… And boy, is it special!
First, if anybody could make proud Princeton tiger mom Susan A. Patterson look like a down-to-earth egalitarian, you knew it would be Ross, Cardinal Douthat:
… Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.
Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding…
… It would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works! The “holistic” approach to admissions, which privileges résumé-padding and extracurriculars over raw test scores or G.P.A.’s, has two major consequences: It enforces what looks suspiciously like de facto discrimination against Asian applicants with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class and geographically dispersed — who don’t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite…
Yeah, networking resume-padders like Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, or that social-climbing urban couple now in possession of the White House. Tough world, Doubthat.
Next up in the Squid-Cloud of of Butthurt parade, Erick ‘Strike Force’ Erickson:
… The professional right has turned a mailing list habit into a mailing list addiction. Like drug addicts wanting one more hit before going straight, they send out one last mail piece demanding money to help Allen West. But now, like going from cocaine to crack, they spam your email inbox too demanding your immediate defense of Allen West, Rand Paul, etc.
Never you mind that Allen West will never see one penny of the money. “We’re building his name identification,” the mailhouse tells you. Yes, in the days of Rush Limbaugh’s 20 million listener audience, Fox News’s domination of the news airwaves, and Allen West’s own efforts, I’m sure he needs some crappy little group no one has ever heard of using his name so that they themselves get money.
This is one reason I have discouraged petitions at RedState. We used to do them as a show of support on the right for various issues. But now, too many hucksters demand you SIGN THE PETITION NOW TO STAND WITH X, Y, AND Z purely as products to collect your email address so they can spam you. Older people have no idea. They think they are helping the cause and the only cause they are helping is the bottom line of the professional right.
The professional right bled Mitt Romney dry, scammed millions of conservatives out of their hard earned money so that consultants could fly on Gulfstream jets, and sent kids to bars in Wisconsin to get drunk while actual grassroots groups went door to door only to see the professional groups take credit for work they did not do…
Yes, this is the same E. Erickson who first came to our attention when he urged his Trike Farce Strike Force to use his Amazon link to mail rock salt to Olympia Snowe. But it’s not his own benefits he’s thinking about, it’s poor uncompensated Allen West.
And finally, sliding towards the center and the well-meaning bless-his-heart demographic: Yes, I generally like Brad Paisley’s songs, but “Accidental Racist” is just an embarrassment to all concerned.
The prophet Nostradumbass
While reading something else, I happened to look up at the TV, and saw Charlie Rose “interviewing” Henry Kissinger, presumably about the greatness of Margaret Thatcher. Why isn’t that monster Kissinger dead yet?
The prophet Nostradumbass
I have said this elsewhere, and I will say it again here now:
Henry Kissinger should have been shoved into Pinochet’s grave and buried alive. That that didn’t happen can be rectified by shoving him into Thatcher’s grave and burying him alive with her.
? Martin
Somebody doesn’t understand holistic admissions.
Holistic admissions is all about ROI. If I give kid A $100 worth of educational opportunity and he turns it into $200, and I give kid B $1000 worth of educational opportunity and he turns it into $1100, I’m going to pick Kid A, all else being equal, because he made more of what he was given than Kid B.
Public universities have figured out that they specifically were perpetuating class discrimination in public budgeting because of their selectivity. If people of power wanted their kids to get into the best schools (duh) they needed to ensure that their kids were standing on the best foundation. So why not ask the taxpayers to pay for that by redistributing opportunities from poor to rich, thereby ensuring that the wealthy got their kids into the public system ahead of the poor?
The solution was to grade everyone on a curve. You start out with more, you’re going to have to do more with it. In some cases a lot more. That kid from Oakland whose dad was murdered that takes two buses every day to attend a school on the other side of the bay to get away from the gangs, works full time, still volunteers, and still gets As (actual student) is going to get a seat over your kids who was given a car when he turned 16 and instead of working went to Kaplan 4 times to boost his SATs. Sorry, but when it comes down to it, the first kid is going to bust her ass in college and the latter one will just complain that the wifi is too slow and skate by. The latter kid with the higher SATs is less likely to graduate than the former, simply due to the nature of how they got to where they are (something I have actually measured.)
The GOP loves the idea of work, except that it should always be trumped by privilege.
Cygil
It’s opposite day. Ross Douthat is drawing attention to elitist snobbery in America and advocating for the poor and underpriveleged. Nixon goes to China, and all Balloon Juice can do is ruthlessly mock him for it, in true entitled fashion, without addressing the substance of his arguments.
I don’t think you want to bring up Kagan here as a counterexample of privilege. You are aware of the despicable way Elena Kagan, as Dean of Harvard Law, treated a complaint by a genuine outsider, Norman Finkelstein, who had been slandered by Israel troll Alan Derschowitz using the Harvard imprimateur?
amk
So the asshat is admitting there is a class war in ‘murka being perpetuated by the moneyed class?
NotMax
The big kahuna pioneer of right-wing direct mail, Richard Viguerie knew of what he spoke when he opined “Whenever conservatives are unhappy, bad things happen for the Republican Party.””
bad Jim
One might think that nothing could draw more unfavorable attention to elitist privilege than the very presence of a column by Douthat in the New York Times.
JoyfulA
@The prophet Nostradumbass: She’s being cremated. Apparently, her family took note of the several million people who’ve said they intend to water her grave.
? Martin
@Cygil: Advocating for the poor and underprivileged? Hardly. He’s claiming that the victims of holistic admissions are working class whites. It’s actually quite specifically the kids in high income/high school funding areas. I live in one of those areas. The average graduating GPA out of my kid’s high school is roughly 4.0 because he can literally take every AP course/exam possible. A below average kid in his high school would wipe the floor with the valedictorian from half the high schools in the state too poor to offer AP courses in any GPA/SAT admissions criteria. I told him if he expects to get into the level of public university he wants, he better graduate in the top 5% of his class. Now, that’s a scary prospect to him, as he’s going to need to work hard, but he also has the benefits of a national championship marching band, access to college courses and special programs like a filmmaking institute and stuff that 95% of students don’t have access to. If he squanders what he’s been offered, it’s his own damn fault.
Suffern ACE
@Cygil: what exactly is Ross advocating? More academic rigor and less networking at Ivy League schools? Demanding that the next Supreme Court judge come from a land grant college? That Harvard use its vast foundation to build new dorms so that it can increase its undergraduate class size to includ more Asians and white kids from Minnesota? That large multinationals start recruiting from non Ivy League schools? That people move to new neighborhoods?
I don’t think he’s advocating any of that. He’s complaining.
dirge
SAT scores are most strongly correlated with parents income, not high school grades or future college grades or even ‘IQ’ tests… so it’s not like the SATs are some great equalizer.
That being said, Baby Brooks isn’t wrong about the cultures of elitism that exist at Ivy League schools. Just because students like Sotomayor and Kagan got into those school 30+(?) years ago doesn’t mean that most of the students there are breaking class barriers.
Princeton was very proud that a full 16% of it incoming class were from low-income families. Given that 48% of the US is now classified as being low-income, 16% is embarrassing.
40% of their incoming students receive no financial assistance at all, which itself breathtaking, given that a year at Princeton runs to $60,000+ with travel.
Obviously, the students from elite families that get in are still working hard, but they and their consultants are mostly competing against each other, big fish in a small pond.
El Cid
One of the things we cannot sanely discuss in this country is that there really is a social upper class which perpetuates itself through institutions and cultural mechanisms, and that this crosses over with a socio-economic power elite.
Suffern ACE
@El Cid: I think we know it exists. What we have trouble discussing is now to evaluate it and replace it.
Debbie(aussie)
I must be really slow, admittedly have taken the pils for sleep, but that first one n part iPad just went woooossssshhhhhh , right over the top of my head. Anyone care to decipher into plain empathy enhanced English dialogue to me. Please!!!!!!!
Edited for errors
Hoodie
@? Martin: Douthat is, in true conservative form, pitting the underclasses against one another. The diversity at the Ivy League is real, but it’s miniscule considering what these overendowed whales could do. If a significant number of students are paying the full rate at a school like Princeton with a multibillion dollar endowment, that school isn’t being diverse enough. It should have more working class white, black and latino kids, and fewer sons and daughter of bond traders. Like that will ever happen.
Suffern ACE
@Debbie(aussie):
Yale Grad: Ivy League women need to find Ivy League husbands or their marriages will be miserable. My son is an eligible bachelor, so give him a look.
Internet commentators who aren’t Ivy League grads: ha ha ha ha ha. Typical.
Internet commentators who are Ivy League grads: we aren’t like that!
Ross: yes you are plus admissions policy complaint.
That’s the state of our dialogue. Plato would not be impressed.
TriassicSands
Four words that should have any remotely liberal or progressive person worried: Max Baucus / Tax Reform.
The Post has an article up about Baucus pursuing tax reform in time for the next debt ceiling hostage situation and it should come as no surprise that he’s looking to Republicans for support. Does that mean we’ll see major revisions in taxes without raising a dime more than we do now? Revenue neutral is always music to the ears of wingnuts, and Baucus is no great friend to progressive issues, so we could see yet another case of a Democrat working hard to further the GOP’s agenda.
With Obama offering cuts in Social Security and Medicare and Baucus working with Republicans to “fix” the tax code, we could see real progress for the 1% over the next few months. The greatest hope liberals/progressives may have is that the Republicans are so insane and stupid then can’t recognize victory unless it is total, and they’ll simply refuse to go along with anything that the Kenyan Marxist proposes or supports.
A sane, intelligent Republican (I know, there are only five, they’re all over the age of 85, and none are in office) might take the cuts in Social Security and Medicare (blaming Obama for the cuts could be a great issue for them in 2014 and 2016) and work with Baucus to get wealth-friendly tax code reform and then, the next time they control the House, Senate, and White House, if Harry Reid hasn’t done it already, they can scuttle the filibuster and ram through big new tax cuts for the wealthy. They could then voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid over to the states with inadequate bloc grants, effectively killing that program (and indirectly a huge part of the PPACA) in more than half the states.
At that point, they’d have everything they want and the price would have been a willingness to accept a short deferral of total victory.
We live in interesting times.
El Cid
@Suffern ACE: That was awesome.
El Cid
@TriassicSands: It used to be that the variable in the phrase “May you live in interesting times” was assumed to be “interesting times,” while people took for granted that they would be alive.
Now, the fixed point seems to be that the times are always interesting, and the variable is “may you live…”
Debbie(aussie)
You have the Brits doing all they can get away with to meet you near the bottom of the social consciousness slope. Now you have the Aussies champing at the bit to increase the numbers of homeless an degraded persons( all their own fault of course). At times I truly despair. We have so much to be proud of the way we treat others, and so much more than enough money to lift every single family up and out of poverty, think of the jobs. The rich can stay bloated, big deal, , just raise the rest, please……………..
raven
@Debbie(aussie): rort???
raven
HALP, Joe and Cokie!!!!!!
Baud
@raven:
What happened to the fourth horseman?
raven
@Baud: In Froonce.
Schlemizel
@raven:
You turn on the dog you get up with fleas! Its your own damn fault for turning on that dog, Mourning Joe. Turn it off & you will not be afflicted so
Baud
@raven:
Froonce?
raven
@Schlemizel: I know, I do watch it a lot less since they moved MSNBC off the analog tier. Watched the game until about 11:30 and then caught the last half hour this morning.
Linda Featheringill
So. Social class systems are self-perpetuating? Yeah.
Baud
Shorter Douthat: Asians voted overly Democratic in 2012; need to generate resentment to form coalition with working class whites.
cmm
Random recommendations (making up for missing the tell john what to watch thread yesterday). Movie: the last entry on that thread recommended Happy, Texas. Yes yes yes! Love that movie. TV: Sherlock. If you like dumb/action/80s/sci fi etc movies, check out the podcast Film Sack. So much fun! Four funny geeks dissect a crappy-ish movie that is usually streaming on Netflix. Recent ones were Deep Impact and Barbarella. Love this show. Finally, book: at long last got around to reading the first of Robert McCammon’s historical mysteries set in the American colonies. Kicking myself for waiting so long. Finished the first, Speaks the Nightbird, in 2 days. Promptly went off to Amazon and got the next one, Queen of Bedlam. Two more after that and a fifth about to come out. YAY! If you like mystery/suspense and/or historicl novels, this one is a doozy.
Linda
@Hoodie: And much of that racial diversity comes from the admission of wealthy overseas students, not working class nonwhites from the United States. By claiming that working class whites are the main/only victims, he can indeed pit two underclasses against each other in the time-honored conservative fashion.
OmerosPeanut
@Suffern ACE:
When the first reaction of, say, AL is:
“Yeah, networking resume-padders like Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, or that social-climbing urban couple now in possession of the White House. Tough world, Doubthat.”
I’m not sure we’ve even made it as far as you suggest. In this case what is needed is a reminder that the plural of anecdote isn’t fact.
Also, the elite can be perpetuated even if it’s increasingly color and gender-blind. The price tag alone at these schools is a deterrent. Bright and talented lower income kids who manage to overcome this disadvantage can be dissuaded by the 60k/yr. price tag. Yes, even if they’d end up with 90% of it covered by scholarships there is still sticker shock. It won’t keep them all from applying, but it will keep some away. To perpetuate an elite these schools don’t need one single check that separates applicants into “proper” and “upstart” categories; legacy admissions fit this, but AFAIK they’re becoming less common (and if they’re not, that hardly disproves my point). Instead of a single check, what you want if your goal is to perpetuate a system are a long series of smaller checks that are easier to defend publicly.
NotMax
And now for something completely different.
French president Hollande’s gift camel gets cooked.
danielx
Douchehat and Erick son of Erick in the same post? It’s too early in the morning…except to note that both of these gentlemen have clearly been struck by a flash of the blindingly obvious.
Ivy League schools are about connections and stamping on the fingers of those who are below you on the ladder? Seriously? Who knew?
And there really are “professional Republicans” for whom fundraising is an end in and of itself? I am totally shocked. Next thing I’ll be hearing that there are TV preachers who solicit their watchers for funds with which to support their lifestyles instead of ministering to the poor…
Schlemizel
@danielx:
I think the critical thing is that even these two blind sows discovered an acorn. That Douchehat misses the real point is no surprise but the Herr Leutnant Erik admits publicly that there is a large grift going on in his bund the cracks of light might start seeping in on the morans that they are being taken for a ride. Its a small start but we can hope
kindness
Re: the Professional Right
Grifters gotta grift.
Kay
I think the skimming in political parties and particularly presidential campaigns is a management problem.
What Erickson describes was the 2004 campaign for Democrats. I think we had 9 groups “working” here, and the only person who was doing anything was the 22 year old Kerry
campaign staffer.
The candidate’s campaign really has to control the thing, and cut people out. It could absolutely happen again to Democrats.
AxelFoley
Re: Erickson’s quote
There’s a professional right?
Baud
@Kay:
I wonder if that’s a part of the source for ODS.
Anyway, great point, Kay.
Kay
@Baud:
I wonder about it too. I think Romney had to essentially pay them to keep them on board. He didn’t have deep ties to the GOP as an organization and political parties are at base large organizations. People move between the Party and allied groups. They know one another.
In a sense that hurt him, too, because no one told him the truth. Why would they? If they said “you aren’t going to take Wisconsin” then the money dries up in Wisconsin.
Anyway, I think people learn this and then forget it again :)
Princess
Douthat is an idiot.
But he is right that working class people of all kinds, including white working class people (children of East European immigrants, and immigrants from the Middle East who count as “white” for admission purposes) are strongly disadvantaged under the current university admissions system.
Kay
@Baud:
I kept hearing, for example, that Romney Michigan was a complete sham. I heard it over and over. He had these busses that went from place to place but they would have like a western MI county chair and a Romney employee on them. It was if they had actually convinced themselves it was “reality” even though they set up the scam.
Just crazy.
Ash Can
Meh. If the Ivy League schools want to perpetuate a class elite system and price real talent out of their system, they’re only hurting themselves. They’re not the only game in town, and those students will end up at entirely adequate state schools, which furthermore have their own regional elite systems and networks. The Ivy League schools may still dominate the class and employment networks in the Northeast, but elsewhere they’re not part of the clique. Anyone who expects a degree from an elite Eastern school to automatically open doors for them elsewhere in the country is in for a rude awakening. Douthat et al. can whine till the cows come home about the state of affairs at Ivy League schools. The rest of the American higher educational system is humming along quite nicely in the meantime.
Flatlander
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
When I was wife-shopping I went back to my college reunion. I wasn’t the only one.
So far twelve years of bliss consolidating our socio-economic advantages. Our kids will have not one but two legs up.
Douchehat (sp?) is right about this: the only shocking thing is saying it out loud.
The rest of it, about poor whites vs. smart Asians in the face of holistic admissions, now that’s a load of crap.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s hard to believe that with everything that’s happened over the last decade, presidential elections turn on the nuts and bolts of campaigning.
Omnes Omnibus
@Princess: A system based primarily on GPA and test scores is not going to make it better. A holistic approach is, IMO, going to be much more likely to pick out kids with potential since it actually looks at the kids. The weighting of factors may need work. Also, I wonder how many student self-select out of applying to the selective institutions due to a belief the school does not accept people like them or that they could not afford it if they got in. I see lots of statistics on the demographics of how got it, but I have seen far fewer on the demographics of who applied.
Kay
@Baud:
Right, but Erickson doesn’t address your point, which is why this happens and why it’s allowed to continue. The campaign is buying the support ( or silence) of powerful people w/in the GOP or allies by paying them, or allowing them to fleece the base.
He can’t go there, because that threatens his own career.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus:
A Simple Way to Send Poor Kids to Top Colleges
“The results are now in, and they suggest that basic information can substantially increase the number of low-income students who apply to, attend and graduate from top colleges. “
Capri
@danielx:
I think you’ve hit on it. As they say, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. The Ivy League observations aren’t very new, people have been writing about it for decades. It boils down to – how can an Ivy League School be both egalitarian, color- race- gender- class-blind and still preserve it’s “brand” ? The answer is not easily and hypocrisy is involved. In the thirties Harvard had “Jewish problem” now it has an “Asian problem” in a decade or so it will be some other group that would be over represented if admissions were purely merit based.
All Douthat is doing it pointing out the hypocrisy of elite liberal institutions – that’s the right wind agenda in its truest form. There doesn’t have to be any further subtext or meaning.
My mother, bless her heart, once signed up for Citizens United because she thought it was a local group fighting for better trash pick-up. She now gets some looney tune direct mailings each week. When I last visited her, she got a letter from Mike Huckabee who had an urgent need for money so that Obama didn’t sell us out to the United Nations.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Thanks.
I had a little back and forth with geg6 about this type of thing a while ago. I had suggested that someone look into local private schools because I thought, based on the experience of my undergrad, that they had aid packages that could make them at least competitive with local state schools. geg6 disputed this based on her experience as an admissions and/or financial aid person at a public uni. I deferred to her professional experience. It is nice to see some backing for my contention that people should at least look into these schools.
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus:
Anecdata, I know, but I was accepted to a private school, not Ivy, but pretty well regarded, back in the 1980s. I was top 10 percent of graduating class and had a very high ACT. With the acceptance letter was a list of the tuition and rates for the school. Because no one in my family had ever been to college, and the guidance counseling at our large high school was shit, I had no clue that I could have afforded to go there with loans and the like.
Because of sticker shock, and the fact that it was halfway across the country, I went to the local commuter state school. I wonder how many others there are like that?
mai naem
Morning Ho is even more insufferable today.He’s going on about how strong Maggie Thatcher was and he himself wouldn’t be able to deal with a strong woman cohosting the show with him. And Mika doesn’t give a shit about anything except her diet and her Jimmy Choos.
low-tech cyclist
I think Douthat thinks his rant here is aimed at liberal elites, because conservatives always think of our premier educational institutions as hotbeds of liberalism.
But Princeton grads are almost all going to be in the top 1%, and a great deal of them will be in the top 0.1%.
Still, it’s nice of Douthat to lob a grenade or two, however inadvertently, at the same folks the Occupy crowd would like to have a word with.
RSA
I only came up through a wannabe Ivy (Johns Hopkins) but I don’t know that intuitively; it seemed to me to be about learning. If I remember correctly, from a study of high school students who were accepted at an Ivy but decided to go to a lower-ranked school, missing the “connecting” doesn’t actually hurt the students in the rest of their lives, either.
On the more general point about the meritocracy existing to protect the upper class, well, sure, but Ivy League universities aren’t the main culprit, I think.
RaflW
“formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind”
And informally: racist as hell and totally stacked in favor of the 1%.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I recall. We’re making a huge push to try to increase graduation rates so I’m always interested in this kind of information.
Omnes Omnibus
@Capri:
How do you define merit? Then once you define it, how do you prevent it from being gamed? if you go by grades and test scores, costly prep courses, tutors, and 5.0 for an A in AP and IB classes in private schools and wealthy school districts come into play.
@arguingwithsignposts: I went to a selective liberal art college for about what my parents would have spent to send me to a state school. I was lucky; my parents knew enough about the system to look past the sticker price. Anecdotally though, at my high school, lots of kids never looked at anything but the less selective state schools because that’s where people like them were expected to apply.
MosesZD
Actually, Douhat makes quite a few salient points and is more right than the criticism. I figured the connections game out decades ago when doing a college project.
It should be no surprise that Ivy League educated individuals dominate the Boards of Fortune 500 companies. That they dominate in important judicial appointments, political connections and pretty much every area where connections to power and wealth matter.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I was so lucky I had a pal overseas that had graduated from Cornell and said he could get me in any school I chose. I had no business in Illinois but we worked the system and I got in. If I had gone back to Chicago and enrolled in a JC I would have been toast. Course it took me nine years to graduate!
MosesZD
@RSA:
That’s because they missed it. They were too young. They, like so many of us, believed in the ‘meritocracy.’ Only, to find out when it was too late, that those Ivy League connections really do matter if you want to get to the top in many areas.
Sour grapes and stories we tell ourselves to the contrary.
RaflW
@El Cid:
I pretty much agree. I think Douthat’s complaints are aimed at the wrong things, but the underlying issue is very real: the elites have thoroughly gamed the system and their progeny are groomed to perpetuate it. And we’re not really supposed to talk about it.
Elite worship, the utter myth of social mobility in 21st century America, and the shift of taxes from a mechanism for social leveling to a tool for moving cash to the rich are all part of a very big story about the 1% pulling away from the rest of us at alarming speed, while we hubub about things like wether Princeton admits the correct people.
All that said, I can’t really see how SCOTUS knocking down the remnants of affirmative action is gonna help. I think the white people of privilege who are squawking and supporting this SCOTUS effort know full well that striking down admissions preferences for protected classes won’t help poor whites, but they get to look like they’re fighting for middle-class and working class whites while perpetuating the “colorblind” myth.
And as long as we’re all het up about admissions, quotas, what have you, we’re not working to build a tax code that at least asks the elite to pay back a fair share for all the gifts they’ve received in life.
RSA
@MosesZD:
That sounds right to me. And I agree that there are problems at the very top.
Kay
@RaflW:
The columnists at the NYTimes will talk about anything, anything, as long as it isn’t money.
Taxes, colleges, standardized test scores, health care vouchers, as long as it’s sufficiently abstract they will DARE to go THERE!
God forbid anyone should talk about what people get paid.
ArchTeryx
@RSA: I’m not so sure about that. Mine is a rather narrow story, but I’m a bioscience grad and my experience is that having an Ivy League next to your name and degree opens far more doors then State U – I start any job search with a huge disadvantage. But that’s in part because of the miserable science job market of the last several decades. When you’ve 100 applicants for every job, it’s just so easy to make up whatever sort of applicant screening you want to as an employer, and pedigree is definitely one of them.
Kay
@RaflW:
The NYTimes promoted the “skills gap” idea, hard. I asked people here why welders, for example, might not be available. They ALL said labor unions had training programs for skilled trades, and labor unions are decimated.
The NYTimes CHOSE to focus on standardized test scores. They immediately went to 30,00 feet. That’s gotta be deliberate.
I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know if it’s true that the decline of labor unions contributes to the decline of skilled trades, but could they ask someone outside the same 250 people? How about they ask someone who isn’t actively working to lower wages for welders, while bitching that skilled welders won’t work for 9 dollars an hour?
Bulworth
Wingnuts aren’t supposed to mention these things, Liberal Media Bias, and all like that.
Walker
@? Martin:
It is that, but there are other issues as well. Holistic admissions also eliminate students that
1. Were carried every step of the way by someone else and have never really shown any true initiative on their own.
2. Do not handle failure well.
Students with high test scores that satisfy 1 and/or 2 typically crack like an egg in a high-pressure college setting.
It is true that hollistic admissions penalizes a certain racial/ethnic group. But as was pointed out last night, that group is not white people — they benefit from it.
Tyro
Anyone who expects a degree from an elite Eastern school to automatically open doors for them elsewhere in the country is in for a rude awakening
While I am fairly sure that a degree from Harvard won’t open big doors for you if your ambition is to get in on the fast track to being a sales executive for a Midwestern agricultural corporation, it really does open a lot of doors if you have a specific ambition in mind that you want to pursue.
On the other hand, if all you want to do is be rich, a degree from a state school followed by an MD with a residency in plastic surgery will do just fine.
Tyro
Because of sticker shock, and the fact that it was halfway across the country, I went to the local commuter state school. I wonder how many others there are like that?
There are LOTS like that. But if you and your family prioritized obsessing over college from the time you were a teenager, you would have read about the process and purchased college guides and figured it out.
Which is sort of the thing: people who obsess about getting into elite colleges are the ones who go to elite colleges. People for whom it wasn’t a priority don’t go, even if they are really talented. Elite colleges are a “chit” that people get if they want that. For them maybe the chit is valuable. For others, maybe not so much. For some who get that “chit”, they don’t even get much out of it anyway.
Tone in DC
@Kay:
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Kay
@Tone in DC:
The whole skills gap “conversation” made me laugh. As if “skills” were mysteriously gained and then banked and we used them all up, or something. Do they even look at these ludicrous numbers? The premise was “skills” collapsed sometime between 2002 and 2007. That’s ridiculous, but Scott Walker kept saying it, so it must be true!
Ask him again. Just keep asking the same people, over and over.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tyro:
And this disadvantages kids coming from poor and/or unsophisticated backgrounds. As a result, I suspect that the pools of applicants for the selective schools are skewed toward the children of parents who went through the system as well. It is another way in which the system is self-perpetuating.
Egypt Steve
Here is what I would do about college admissions, at any school. First, give up on the idea that it’s possible to rank students by merit in any objective sense. Instead, admit that you can make only rough judgments: highly qualified, qualified, not qualified. So put all applicants into one of those categories.
Then: on the theory that you can’t categorize perfectly, and that people from the “qualified” pool and maybe even a few from the “unqualified” pool would in fact succeed, figure out some proportion of names to draw randomly from each pool, based on your confidence in your categorization. I’d recomment 80 percent from the “highly qualified” pool, “17 percent from the “qualified” pool, and 3 percent from the “unqualified” pool.
That way, no one would be able to say “waaah, waah, waah, I had a higher SAT or did more hours of service at Habitat for Humanity or got a gold medal at the state swimming championship, so I’m objectively better than you, so how did you get in and not me??”
jonas
@Omnes Omnibus: This is a big problem for a lot of elite colleges and universities who would like to bring more economic and social diversity to their campuses — one thing that holds poorer students back is not just the challenges they face in getting a high school education, but that those who are exceptional enough to be competitive at the best schools don’t bother applying either because 1. they think they can’t afford it and 2. there’s a lot of social/family/financial pressure to stay near home, even if that means settling for the third-tier state school nearby. Unfortunately, they get a lot less personal, academic and financial support at those places and the risk of dropping out and ending up with no degree is commensurately higher.
ETA: see Tyro’s comment #68 above
Paul in KY
@JoyfulA: I would imagine her cremated remains will be placed in Westminster Abby at some point in future.
That way you will be able to put your urine in a water bttle & accidently spill it on her marker.
RaflW
@Kay:
I work with a coalition that is trying hard to address the racial skills gap for construction labor here in MN. A lot of union guys are greying out of the workforce, and at least here, the way workers used to come up was, of course, through family.
You knew your uncle Joe was a pipe fitter, so he brought you to the union hall, got you signed up and apprenticed to some shop. They’d train you.
Now days, part of the American dream is for your kids not to have a ‘menial’ job. Never mind that around here, you can probably make a lot more as a pipe fitter than as a desk jockey. The work is much harder physically, and the job sites can be shitty, so it’s not for everyone.
Anyway, what we’re working on is basic: folks from communities where their peers and parents haven’t been heavy equipment operators, or pipe fitters, or carpenters, etc, a whole culture of connection, referral and seeing role models doing the work has to be built.
And the structural racism of the past (and sometimes present) that barred union doors to potential workers of color as well as women has to be overcome. It has been interesting and gratifying to see some of the unions wake up.
The smart ones see that their network of older white guys isn’t self-replicating, and that more and more contracts have the potential of going to out-of-state bidders who bring workers with them (ever wonder who stays in those $189/week “suite” hotels??). If local unions aren’t going to dry up and blow away, they have to welcome black and brown apprentices. The local “Women wear hard hats too” program is doing pretty well in some trades as well.
RSA
@ArchTeryx: It could be that my own narrow view is biasing my opinion; I’m already starting to rethink it.
For what it’s worth, in computer science, the Ivys hold less sway, I’d guess in part because the field is newer and flatter, and because the powerhouses include some public universities. In my own specialized area of CS, only Columbia has any presence.
Paul in KY
@Kay: Hear, hear, Kay!
Mike in NC
Didn’t Rick Santorum say that Real Americans shouldn’t go to college?
Bob R.
My son (and daughter-in-law) are about to become Yale grads.
Their grandfathers were (as young adults) a migrant farm worker, a coal miner, a diesel mechanic and a Baptist minister. A girl from my son’s high school is a year behind him at Yale and her dad is the school janitor.
My wife and I and the daughter-in-law’s parents made it into college (early 80’s) just as tuition and fees at state schools began their rapid ascent.
My son was admitted to Cal and UCLA and even with qualifying for all kinds of merit scholarships and aid, those schools would have been $15,000 a year more than Yale.
The UC system is no longer a way into the middle class and into advanced circles because of the high cost. My son was also accepted at Pomona College (small, elite liberal arts school) and with their aid offer, Pomona would have cheaper than UCLA or Cal. And my son has found Yale to be very egalitarian.
So what’s the deal with Douthat?
1. He’s unhappy, because Harvard people are often unhappy. There was an article in the Crimson several years ago asking “Why aren’t we as happy as Yale students?”
2. He doesn’t know this because he only went to one college, but every college is more about hanging out than it is about studying. If you’re a bright student, and you’re not in the hard sciences, college isn’t that hard, and you have a lot of time for other things, chunky Reese Witherspoon notwithstanding.
3. He’s working to delegitimize Democrats. Ivy grads, especially HYP grads, are everywhere in the power structure, but are more strongly represented among the Dems.
4. He’s working to establish white people as a discriminated class.
5. He’s trying to distract us from the changes in public Universities that have made them much less accessible.
Douthat’s game is that he knows the current system under-invests in secondary education, and that investment is poorly distributed – note that he has no plan to fix that. As others have noted, public Universities are no longer within reach of the Middle Class and the emerging classes, while the Ivies, especially HYP have become more so.
Could HYP do more? Sure, but they’re doing a lot, and the fact that they were more accessible for my family than UCLA should be a scandal – that’s the real problem that Douthat is trying to obscure.
Paul in KY
@Tyro: I agree here. If you had been serious about wanting to go, you (or your paents) would have investigated & known about the sliding price scale, etc.
Walker
@RSA:
Interesting, because Cornell is “ranked” (yeah, yeah, rankings) higher than Columbia. What is your area?
BerkeleyMom
Is Douthat just talking out of his ass, or has he had kids (and all their friends) go through the college admissions process in the last 5 years? Does he even know any teenagers? What a complete asshole.
RSA
@Walker: Most of my work is on modeling and system-building for human-computer interaction–even though some don’t consider HCI “real” computer science. :-) I mentioned Columbia for their work in the related area of augmented reality. (If I recall correctly, you may be in theory?)
Tyro
So what’s the deal with Douthat?
Douthat had a bad experience at Harvard because he was hoping it would be all a about hanging out at the sailing pavilion and hob nobbing at finals clubs. He didn’t get into a finals club and found that he was surrounded by hyper ambitious “achiever” types rather than lackadaisical upper class people he was hoping would give him entree into that social milieu. He didn’t like having to compete with hyper ambitious grinds and found it declassee. And even worse, he resented that THEY had no interest in being conservatives of leisure, and many of them from more liberal backgrounds channeled their ambition into being liberals.
ArchTeryx
@RSA: That’s also true in bioscience – especially as you move up in degree rank. There are some serious powerhouse state schools in bioscience. Once you pass the Ph.D. level, then the aristocracy isn’t your school – it’s where your advisor gets published in. He can push your papers into Science and Nature, you get the inside track to one of those extremely precious jobs. If he can only push you into a trade journal, you’re put in the middle or bottom of the pile.
Kinda dilutes my original point, but pedigree is still bloody important, though what “pedigree” is actually important can change from field to field.
Jennifer
The Japanese public school & university system seems to have taken the whole “college for networking” thing to its logical extreme. You may recall a few years ago where they did a comparison of American vs. Japanese schools, and found that Japanese high school students were far advanced in terms of education vs their American counterparts, but that American college grads and Japanese college grads were pretty much equal in terms of educational attainment. Delving deeper, it was concluded that the reason why is that university admissions in Japan are so competitive that high school students there do the equivalent of college in their high school years to make sure they can get into a college. Once they do get in, most of what takes place in college is social network building, rather than building on what was learned in high school. Thus, the equality of outcome after the college years – American college students essentially “make up” the deficit they show in comparison with Japanese after high school by buckling down in college, while the Japanese spend their college years partying and making contacts and social alliances that will be useful after graduation.
Mnemosyne
@Princess:
When you say “working class,” do you mean actual working class people who make less than $40K a year for the entire household, or the kind of people who make $200K a year or more but think of themselves as “working class” because they drive pickup trucks?
As far as I can tell, smart low-income white kids have just as good a chance of getting into an Ivy as a low-income black or brown kid. Many of the complainers seem to be kids from high-income families that have a social identity as “working class,” not actual working-class kids.
Roy G.
Any time a Douthat or Brooks type, or their Ivy League peers at the club say ‘meritocracy,’ it’s a dog whistle for ‘you got what you deserved, because you’re not good enough,’ and ‘we earned every penny of ill-gotten booty from the sweat of our brow at the Aspen Institute.’
? Martin
@Bob R.:
Any one of 9 UC campuses takes more undergraduates than every private you could name on the west coast. Pomona College has 1,500 students. We have majors with entering classes that size. Yale only has 5,000.
The reason that Pomona and Yale and Stanford can be affordable is that they are extremely small. They’re still elite schools, but along a different metric. They aren’t the way into the middle class except for a small handful of people. Let’s give them a bit more credit over the UCs when they choose to stretch the scholarship dollars for those 1,500 across to 40,000. UC has a quarter of a million students. Who’s really the path to the middle class?
Keith G
I do like the fact that Ross has begun conservative-based nibbling on the notion that “great sorting is not a good thing.
And this…
…should be inscribed on every voting machine in the country. From 1960 through 1984 only two nominees (both major parties)had degrees from either Harvard or Yale. From 1988 to the present all but two (Dole and McCain) had degrees from either Harvard or Yale. If one were to add in those who write and edit in the commercial media, the numbers would be gob-smacking.
We have a problem of exclusion as well as the challenges of intellectual and policy making incest. If Ross gets few more folks to think about that, hurrah for the effort.
Keith G
I have been moderated, please help.
RSA
@ArchTeryx:
Yes, this sounds very familiar to me, too…
Keith G
Let me apologize for what will be a double post. An offending word sent me to moderation, but since our overlords have day jobs and Tunch doesn’t care, I am resubmitting before the thread totally dies.
I do like the fact that Ross has begun conservative-based nibbling on the notion that “great sort” is not a good thing.
And this…
…should be inscribed on every voting machine in the country. From 1960 through 1984, only two nominees (both major parties) had degrees from either Harvard or Yale. From 1988 to the present, all but two (Dole and McCain) had degrees from either Harvard or Yale. If one were to add in those who write and edit in the commercial media, the numbers would be gob-smacking.
We have a problem of exclusion as well as the challenges of intellectual and policy-making inc*st. If Ross gets a few more folks to think about that, hurrah for the effort.
MCA1
@? Martin: I think the criticism was that large, land grant universities have as a general rule, based mostly on economic pressures from various directions, become more and more expensive vis-a-vis the top private universities, and that that undercuts their traditional mission. Because of a public school’s need to serve so many, and because the Ivies, Stanford, Notre Dame, Duke and the like all have endowments that dwarf almost any state school’s, the ability to make a $50k+/year education available to talented kids without much in the way of family financial resources is now skewed in favor of those elite private schools. When the price tag for a lower to middle class kid to go to Yale is lower than for the same kid to go to Berkeley, then the land grant institution’s basic function isn’t being fulfilled the way it was intended.
One other issue that hasn’t been addressed in the thread is the problem for those between the middle class and the 1%. We don’t need to shed tears for those making $250k/year, but that’s far too much to qualify for most aid, and simultaneously not nearly enough to support two kids in college at the same time. The system has put a ceiling on upward mobility through the cost of higher education. Graduate from a very good school and go the professional route, but if you don’t make the big time or you choose a career that isn’t extremely lucrative, you can’t afford to send your kids to the school you went to because the cost is 2.5x what it was 25 years ago. So now you’ve got a system where there are lots of kids from families who could probably get a lot of aid, scholarships and other assistance to give them access to the best schools, who don’t know the system well enough to know that; and kids who would know their way through the system but can’t qualify for any help. Both of them shy away from the elite schools due to sticker shock.
Kay
@RaflW:
Right, well people sometimes “wake up” when they have to :)
Thanks so much. It interests me because we still have a “traditional” union presence here. The place itself is overwhelmingly white, but “traditional” also has to do with what they do here, which is manufacturing or production of some kind, instead of service or building trades. I have an ongoing email exchange with a person who was a political organizer here who went on to labor organizing in FL, and he uses the term New Labor.
It’s a shame to me that political parties abandoned the whole idea of saying something immediate and true about what people make ($!), and what they do. I suspect they abandoned it because they don’t have anything real or tangible to offer to remediate it. Democrats stick to safety net and tax distribution tweaks and Republicans just scream “Reagan!” over and over again, or they do what Douhat does here, which is focus on the 10,000 people who are hugely concerned with whether someone else is taking “their place” at Yale :)
It’s politically potent only in a cultural resentment sense for Republicans, so while I understand why they do it, I’m impatient with it. It really doesn’t get the vast majority of rank and file Republicans anywhere. He’s wasting their time.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Mostly this. But there’s another category of families that have put all of their resources into getting into neighborhoods they can barely afford. They get the educational benefits of a high-income area, without the income themselves. That’s another cycle the admissions process is trying to break – just live where you can afford and you won’t be penalized.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I said it all along – nobody had anything nice to say about Willard unless they were getting a paycheck from him
? Martin
@MCA1:
That’s bullshit. I make ¼ that amount (household) and will be able to send two kids through any college they want. And that’s with living in one of the most expensive places in the country. The people I see bitching about the cost of college are driving $50,000 cars. I drive a $20,000 car. That’s a full year of college right there. The problem is that they want to live $250,000 lifestyles for themselves and then complain that they can’t afford what they feel entitled for their kids. Well boo fucking hoo. Go mow your own lawn and bag your own lunch every day and then complain. Financial aid needs to go to the people that can’t legitimately do that – the folks earning below median, below $40K. They’re already bagging their lunch just to break even.
And even there I’m going to make them take out loans for much of it. College is an investment, not an entitlement. Treat it as such. If you want to go study russian ballet history, great, but I’m not paying $150K for a hobby. And nobody else should either. If this is an investment on a career, then treat it like one. You can always go and study russian ballet history in your spare time after work. By extension, the universities are free to approach their academic programs as more practical efforts. It’s criminal that we admit so many students into disciplines that we know full well have no job prospects at all. Honestly, how many Anthropology BAs do you need to turn out every year in this country? You’ll never take them into graduate programs where they’ll have some prospect for a career, and you won’t give them any practical skills to take a job where they actually need workers. But feel free to load them down with debt, because that barista job they’ll wind up with is so lucrative that they should have no problem paying it off.
FWIW, if you start bagging your lunch the day your kid is born through the day they graduate high school, and you normally spend $7 on lunch, vs $1 to bag it (seriously, it’s that cheap), that works out to $1,500 per year/$27,000 over 18 years. In even a shitty investment vehicle (CDs) you’ll double it at least. $55K goes a long way toward sending your kid to college, and all it cost you is a turkey sandwich instead of a bacon cheeseburger.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: Good point about the fake ‘working class’ rich.
tommy dee
@? Martin: my Oakland kids didn’t cross the Bay, graduated from Oakland Tech, and attended UC San Diego and Princeton respectively. Just saying.
Bubblegum Tate
This Atlantic Wire article is a bit more expansive on the topic of EsoE vs. Crazy-ass Mail. Naturally, the Breitbrats screech that pointing out wingnut grift is “declaring war on the grassroots!”
I really hope this schism widens. Not just for the schadenfreude of it, but because it would be a good thing to reduce the amount of paranoia that hurtles into wingers’ inboxes/mailboxes.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin:
And this is a bunch of crap. Education should be something more that a job training program. Liberal arts programs, broadly defines, are about teaching students how to learn and how to apply what they have learned. How many careers exist today that did not exist 30 years ago? How many great, can’t miss career fields from the past no longer exist. If you go to school purely to prepare for a job, you may land a job when you get out of school but what happens as the world changes? Also, take a look at mid-career earning statistics for the liberal arts guys. They tend to be pretty good comparatively.
Honestly, sneering about BAs in Anthropology and studying Russian ballet history sounds quite like sneering about volcano monitoring.
rikyrah
@Bob R.:
I don’t think he gives two shits about the White working class. But, it is all about fostering White racial resentment, which is the only thing Republicans know how to do. Like the post from yesterday……the GOP won 60% of the White vote..and Willard got his ass stomped in November.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
I’ve spent most of my working career at corporations. An anthropology degree would have been enormously helpful in navigating the various corporate cultures. You’re confusing learning specific skills for a specific job with having skills and knowledge that will help you in the workplace.
I knew way too many aerospace engineers who ended up working at baristas in the late 1980s and early 1990s to think that there’s any specific degree program that guarantees you a job for life. One of them was the manager of the Crown Books I worked at in 1993 — it was the only job he could find after the industry collapsed. So, no, getting kids to focus on “practical” fields is quite often the worst thing you can have them do because they have no other skills if that field collapses.
Tyro
@? Martin: That’s another cycle the admissions process is trying to break – just live where you can afford and you won’t be penalized.
But regardless of the admissions process, the student will STILL be penalized because his education will be worse.
Jebediah
@Capri:
Was she disappointed to find out they distribute it, rather than pick it up?
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus:
In the good old days when the state was paying for it – I’m all in favor. But it’s cruel to encourage 17 year olds into disciplines, saddle them with $50K-$100K of debt, deprive them of practical training for 4 years, and then send them back out into the world with little better prospects than they had 4 years prior.
I’m all in favor of liberal arts, but let’s not ask our kids to pay for it all. If society wants it, then society should pay for it.
? Martin
@Tyro: No, that’s the point. The reason the education is worse is because too many of the people that had the means bailed out. They moved to a better town, they put their kid in private school, they took that voucher. They played their FYIGM card because they could afford to, rather than staying behind and investing in the school that needed help. They took their tax base and their stay at home mom volunteers and their PTA support and the put it into schools were the marginal benefits were limited. Rather than the old school getting their first physics class, the new school got a new diving platform because they already had four physics classes.
The only way to stop that cycle is to completely flatten the process. Take the top 10% out of every high school. Now, the calculus for parents changes. Are you better off being the 20% kid in the 1% ranked high school or the 1% kid in the 20% ranked high school? Under the old model it was clearly the former. Under holistic, it’s the latter. The goal isn’t to concentrate your academic effort in a handful of schools, but to spread it out as widely as possible. That’s what’s going to lift up these marginal schools. And the universities become allies in championing the cause because they’re now having to deal with underperforming students in a way they could previously avoid. They’re going to put pressure back on the legislatures to shift dollars more equally because it’s now in their self-interest to do so.
It takes time to fix, but this problem took time to create. And the admissions process can at least give everyone equal opportunity while it sorts out.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
Interesting blurb in the Houston Chronicle — admitting the top 10 percent of all Texas college students hasn’t increased minority admissions to the top schools (like UT or A&M) because minority students aren’t applying to those schools even though they’re eligible.
I think this is where we start to run into the problem of poorer kids going to school where they already have social support (ie near family and friends) rather than going to the best school they can get into. I moved 1,800 miles away to go to USC, but my brother and aunt were already established out here. I only know a couple of people (including my husband) who made a similar move without having any social contacts at all.
(Sorry, forgot the linky.)
MCA1
@? Martin: Wow, didn’t mean to touch such a nerve. Like I said, we don’t need to cry for anyone. Make it a two worker family pulling in $175k, then, with a takehome of around $125k. I would suspect they, too, are not going to be getting any aid, but if they’ve managed to save $100k for college and have two kids separated by four years, they’re going to be dropping fully 40% of their net on college during the 8 year period someone’s in school, right about the time they’re starting to think about when they retire.
It would, of course, be nice if everyone saved and scrimped the way you do and could salt away enough on whatever you make to put their kids through Stanford if they’re talented enough to get in. I can certainly relate to the annoyance with all the moral hazards I see driving Porsche Cayennes around with their young children every day. But the culture at large is your primary gripe, I think, where fully 3/4 of the population has a household net worth of less than $200k. With our consumer economy training most people the way it’s intended to, leading to very small savings rates, we’re just not going to get to the point any time soon where the average family with two kids is able to have half a mil on hand by the time they hit 18. Compounding interest isn’t going to get them there through 529’s, not in the markets the last 10-12 years.
The fact remains that the market where a lot of people put their kid’s college education money years ago has tanked twice since 2000, and they haven’t had anywhere near the 2x return you mention over that period. There’s also no getting around the fact that the costs of universities have continually outpaced not only inflation, and our generally stagnant equity markets from the last decade plus, but also the pre-2000’s, double every 8 years forever markets. Not to mention a housing collapse. Oh, you put aside a total of $50k over time, thinking it would double and get you 2-3 years out of four for Jr.? Well, it’s still at $50k, and by the way that covers freshman year now. Maybe. That all doesn’t excuse the fact that as a whole we’re spendthrifts and live beyond our means and aren’t fiscally responsible, but I don’t think it means everyone thinks they’re just entitled. Our savings rate sucks, yes, but what I’m trying to push at is another problem – that the accelerated costs of colleges have outstripped the rest of the economy by far, and have a negative effect, even on those who do make a decent amount of money and have been doing some saving. While we’ve got unacceptable income and net worth inequality from the bottom quartile all the way up, where we’re really unsustainable is the launchpad within the final 1%, where the top .1% is orders of magnitude ahead of those toward the bottom of the 1%, not to mention the 2%’ile. No matter how poorly some at the very top have managed their wealth, the college cost landscape changes don’t have any impact on them, but I would bet that for a large segment of the well-compensated but not superwealthy, even some of them who thought they were being prudent while their kids were young, very much feel the weight of a fifth or a quarter of a million for four years at an elite school.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, that’s definitely happening, but it does correct over time. It also helps when you have multiple universities doing the same thing. While any given one may not appeal to a certain demographic, others will (I went to a school that unbeknownst to me was known for being particularly gay-friendly – late 80s, no small thing). But if they can’t get admitted, you can never get that shift and reputation to take place.
MCA1
@? Martin: This is interesting. I know little of educational reform, etc., but it’s obvious to anyone who cares to see that the local property tax basis of funding for public school districts is a primary driver of inequity amongst schools, and inherently unmeritocratic. The problem has always been that it’s just a political non-starter to entertain any other system, since the primary beneficiaries of the current system happen to align pretty closely with political power. But if you can get at the issue from a totally different angle, that’s a powerful tool. Even if something like just admitting the top x% from any given school and no one else didn’t make state governments change their funding models for public schools, over time there would be a flattening of local tax base differences, as the rational economic choice would be for those of means to start moving to towns where their kids might face less competition. At first, it would be marginal moves – people in Westchester aren’t going to start showing up in the Bronx right away. But some of them move to the next town over, and some there move to the next town again. Eventually, enough people might move to have a legitimate impact over a few generations.
This might be an interesting way at getting at one of the anecdotal things that seemed truthy enough to me from personal experience (though it may be bullshit empirically), and was one of the interesting items that was predictably taken in entirely the wrong direction in that Charles Murray book a year or so ago. It’s the idea that our social hierarchy is becoming more and more stagnant as we shut ourselves off in enclaves based on tight economic status packing. There are a lot of towns nowadays where there is no “wrong side of the tracks” and a lot where there’s no “right side of the tracks,” whereas decades ago that didn’t seem to be the case.
? Martin
@MCA1:
So what? Look, I live in a city with a net median household income of $140K (I earn less than half that). I have these discussions every day. The guy across the street from me bitches about the cost of college. He’s got a fucking Lamborghini Gallardo in his garage. He blew his kids college money on a car. I’m not sympathetic. And he’s not an outlier.
And why are we trying to pay for the kids college on the fly. Did they not realize they had kids when they were born? Hello? You had 18 years to save up for college and have that money working for you. If you blew it on kitchen remodels and whatnot rather than on your kids than that’s nobody’s problem but your own. Every complaint boils down to ‘I didn’t plan, I prioritized other things, this is unfair’ and I’m fucking tired of it.
50% of this country earns under 50K. I could care fuckall about the 50% that earn over that number. And I’m one of them. Not only do they have means to get their kids at least part of the way there, and have the means to support their kids so that they can contribute to their own education, they’re still going to qualify for financial aid up to about $80K income, higher if they have more than one kid in college. These are already people in the middle class, and they have the means to stay in the middle class.
25% of the applications I read this year had household incomes under $10,000. These people have net worth’s of $0 or lower. I could literally fill a UC with qualified kids below the poverty line. They’ve busted their ass to qualify. They’re every color – and plenty of white kids from Bakersfield and San Bernardino too. They have no path to the middle class except for us. I’m not interested in solving the problems of burdened middle class people that simply want their cake and eat it too – the GOP is doing a fine job representing them. We at least have the $5 a day that we can choose to put aside, and failing to choose to do it just doesn’t get my sympathy today. The kids I’m looking at don’t have $5 a day to make that choice. Yeah, you may not earn enough to amass the $50K, but you’ll qualify for financial aid in that case. And as rapidly as tuition has increased, financial eligibility has kept pace. People that never would have gotten aid 5 years ago qualify now. So we’ve covered that.
The problem is the people that earn enough to save for college, but chose not to, or invested in stupid things. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t invest in equities without enough time for the market to correct, and make sure you diversify. Can we please stop making excuses for people with the means to achieve their goals, but who fail to implement them? There’s hundreds of kids in my pool that are looking forward to coming to college so they can have a bed of their own for the first time in a while. We’re talking an entirely different scale of ‘burden’ here.
MCA1
@? Martin: The horse was dead after the prior post. Rant not necessary, but thanks.
Perhaps I’ll divert to something more anodyne: You state that “people that never would have gotten aid 5 years ago qualify now.” As I’m not at the age yet where I’m looking at colleges for my youngin’s, could you elaborate? It’s not terribly common knowledge, I guess. At what point would a household not be on their own? I don’t have a clue how the system works – presumably parents who pull down $100k aren’t offered the same sort of package as parents who pull down $50k?
MCA1
@? Martin: Also, perhaps we can find common ground: can we agree that an economic/educational system in which a year at a really good school has an open market cost of approximately the median family income for that year is pretty ridiculous?
? Martin
@MCA1: Financial aid is indeed somewhat complex. Households are evaluated on ‘means to pay’. Student savings, parent savings, other assets, and income. As the cost of education goes up or down (which includes room and board and all other costs) your ability to pay changes.
Simplified, for a given income you are expected to be able to contribute $x. If the costs are higher than that, then financial aid puts together an aid package to fill the gap – grants, federal loans, other loans, scholarships, work study, etc. If your income stays flat and the costs go up, then that package grows, not your contribution.
When tuition increases, it’s normal that between 50% and 66% of the increase be diverted back into the financial aid pool. So, if tuition goes up $3, as much as $2 of that will be made available as loans or grants or scholarships. To a large degree, the top earners are directly subsidizing the bottom half to ⅔ of students. At this stage, ‘top earner’ is pretty close to $100K. But even in that case, there are typically loans available. I mean, the only thing a loan does is invert savings. Rather than growing your savings, you’re paying after the fact for not saving. Both stretch out the time you apply your earnings to pay for something, but one helps (you’re the lender) while the other costs (you’re the borrower).
If you have two kids, then your ability to contribute is somewhat split between them. It’s more like 60%/60% – you’re still expected to put more in (you should have known that you have two kids) but it’s not double. You’ll get more in aid packages for each student in this situation.
You may qualify for merit based financial aid based on student achievement which gets factored into the above.
Something else that people don’t realize – many universities, particularly privates don’t do need-blind admissions. That is, they know how much in financial aid they have available, and they will turn down high-need students even if they’re qualified, simply because they don’t have the funds to cover their aid. Publics either don’t do this, or do it at a much lower degree because it’s part of their charter. So again, low income students don’t get the same opportunities as higher income students, simply due to the fact that they’re poor, even if they are academically competitive. Being middle class assures your kid won’t be discriminated this way.
Tyro
@? Martin: Making universities crappy places by having a less competent student body doesn’t sound like a formula for success. Plus you have the magical thinking of “if only richer parents were forced to go to crappy schools, things would improve!” Second and third-tier state universities as well as community colleges have been bearing the brunt of students with poor secondary education for decades. The legislature hasn’t exactly responded to that.
Something else that people don’t realize – many universities, particularly privates don’t do need-blind admissions
True. But only the colleges and universities for which there would be little academic benefit of attending over the state university.
Ted & Hellen
This song is fine. You people are weird.