Posted on 12/24/2012 8:17:55 AM PST by pabianice
GALVESTON, Tex. — Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.
“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor.
Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O’Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to “get off the island” — escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston. Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death. They stuck together so much that a tutor called them the “triplets.”
Low-income strivers face uphill climbs, especially at Ball High School, where a third of the girls’ class failed to graduate on schedule. But by the time the triplets donned mortarboards in the class of 2008, their story seemed to validate the promise of education as the great equalizer.
Angelica, a daughter of a struggling Mexican immigrant, was headed to Emory University. Bianca enrolled in community college, and Melissa left for Texas State University, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s alma mater.
“It felt like we were taking off, from one life to another,” Melissa said. “It felt like, ‘Here we go!’ ”
Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. Not one of them has a four-year degree. Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts. Angelica, who left Emory owing more than $60,000, is a clerk in Galveston...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Cheaters never prosper.
When admission to college was competitive for those from under-priviledged households, “college” proxied either a good upbringing and preparation for college and/or exceptional aptitude and demonstrated ability.
Now that admission to college means nothing, “college” means nothing.
However, specific programs of education - e.g., heavy in mathematics, science, engineering - continue to mean something. The real hit has been to the humanities.
Is that how she showed up for the college interview? No wonder they let her in!
The very people bleating about “crushing debt” are the ones who created it and benefitted from it. They’re cheerleading for a full ride with the taxpayers picking up the tab, and their bloat unaffected.
Study the job market, learn where there is a need that is a fit with your strengths and weaknesses, go to a decent community colleg or trade school and get out into the world making a decent wage. Save your money, live beneath your means.
If, at some point, this still seems unsatisfactory, go to night school or take online coursework to achieve a four year university degree, far less costly.
This is the route to upward mobility, not borrowing a hundred thousand dollars or more that you do not have with little prospect of repaying, for a degree in a field that may not provide the income to repay, even if you found a position in that field.
The disconnect from reality here is astounding.
>>Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. <<
What a pantload. You fail in College by not working hard enough. I came from the way low end of the socio-economic scale and worked my butt off to stay in college and turn my degree into a useful career.
The days of college being a “time to find yourself” ended in the late 60s. Tromping across the campus in goth costume does NOT set you up to succeed in ANY life outside being clerk in a tattoo parlor.
You could blame college counselors but I saw mine like once in all the years I was there (and graduated).
Demographics are driving our statistics. We are importing mostly uneducated people from the third world and they are dragging down our income averages and our educational averages. We are subsidizing families headed by single uneducated women..and then we are surprised that the output can’t keep up with our competition in Asia?
Unfortunately, the humanities are dead. They killed themselves. They used to represent a well-rounded education, in touch with "the best that has been thought and said" in Western Civilization. The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the history of how civilization was built and what it means. The best general background and moral and intellectual training, the best general preparation, before specializing in a job.
Now there isn't any great literature or western history. It's all about white guilt, colonization, slavery, and gender bending. The brainwashing has overwhelmed everything else.
The reporter here almost stumbles into the truth. As a book recently examined, the culural collapse of low-income white people is devastating. And you have to believe that the impact is even worse on minorities.
Seems to me that’d be good enough evidence education is an equalizer. Lower income sorta by definition means you got a worse education, ceteris peribus. So I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Neither have a Degree. They have learned it all through experience and love of the job. Yet, when it comes time for a promotion, it goes to someone with a DEGREE (don't matter what the DEGREE is in).
Why is this so? My daughters have had 20 years of ON THE JOB TRAINING (which is the best source of an education), yet are bypassed for some dingbat with a degree. Something is not right about this.
My opinion (which does not mean much), that if you are in a field and have so many years on the job (education), you EARNED a Degree by proxy/default. Colleges don't teach what these people know.
Eliminate public funding while encouraging private benefactor and corporate paid scholarships and I suspect more poor students will go to college of they truly earn it.
I dated a sociologist who got her PhD. fully funded by the Hershey corporation. It worked out great for everyone. She got the degree she was after and Hershey got their market research at relatively low cost.
You can't improve somebody else by taking another person's money and giving it to them.
The reality is that no one ever sat in a class-room with his or her equal on either side--unless it was your identical twin or triplet. People are different--significantly different--in aptitudes, personality traits & personal experiences. In reality, regardless of the motivations involved in the promoters, Egalitarian/Collectivism Sabotages Human Potential.
Unless Conservatives are more open to aggressively challenge the false dogma, which permeates, today, in Western Education, we are going to lose everything that we value. The time for simply avoiding being called nasty names is over. Reality will not cease to be reality, merely because those who should speak up, remain silent.
William Flax
True, but even that is changing with the spread of online science and math courses. And that's because cheating is so very easy when taking online courses.
I happened to be visiting a friend of mine while she was taking an online biology final exam. Except that she wasn't answering any of the questions herself. A biologist friend of hers who was also visiting was answering all the questions.
I wonder if the NYT omitted a word from that sentence.
Liberalism killed public schools. I know of no educator that has any idea of what “being educated” means. Kids come home with with plenty of A’s and self-esteem but they cannot read, write, or do mathematics. I’d say put the Bible back into schools, but I don’t think there are any teachers competent to instruct.
The only solution remains:
a) Parents must pay for their children’s school directly
b) Fathers must raise their children.
“Cheaters never prosper.”
Well said; I sat in a state college with minorities that would have NEVER graduated my GRAMMAR SCHOOL. A lot of them dropped out in the first year; they knew they were several years behind, and didn’t realize the professors had standing orders to pass them anyway. There was also a large number that spent their first years in “remedial courses”; those were high school-level classes that white boys wouldn’t even be admitted without. They wasted time and money, and if they did graduate it was in “soft studies” for which there was no demand anyway.
The government is swindling them in the same way it swindled them with mortgages; the housing market and education industry were basically told to lower their standards to accomodate inferior clients, and those clients ended up with nothing in both cases.
And usually that DINGBAT with a degree hasn't a clue about that business or how it is operated. They have to get their "on the job" knowledge from the peons without the degree.
I guess it is called "Delegating by a DEGREE", that basically sums it up pretty well and then get big $$$ for that delegating..as if they had a clue.
The kids aren’t to blame here. They were doing as told and doing what other generations did to achieve the American dream. The liberal education system is screwing these kids. Ho does one amass 60k in student debt at a and rate university that 15 years ago was probably around 6k a year to attend? Liberals like Elisabeth Warren who are gaming the system worse than a two bit union thug. Warren was a tenured professor who taught one class and received 350k a year and a free house on campus. These liberal acedemics have figured out how to rip off the system at the expense of the students by padding their salaries and adding on useless programs just like they do in the federal government. It is a hidden national scandal that is bankrupting future generations.
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