign.
This is sad to me as someone who does believe in a liberals art education but it is untenable to have 18 year olds and their family study Dante, The Tale of Genji, and Plato just to get an accounting degree. Or worse to drop out with a lot of debt and no degree at all like the women in the article.
I think this is another Sailing Away to Irrelevance moment for the GOP and would love to see Tod take on the NRA as part of the boondoogle.
Salon.com noted that Rush Limbaugh called Wayne LaPierre, the "adult" in the room on gun control.
Though I disagree with one of your assertions but it could reflect my Pauline Kael problem. I do not think his arguments will be popular among non-gun owners. All of my friends are talking about how absurd and brutal and horrible the statements are. Why do you think non-gun owners will love them?
Most Americans support stronger gun regulations. However, there are very few pro-gun control people for whom it is a single issue. However, there are a lot of anti-gun control people for whom it is a single issue when coming to vote for a candidate or not.
I will vote for a candidate who is less strict on guns than I want if I think he or she is good on other issues that are important to me. Many gun rights people would not do otherwise. They won't vote for the pro-gun control candidate even if they agree with the candidate on everything else.
I think there is a decent amount of evidence in evolutionary psychology to show that people are hierachical by nature. It is not an accident that we form some kind of hierarchy in our cultures and societies but by design.
On “What I Wish My Students Knew”
The post to Damon was meant to apply to you.
"
Sorry. My response was meant to go to Kim. Not you.
"
I think this is changing.
My grades were all over the map in high school. Many were very good but in some subjects like science and math, I was a perpetual C student. Biology was the only science I got a B in without serious effort. I just really liked it. Overall my average in high school was about 83-84.
I still managed to get into my first choice college in 1998 through a combination of a decent amount of good grades, excellent board scores, recommendations, and extracurricular activities.
I don't think this would happen today. The competition is way too select. My top-tier college can probably fill their class-size several times. IIRC someone from Harvard admissions said they can easily make 5-6 Harvards every year.
"
Also and repeated from below:
Going back to the ruddlerless.
Why is this bad? What is wrong or horrible about giving young people the chance of having some kind of pseudo-adult/emerging adulthood period where they can explore a bit, have fun in the city (or whereever), do cool and interesting jobs, etc?
This used to only be the provenance of the very rich (William S. Burroughs was a trust fund kid and so were many other avant-garde bohemian artists) or the truly misfit, the kind of person who could never hold a 9-5 job if their life depended on it. I think it is a sign of a wealthy society that allows many people to have wastrel periods and turn out okay and do the marriage and kid thing later in life. We live much longer now. Why does this mean more decades need to be dedicated to work and conservative-vision adult things?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the period of 18-29 being about exploring.
"
Going back to the ruddlerless.
Why is this bad? What is wrong or horrible about giving young people the chance of having some kind of pseudo-adult/emerging adulthood period where they can explore a bit, have fun in the city (or whereever), do cool and interesting jobs, etc?
This used to only be the provenance of the very rich (William S. Burroughs was a trust fund kid and so were many other avant-garde bohemian artists) or the truly misfit, the kind of person who could never hold a 9-5 job if their life depended on it. I think it is a sign of a wealthy society that allows many people to have wastrel periods and turn out okay and do the marriage and kid thing later in life. We live much longer now. Why does this mean more decades need to be dedicated to work and conservative-vision adult things?
I don't think there is anything wrong with the period of 18-29 being about exploring.
"
"1. These kids are growing up in a society that has pushed “adulthood” somewhere back into your mid to late 20s, maybe even early 30s, making them even more unprepared for that first step to quasi-adulthood."
Probably true but how do you change this. I've seen a lot of articles in the past few years (often in center-right publications but sometimes in center-left ones) bemoaning this change. The articles often bemoan the fact that it is no longer possible or probable for young people (largely men) to have a good-paying factory/real he-man job out of college and also to have kids and house by their mid-20s. A permanent job/career, mortgage, marriage, and kids being considered the real hallmarkers of adult life.
These articles strike me as hypocritical for two reasons:
1. They are often published by magazines or think tanks that played a heavy role in the destruction of well-paid blue collar labor. Usually through a lot of drumbeating for "deregulation, deregulation, deregulation."
2. The articles are often written by the kind of paradoxical conservative who epouses traditional values while living the lifestyle that they decry. Mainly the East Coast, "elitist", professional class of working hard on education and job and then having kids later in life, once settled in a professional career.
For better or for worse, we have created an economy that pushes adulthood back to your 20s and 30s. We did this through policies that helped encourage a post-Industrial, high knowledge, information technology. This means that the best hope for a good job or a chance at a middle-class and above lifestyle is through education and internships. Someone had to pay their dues for a long time before having a decent life. In many ways it makes more sense for people to wait until they have been working for a while and on a good trajectory before they have kids. Why would someone want to plan having kids while still in a residency that requires 80 plus hours a week at work including overnight shifts?
"
'If they miss a deadline, it’s often (but certainly not always) because life rained down some travesty on them, not because nobody ever taught them that they need to meet deadlines. OTOH, the more advantaged kids are more likely to be all “What do you mean the deadline isn’t negotiable?”'
True but from what I've read, the poor expect these travesties more often and create a support network that also perversely acts like an unbreakable cycle that keeps them in poverty. Let's say Bob works as a meat-packer and can be easily sacked for not showing up to work. Bob has a friend named Fred whose car is in the shop. Fred calls Bob up one day and says "I need you to take me to the emergency room. I think my appendix burst". Bob was getting ready to leave for work and will be fired if he does not show up. From the studies I've read, Bob is likely to take Fred to the Hospital and risk getting fired because he knows he can be in Fred's shoes one day.
In my white-collar world, I don't know if any of my friends will not show up for work if I have a medical emergency like a burst appendix. However, I think my employer is likely to be understanding and not fire me for my medical emergency. And I am just a contract attorney working on a long project, not a full associate. Working class folks do not often have that luxury of thought.
"Apparently working in high school is something that a lot of the more advantaged kids don’t do, so they don’t get those experiences. When I see white suburban kids with professional parents displaying all of the helplessness and cluelessness that you describe above, I don’t think we can blame it all on class and let our hearts start bleeding like some of my colleagues do."
I did not work at high school at all. Neither did many of my classmates who fit your description. Nor did I have a work-study job in college. Though I did work during the summers between semesters of college and during my Masters program. My parents did not want me to have a typical high school job like working at a record store. They thought there would be more value in me studying and doing summer programs at a university where we took college level courses. I think they were right. Though for some people, I think working in high school can give them more direction.
The problem with these debates is that it often seems that everyone (myself included) can only come up with a one-size fits all solution. This can be sending everyone to the Marines, or requiring everyone to do a year or two of backbreaking labor right after high school, or my solution of keeping things as is but having more guidance/advocacy for poor students.
"
I think kids from well-to do backgrounds can be just as directionless because they are used to their parents micro-managing their lives and then get to university and need to do it for themselves and this a shock.
I learned a lesson like this the hard way during my sophomore year. A class had a term paper. I took out all my books, got approval for subject matter, and then it just escaped my mind until the day it was due. I had no idea how this happened but I woke up and thought Oh Fuck!!!
I scrambled to turn in a horrible piece of writing that got a D and turned my B plus in the class into a B minus. I was too ashamed to write to the professor and tell him what happened and to beg for mercy/getting an incomplete. I was too ashamed to tell my parents what happened and ask for advice on what to do.
This hasn't happened since and will hopefully (knocks wood) ever happen for something like a court filing. But I learned the hard way.
"
"The study found that the vast majority of graduates had to be away from their university for an average of fifteen years before they’d even consider giving a dime to the place. Reasons cited? It took them that long to get over the bad feelings about how they had been treated – the contempt, lack of courtesy, pure tuition-fodder with no obligations on the university’s side. And these were the people who graduated!"
I feel this way about my Masters program but not my undergrad and law schools. I loved my undergrad and law schools. I wonder if this is another advantage that small and/or elite institutions have over large universities. They have the resources to make the system seem more humane and individualized and this gives them even more resources from alumni giving.
Vassar was a small school but they make sure that I know "we still think about you" through alumni programs, happy hours, networking events, etc. And I am 3000 miles away from the university. Even large elite universities like Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Penn, know how to do this.
Those schools also benefit because most of their students really want to go there especially the smaller ones. You don't pick a school like Vassar, Swarthmore, Colby, Amherst, etc unless you know it is really for you. Many state universities are really great schools but I imagine they also have a lot of students who pick them more for tuition than a desire to attend.
"
I agree and someone (or really a lot of people) need to break the cycle but we don't seem very good at picking the right examples.
Everyone likes to point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as success stories for being college drop-outs but those were two extraordinary examples. Both had the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. They also came from advantageous backgrounds. Gates Senior was one of the most respected corporate lawyer's in Seattle, possibly in the nation. I think his mom served on IBM's board.
Or people talk about Peter Thiel and his plans to give grants to people if they promise not to attend university but Thiel is selecting geniuses in math and science, not ordinary kids or even somewhat above-average kids. He is picking people who make everyone hear seem like lag-behinds and this is a very well-educated crowd.
Perhaps a tax-credit towards apprenticeship can work. Though credentialism is probably here to stay largely. You might see fewer people try to get credentials (hence the drop in law school applications) but I don't think employers are going to follow the lead.
"
"This has huge (SES) class implications. I am a believer that it’s absolutely for the best if you can send your kid to college without working and living on campus. I am uncomfortable requiring that, though, because what’s ideal for some people is a dealbreaker for other people."
I hear you. However as far as I know, it is very common for many colleges to require students to live on campus during their freshman year at least. Though I think colleges/universities can and should give out more financial aid than they do. IIRC studies also show that going away and staying on campus is more likely to make them graduate on-time or even graduate. Basically, a poor student from Detroit has a much better chance of graduation if they attend Michigan State or U-Michigan than Wayne State in Detroit.
"The most important factor isn’t total enrollment but rather how many warehouse classes you have, general faculty-to-student ratios, and so on."
Good point but my experience probably says that Emory would have a lot of warehouse classes ;)
"
That makes sense to a certain extent but I still think it is a chicken and egg problem. I've certainly only lived in areas where college and advanced degrees are not hard to come by.
"
"Do you force kids to go to orientation?"
Yes and you force them to live in the dorms freshman year as well.
"I’m not sure how you fix that."
Me neither.
"I went to a huge state university. I’d imagine that this sort of thing is much more likely to be accomplished at a smaller school. Which kind of makes me surprised that it was an issue at Emory. That’s exactly the sort of school I would expect to get it right."
According to wikipedia, Emory has nearly 14,000 students. Around 7400 are undergraduates. This is not large compared to Michigan or Ohio State but still seems like a huge beast compared to my undergrad alma mater. We had around 2500 students and all were undergrads. That is the kind of school that can get the hands on approach right. Though the liberal-arts experience is not for everyone.
Admitedly my undergrad experience makes it hard for me to understand the whole education debate in this country. I went to a school without majors like business, engineering, accounting, fashion merchandise, etc. For "practical" majors you were either econ, a pure science (bio, chem, physics), or computer science. The school was filled with people who were looking for educations and not just a degree to get you a job. We were a precocious lot and as you write below, the type of students who would be tracked towards college.
"
I agree with your last paragraph but the problem is that I think this will require a lot of government action that will make a lot of people very nervous. The government action would be telling a bunch of private employers that for a bunch of jobs (and they will need to be decent jobs) is that they cannot discriminate based on education. There are a lot of jobs where the ER says "BA required" even though this is not the case. The Government is going to need to disallow that.
The other part might be a bit of a force march of people into plummer and electrician apprenticeships.
"
That sounds a lot like mine as well but it is interesting to note the almost complete lack of a vocational track.
"
I think it would be more ethical for schools to point these out to students and to do so well in advance of financial aid forms and the like.
My law school has two orientations. One was for everyone and then there was a separate one earlier in the summer that was for kids (usually first in their family to graduate from college types) to give them a little extra boost. It also came with fairly regular meetings during 1L year. The proactive response seems to have largely worked. Everyone or almost everyone I knew in that program graduated on-time and did not flunk out after 1L year.
"
Did your kids go to the same high school as you?
I grew up in a town where there was the opposite issue, we did not have a vocational track. The Home Ec classrooms were turned into science labs during my senior year (1997-1998) because no one signed up to take Home Ec for years. There were some traditional tech/car shop classes but only a small number of students took those.
"
How about people who just need advocates to help them navigate the system?
My hunch is that for the woman in the article, the one who dropped out of Emory is that it was not her intellect that held her back but that the system was alien to her and her family. I think she would have done fine if she had an advocate on her behalf. Someone who could review financial aid forms and the like and then check up and argue if Emory fucked up.
Is this patnernalism? Perhaps but plenty of middle-class and above kids have parents who advocate on their behalf to university administrators, why not find a system that provides similar support to the poor.
"
Excellent post. I have a hard time with this issue because I grew up in a suburb where most of the parents had college or advanced degrees and as far as I can tell most of my classmates have done the same. We were the top 1 or 10 percent in this regard. My college GPA was all over the map but I graduated in four years and then was able to do a Masters and Law Degree in the requisite amount of time as well.
"They are rudderless. Many seem to have no idea why they are in college. I often ask this of students at the beginning of the semester. They really seem to have no clue. It’s not that they are there for the goal of a liberal arts education in itself and are not yet career-focused. That is a perfectly legitimate goal. They literally have no fishing clue why they are there"
This is true and again hard for me to relate to. I feel like many classmates from high school knew why we were there and what was expected of us. This includes those who wanted a serious education and those who knew from day one that they were heading to law, med, or business school. What's the solution though? How do we give young kids aim? I'm not a fan of the right-wing blowhards who just want to send everyone to the Marines and this will teach them a sense of purpose. It might work for some but the leftie in me suspects that many will just become infantry-runts and finish their service with no real skills learned. I am skeptical of the Be all You can be campaign.
This is sad to me as someone who does believe in a liberals art education but it is untenable to have 18 year olds and their family study Dante, The Tale of Genji, and Plato just to get an accounting degree. Or worse to drop out with a lot of debt and no degree at all like the women in the article.
On “Today”
I admire people who can listen to Rush when they don't agree with him. It always makes me feel hypertension.
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I think this is another Sailing Away to Irrelevance moment for the GOP and would love to see Tod take on the NRA as part of the boondoogle.
Salon.com noted that Rush Limbaugh called Wayne LaPierre, the "adult" in the room on gun control.
Though I disagree with one of your assertions but it could reflect my Pauline Kael problem. I do not think his arguments will be popular among non-gun owners. All of my friends are talking about how absurd and brutal and horrible the statements are. Why do you think non-gun owners will love them?
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Most Americans support stronger gun regulations. However, there are very few pro-gun control people for whom it is a single issue. However, there are a lot of anti-gun control people for whom it is a single issue when coming to vote for a candidate or not.
I will vote for a candidate who is less strict on guns than I want if I think he or she is good on other issues that are important to me. Many gun rights people would not do otherwise. They won't vote for the pro-gun control candidate even if they agree with the candidate on everything else.
On “January 3rd”
A Constitutional Crisis seems to be the nation's anniversary gift to you.
On “Arkansas Town Declares Quasi-Martial Law to Fight Property Crime”
I think there is a decent amount of evidence in evolutionary psychology to show that people are hierachical by nature. It is not an accident that we form some kind of hierarchy in our cultures and societies but by design.
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I don't disagree with you either. I almost commented on TNC's blog that a lot of people do seem to want it.
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