Class and College

Elevating the unqualified while cutting the able down to size creates social equity. President Johnson's "Great Society" ended poverty by flensing the productive into survival by revolving credit while their income was redistributed to the deserving. The NINJA (no income, no job or assets) mortgage put every deserving family into the home it had a right to own. The entire planet blossomed into perpetual prosperity.

Every A or B student must compassionately surrender grade points to D and F students to fulfill the social contract. An obvious shortcut is diversity matriculation wherein discriminatory students are ab initio excluded from stealing the rights of the Officially Sad.

Universal opportunity creates pandemic poverty because only the productive will gain assets. Trusting national policy to social advocacy is like boarding your dog at a taxidermist. Sure, you'll get it back.

The comments on Thoreau's post suggest that if we are going to require file clerk types to have a university degree, we should make low-cost (or even free) university education available to all. I don't think that is as good as making sure there are viable options for high school grads who do not continue to college. Some people are not suited for college life. And yes, some of those who are not suited for college life are trust fund babies.

The present system legitimizes a class system, but not for the reason Thoreau's friend gives. It legitimizes a class system by requiring those who wish to become college educated to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, either from money on hand or by taking out loans. (A lucky few get scholarships, but not enough to make a material difference.) Only the upper and upper-middle class have anywhere close to enough money these days to avoid loans. The rest have to spend much of their 20s (and 30s if they opt for grad school) repaying those loans instead of saving/investing that money for the future. In this economy, I suspect many recent graduates and current undergraduates will never repay those loans, which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy--that makes the effects of personal economic failure more severe for ordinary people than for the rich kids.

completely agree with that snippet. the attitude that everyone should have the opportunity to achieve no matter how many times they're failed is a noble one, but get real:

-the return on your effort and time for that qualification goes down with each failure.

-some employees are likely to devalue your qualification if you failed at one point. they shouldn't, but do.

-a socially disadvantaged students have to pay more in relation to their financial wealth, social wealth and time for an education.

-a dollar is worth more to someone with social/economic support than to someone without social/economic support.

this won't be popular, but this is not helped by higher education who salesman like push their product to everyone, causing students to get qualifications at a grade which is over bought in our society.

accumulative advantage happens no matter what, it sucks, i hate it, i despise it, but i don't know a solution.

Wait you've been in this show for how long and you're just now realizing education as the great equalizer is a load of smelly manure? How. Odd.

College is a great and wonderful thing. But the fair-world in which hard work, self-improvement and delayed gratification always pay off is not identical to the world we live in. There are many reasons to justify college, a means by which hard working individuals can achieve economic success is not one of the more accurate ones.

If you really want a perspective on class and higher ed, you should read what Dr. Crazy has written on the subject.
http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/
The posts aren't tagged, so you have to go looking around for suitable titles, but she does come at it from the perspective of a professor who comes from a working class family. First to go to college, IIRC, not to mention earn a PhD and become a newly tenured professor at a "regional comprehensive" where there are a fair number of first-in-family students like herself.

My perspective (Grandfather was first-in-family and the vast majority of first- or second-degree relatives have a college degree with only one that I think never attended college) is quite different.

What I see at this CC, however, is that no one in their right mind would hire someone with a HS diploma to be a file clerk. Even the middle tier of HS grads, the ones that come to our CC, show serious deficiencies that would affect the ability to put the right file in the right place. I can't imagine what the rest are like. The reason "some college" shows up as a major indicator of improved earnings is likely because just taking our remedial courses gives them a leg up on a regular HS grad.

Unlike Europe, Class in the USA is determined almost completely by 4 parameters: Education, Income, Profession, and Wealth.

I've taught somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 students since 1973 in colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, Art schools, corporations, government agencies, and adults 60-95 through "The center for the Study of the Future" and Elderhostel. This is a profession at the core of civilization itself, but as poorly monetized for content creators as books or music.

I predict the Bill Gates Microsoft Campus of Harvard, a Google Campus of MIT, a Facebook Campus of Caltech, and the Rudy Rucker Institute of Transrealism at San Jose State.

Emmy, once the book hits the stores, is a step closer to being a Writer-in-Residence, albeit she needs a degree to be a Professor as such.

One thing that it does suggest, though, particularly taking the original remark together with the first comment, is that the focus of education reform ought to be on improving the quality of public high school education, and trying to ensure that people with a high school education can make a good life for themselves.

I think I'd make that K-12, rather than just high school. Certainly, public high school education needs work, but part of that (a large part in my view), is making sure that students have the background they need by the time they get there.

Our vocational education system needs work. College has become the only credential that matters for a wide variety of jobs that you don't really need a college education for. Not everyone is interested in or needs the general education requirements. We don't have serious vocational education that teaches real skills for serious jobs.

It's not really so much what you actually learned in college that gives someone the earning bump, but the degree. If it was what you learned was most important, the penalty for being a few credits short wouldn't be so high. I can guarantee that it is not anything I learned in my last trimester of college contentwise that made me especially employable. (Piano lessons, Contemporary American Short Stories, Seminar in Political Economy (the fluffiest class ever) and Parties, Interest Groups, and Elections).

The value of the degree is more that by actually finishing the degree I showed I could navigate an institution, follow directions, and put up with a certain amount of institutional arbitrariness (I had to pass a swim test to graduate and take 4 noncredit PE classes.) I also had clearly managed to fill out all the right forms and do things that I had to that I didn't want to do. (Spanish IV and the Arts Requirement for instance)

I was no more qualified to do something like manage a retail store (which in most cases requires a college degree)at the end of those four years than I was at the beginning. However, earning that degree was a proxy for having certain skills because people with those skills generally go to college and finish.

A four year degree is a pretty expensive and time consuming way of sorting for skills like basic critical thinking, the ability to follow directions, the ability to function in a large organization, and the responsibility to do what you have to do.

Not everyone enjoys or is cut out for many of the general education requirements required for a four year degree and many of them have little relevance to what they want to do. However, college for everyone has meant that the easiest way to pick out people with skills not so much related to the education, but the skills needed to succeed in college, is to hire people who graduated from college.

Better K-12 education and solid, respected post-high school vocational/technical/career focused education paths would provide more options to more people. Kids from the middle class and above go to college because that is the only socially acceptable option. Many of the might prefer to have skipped lots of things they weren't interested in and won't ever use if they could have. How many people just marking time do those of you who teach have to teach?

That's not to say that I don't support making sure that everyone who wants to has the option to go to college. I have a BA in political science from a top ten liberal arts college. I loved it. It was an incredible, life enriching experience that everyone who wants to should have the chance to get. I probably value the things I don't use in my work life more than the stuff in my major. For instance, I'm a policy analyst who reads a physics blog. :-)

We've made college the only choice on the road to a middle class or higher life without an especially good reason.

A four year degree is a pretty expensive and time consuming way of sorting for skills like basic critical thinking, the ability to follow directions, the ability to function in a large organization, and the responsibility to do what you have to do.

This used to be the function of high school.

It's a measure of how badly some high schools have failed that nobody considers a high school diploma an actual measure of those skills, even considering how many people never finish high school.