Posted on 12/24/2012 8:17:55 AM PST by pabianice
I’ll agree with you to some degree, and then add two other points. With the costs of college today, students and parents have a hard time justifying an expensive degree that won’t get a job on the other end. Despite what a lot of FReepers think, not everyone is majoring in women’s studies. : ) It’s one thing to take survey courses in the humanities, it’s quite another to major in French lit. and a lot of students/parents realize this already.
The other issue is that humanities have been way behind in accepting technology. I know of professors who won’t allow laptops in class (?). They don’t use technology much themselves and, cloistered with their first editions of Jane Austen, don’t see that anyone who’s not a computer science major needs technology. Meanwhile, employers are looking for tech savvy employees, for all kinds of jobs.
I’m a professor in a professional field. Our grads get jobs. Our grads are tech savvy. Many of our students come to us from the humanities (which is a good background for some divisions in our field), because they couldn’t get jobs with the their humanities degree.
It used to be that a good liberal arts background would prepare you for a lot of jobs, and it’s still not a bad background to have, but if you want a job out of college, you’re going to need to take education, business, engineering, computer science, nursing, etc. Even the nonprofits, which used to be the employment mecca for women’s studies types, need people who can read a spreadsheet.
A lot of students should just forget the 4 year college thing and spend 2 yrs in community college getting some general education courses and a degree or certificate in a trade or paraprofessional position. I’m not sure what it will take for this society to recognize that we don’t need all these liberal arts grads and that there are a variety of well-paying jobs that need training, but not a 4 yr degree.
What a sad story with the young student at Emory. And while I agree it was mostly poor personal choices and lack of a family support network middle class students take for granted, it is totally unconscionable financial aid administrators modify student paperwork without verification.
Unfortunately, a lot of kids who fight tooth and nail to get into college sometimes have self defeating values. The school should also have been more proactive and aggressive in addressing her case. For instance, there should be an office that helps low income students from the very start to fill out those papers because they are complicated and these kids nor their parents have backgrounds/experience for something that sophisticated as financial aid, loans, etc. Usually, they are families barely making ends meet!
This is a missed opportunity for her due to a lack of communication and Emory should have stepped up and insisted she meet with them to work all of this out. Email notification falls short in something this important to someone’s life. Letting her fall thru the cracks is unprofessional. I realize they want these students to stand on their own feet...but some of them need shoulder to stand on first before they can do that.
We have become a terribly bratty and ungrateful society if a good school like Emory reaches out to minority and underprivileged students, offers them financial aid, an advisor, counseling, a staff that makes active attempts to contact them, professors and deans who email each other out of concern for them, second and third and fourth chances on grades... and when the child doesn't follow directions, doesn't reach out, sinks into apathy, refuses to communicate, and fails... somehow they STILL didn't do enough?? At what point have they done enough, hm? When they show up every morning to drive her to class? When they fill out all the paperwork FOR her? Does she need help sharpening her pencil too?
I definitely have met people with degrees that are completely ignorant in the related subject; the degrees certainly have been cheapened. At the same time I’ve had people tell me that a few weeks on the job would show them the workings of my job, and they could easily do it without a degree. They might be able to learn my job, and they might not need a degree, but I’ve spent almost 20 years learning the job. If it was that easy for someone else to do my job, they’d already have it for a fraction of what I cost. A lot of the “jesters” you describe (a good term for them) have lost their jobs in the last few years; at this point they mostly exist in government jobs, non-profits (where there is much less accountability), or as affirmative-action hires (where there are no expectations anyway, and they are kept on the payroll to fend off lawsuits).
I would trade a few thousand dollars’ pay for job security, and if I didn’t have a degree and felt it was necessary in my line of work I’d be seriously looking at night school for it.
It is difficult to speculate on a motive without an in-depth portrait from the student side, but Angelica at least comes across to me as rather more fatalistic and regretful than bratty or demanding. I just know how many chances I was given to find a way in life back 15 or 20 years ago when the economy was optimistic and everyone’s future seemed so bright and clear.
Sounds like you already have it, with 20 yrs on the job.........my daughters cross train their office staff, so that every one knows the others jobs, except hers, on that they only train up to a point. lol.
That skill is know only to them. There is their job security and it works...
Plus the fact that they WORK, overtime if necessary without pay, going the extra mile. They have become unexpendable in that they can be counted on anytime. Good work ethics.
My daddy taught me, if a man pays you $1 per hour give him $2 worth of work and don't complain or compare your work and salary with the others, makes you unexpendable. They learned this as well.
We are already cranking out college graduates who show up for job interviews chewing gum and wearing flipflops. Frankly, we need to be sterner with our young, not more supportive. As a society, we really cannot become much softer before we dissolve completely.
I’ll add that the one element this article leaves out is that all three girls were academically unprepared for college. It is mentioned at one point that their high school is one of the least successful in the state, and I can guess what happened: grading on a curve. The standards for student success are lowered gradually, without the teachers or administrators being consciously aware of it. As a teacher myself, I know what happens when you teach low-performing students year after year after year. You gradually forget what level they SHOULD be performing at. A child who can even read at grade level becomes a treasure. She stands out in a room full of high schoolers who read, write, talk, and act like 4th graders. The students and teachers alike lose sight of what Honors or College Prep should really look like. The girl was right when she said she was ready for community college, not Emory.
Debt is an instrument used to shackle subjects. The gov’ts continued endorsement of debt will further enslave and create subjects. The elite are celebrating their own enrichment and the media write articles to distract from the true issue.
Thanks for the concise summary of the article. It is proof that being broke is a temporary economic situation, while being poor is a state of mind. Poor people will stay poor, broke people have a good chance to change their economic state!
Low-income students simply need more resources, and that’s as true for students at the college level as it is for those in elementary and high school. It can be as simple as pairing disadvantaged kids with faculty and peer mentors, monitoring their grades, and instilling them with basic job-hunting skills like business etiquette.
The bottom line in this case is that Emory flagrantly violated its own ‘tuition-free’ policy for financially disadvantaged applicants from families with income under 50,000 by unilaterally altering aid data without student input or verification. Even if Angelica were as unprepared academically as she was culturally, which isn’t clear from the article, there should have been a remedial support system in place and loans should have been replaced with grants and work study.
They found consistently that the parents of the upper-class section would guide their children around the library, interacting often, making suggestions, previewing the books, asking the child questions about what they understood... and then they'd check out a few books and leave. But in the poor section (yes, mostly minorities) the parents would bring the child in and basically turn it loose. They often brought work of their own, or messed with their phones, or got on the computer, and the child was left to its own devices. They'd fumble around a while and eventually the parent would indicate that it was time to leave. They usually left without checking out any books.
I bring this up not to pick on the poor but to point out that even those who are well-intentioned enough to bring their child to the library, sensing that this is "a good place," don't know what to do when they get there. It's a kind of cargo cult if you build it they will come mentality that indicates, like this article, that they KNOW the locations of the route to success (school, library, university), but they don't know what to do other than to show up. Woody Allen once said that 90% of life was just showing up, but he's been wrong about a few things, and this is one of them.
It's a little like kids from the midwest who want to get into show business, so they come to Hollywood, get off the bus, and stand there looking around like, "Okay, I'm here. Now what?" (Now what tends to be that a year later they're hooked on drugs and doing porno to pay the rent. Because like the girls in the article, or the parents in the library, they don't know what to do once they get there.) I know that was a tangent, but I live here in Los Angeles, so I get to see a lot of failure.
Then it goes on to say that her mother was paying the rent with money from some Federal aid fund. Well... then... she DID have more money than $35,000 a year. She didn't EARN more, but she had access to more. Clearly the college knew that. The article indicates that Angelica screwed up her aid forms three years in a row, so I'm getting the sense that Emory didn't (couldn't) simply arbitrarily decide "I don't like your looks; we're going to falsify your aid forms." There's something not being reported clearly, probably to give the girl the most sympathetic reading possible.
And the university has since implemented a financial aid structure limiting Stafford loans to 15,000 for students in the 50-100,000 range so clearly there were complaints coming from the more affluent spectrum as well. Emory is one of the richest colleges in the country with an endowment in the billions. Regardless of intent, aid forms are massively complex and putting a burden of debt equal to an annual income on these unsuspecting students and their families is absolutely unconscionable. I get the sense the school has gone the extra mile to assist dependent students both financially and expectations-wise such that she would probably make it to graduation today.
I grew up very country. Until my mom married my stepdad, we didn't even qualify as blue-collar. When I finally was able to put myself through college, I started at a community college, got the Associate's, transferred to a university that was respectable but by no means a household name unless you really like women's basketball. It was an okay enough school, but no prestige. There I got my B.A.
Now I have a decent job. Mission accomplished.
I don’t have a problem with loans as long as the costs/benefits are transparent before actually applying and parents are not “misled” into over-declaring their income. No doubt many, many students that mortgage their family’s financial security by attending an designer label private college graduate feeling disillusioned, even ripped off, when they could have been a stand out in an honors program at state schools/community colleges and gone on to be just as successful at a fraction of the stress.
Unless there is an eventual NBA or NFL contract in the offing.
Agreed.
The poor already get more resources in the form of aid, loans, welfare, foodstamps, housing, obamaphones, medicaid, and on and on and on. The result is that, as you point out, they are culturally unprepared to change their economic situation. What is the answer? You propose further resource reallocation, I prefer making poor thinking painfull. Your proposal will drive more cultural unpreparedness, mine will drive motivation to change thinking.
Admitededly, mine assumes that our society is not to far gone and can still shift out of making the poor from some kind of heroic situation to one that is even allowed to shift....
I’ve had 20 years in the field learning the job; been on this particular job 15 (which just makes one a target for those trying to bring in cheap workers).
Sounds like your daughters are real assets to the company; they should be fine. I’ve also worked unpaid overtime, to the point that I’ve been given unexpected bonuses for it (that was back in the good old days); now it is expected and unappreciated. As far as comparison to what others are paid, it is difficult to ignore; when I see a boss promote a woman he has a romantic interest in, with a fabricated title during a time when the company has officially frozen pay & promotions, it is difficult to ignore. Seeing office “toys” paid this way without doing any real work is nauseating.
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