A low-income but high achieving American girl named Angelica wanted to go to Emory, a $40,000 a year university that has been deemed “new Ivy” by Kaplan. She initially qualified for financial aid, but it fell through for mysterious reasons, leaving her in the lurch. Her response was to take out a $60,000 private student loan without telling her mother. Her boyfriend cosigned the loan.
I’m sure you know where the story goes. She was unable to graduate and is now saddled with a huge debt while working a job that barely pays above minimum wage. The NY Times shed many tears over her situation, painting it as a trend that is contributing to America’s decline. The article made heavy rounds on Reddit and leftist sites as proof that class divides are becoming more rigid as the oligarchical elite takes control over the country.
Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net.
The story of their lost footing is also the story of something larger — the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions. Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.
The first thing I asked myself was, “What was her major?” The answer: psychology. Even if she did graduate, how would that bachelors pay off a $60,000 debt? Last time I checked, the only thing you can get with a psychology degree is an $18,000 a year job in a day care center or clinic. The Times didn’t see it that way. In spite of the fact that she had trouble graduating from a high school that was declared “academically unacceptable,” they saw no reason why she couldn’t be part of the 1% by going to a top-tier school.
“She was an extremely intelligent woman and an unusual one,” she said.
Yet even as Angelica’s work hours grew, so did the rigor of her coursework. Meetings with faculty advisers were optional and Angelica did not consult hers. When it came time to declare a major, she had a B-plus average in the humanities and D’s in psychology. She chose psychology.
By the end of her second year, she felt exhausted and had grades to show it. Her long-distance love life was exhausted, too, and she briefly broke up with Fred. She went home for the summer to work at Target and dragged herself back to a troubled junior year.
I challenge the notion that she was “extremely intelligent” if she got a D in psychology. Class divide had nothing to do with her failure—it was due to being in over her head while making a series of bad decisions, such as…
—Going to an expensive faux Ivy instead of a public college near her home
—Not doing the coursework, or even going to class
—Picking a major that would not have provided her with a good-paying job
—Hiding a huge financial decision from her parent
Blame should also be placed on her immediate circle:
—Her mother, for not knowing that her daughter couldn’t handle a tough college workload
—Her father, for being absentee
—Her boyfriend, for enabling a horrible financial decision that he himself is now burdened with
—Her high school guidance counselors, for encouraging her to aim beyond her competency
While I have some sympathy for her, since she didn’t have a father figure to aid her while the private loan industry preyed on her ignorance, I’d point the finger at just about everyone except “class division.” The Times dares to suggest there’s a new trend preventing Angelicas of the country from getting a good education, but I don’t buy it. Was there ever a time in America where the daughter of a single mom working at a department store could easily get a degree from an Ivy League college?
I went to a state school with a lot of bright kids who had a more stable background than Angelica, and while most of them finished school, some took longer than four years because of the difficulty, and this was with a tuition of $8,000 a year. That money was no small change for me, and I ended up taking out $17,000 in student loans. However, I lived at home, worked part-time for two years, and picked a major (microbiology) where I knew there would be a job waiting for me, just a few miles away in Maryland’s biotech corridor. My first year after graduating I made about $30,000, more than enough to pay my $180 a month student loan bill. While my major was the incorrect choice from a fulfillment perspective, it was a great choice financially. I thank my dad’s advice and my own career research for that outcome.
When anyone with a heartbeat and no money thinks they can easily graduate from an Ivy League school in a worthless major without having to experience difficulty, the problem becomes not one of class divide but entitlement. An elite private education and a $100,000 job is no one’s right, and not everyone is destined for an upper-class lifestyle. Unfortunately, some people–and their boyfriends—have to learn this the hard way.
Studies show 50-80% of intelligence is genetic. Generally speaking, poor people are poor because they come from shitty stock
Less and less correct, as society becomes less and less free.
“Intelligence”, whatever it means, is a valuable attribute in progressive dystopias. Hence, expensive. Hence, something that primarily wealthy people can afford to decorate themselves with. Hence, the more society gets rigged to become a self congratulatory echo chamber for progtards, the more “intelligence” is simply a measure of ones level of progtardism.
I’m referring to iq.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
@ Trr
The wikipedia article, read in its totality, doesn’t support your contention about poor people.
Read it again, and the bibliography, slowly and carefully.
The wiki article was to backup the claim about intelligence and genetics only.
The poor people part i heard elsewhere in a freakonomics podcast on parenting. Basically it was shown that it didnt matter how many extra curricular activities you put the children of high iq parents in, they will do well regardless. The same held true of children of low iq parents. Spending tons of time investing in these children did not have an effect on their level of success in life.
Even in the situation of twins separated at birth, with one given to a rich family and the other given to a poor one – twins finished at just about the same level in terms of financial success.
But thanks for the snark, much appreciated.
How are those studies measuring intelligence? What kind of tests?
test taking abilities can usually be trained.
I don’t buy that people are poor because they come from shitty stock. Is the best stock Chinese? Largest population, rapidly rising economy? I don’t really think so. I think the “shitty stock” theory is in line with the white supremacists comparing other races to animals. I think it’s a draconian and unsupported theory.
Take a closer look and look at race and iq.
-edit-
[Roosh: I don’t want racial differences in intelligence discussed here. There are many sites already for that.]
TRR,
I read the article. It states it is controversial and doesn’t have any backed up data besides tests, the substance of which we dont know. If you really believe poor people are poor because they are dumb and of “shitty stock” you should rely on more than one unsubstantiated, self described controversial study.
I think you just want to believe your own theory and are grabbing straws to find support.
Hi,
I don’t know what “shitty stock” supposedly refers to, but the single biggest predictor of a great many poor social and behavioral outcomes – including, for our purposes, poverty and chronic unemployment – is indeed general intelligence, otherwise known as the ‘g-factor’ (or simply ‘g’) within the intelligence research community.
Such associations have been ably documented empirically. And such findings have also been presented masterfully and professionally by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their excellent though seldom read and much maligned book published in 1994, The Bell Curve.
Moreover, behavioral geneticists have found general intelligence to be highly heritable, with between .60 and .90 of the inter-individual variation within a given population explicable by genetics. (Indeed, heritability measures increase with age, and some study samples have measured heritability to be as high as .90, as just indicated by the upper bound figure.)
That outcomes such as poverty, crime, and chronic unemployment, inter alia, are hence highly heritable is a reality which elites do much to avoid pronouncing to the general public. But it doesn’t make it any less true, as empirical reality does not owe us any particular favors, much as we might wish certain things to be the case. (As someone who was once an all-around liberal, I would dogmatically avoid such evidence. I eventually came around once I received a proper scientific edu
Complete nonsense. Intelligence & IQ are plastic…
You are Calvin Candie from Django Unchained.
Another fine post, Roosh. I went to an Ivy League college but I’ve come to believe that the elite status and attitude of these schools is counter-productive in society.
Everyone has contributions to make in life, and it’s much more important to focus on developing one’s own skills and talents than on joining some snobby club.
While the poor and unintelligent do not deserve an Ivy League, or indeed *any*, university education, the fact is that elite colleges and universities are practicing a rigorous form of racial quotas, to keep out Asian Americans and whites. Our top universities are the real race trolls, I’m afraid:
“Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.
Furthermore, the Harvard enrollment changes over the last decade have been even more unusual when we compare them to changes in the underlying demographics. Between 2000 and 2011, the relative percentage of college-age blacks enrolled at Harvard dropped by 18 percent, along with declines of 13 percent for Asians and 11 percent for Hispanics, while only whites increased, expanding their relative enrollment by 16 percent. However, this is merely an optical illusion: in fact, the figure for non-Jewish whites slightly declined, while the relative enrollment of Jews increased by over 35 percent, probably reaching the highest level in Harvard’s entire history.”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
I’m not gonna cry for the poor white christian male, but I do think racial quotas on whites and asians is bogus and harmful.
How is Harvard able to set quotas based on religion? I know they ask race on college applications, but do they also ask religion?
Therapsid says, “While the poor and unintelligent do not deserve an Ivy League, or indeed *any*, university education, the fact is that elite colleges and universities are practicing a rigorous form of racial quotas, to keep out Asian Americans and whites.”
Then he qoutes, “This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students”
OK so which is it? Elite colleges are “keeping out Asians” or there is a “very rapid rise in the number of Asian students”?
And yeah, how do colleges control for religion?
ROOSH IN 2016 !!!
Let us not forget that if the poor student was a white heterosexual male that the story would not even make it in the Times.
Not a male and not the Times, but still:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-new-castle-pa-trying-to-break-free-of-poverty/2012/12/08/f41f20ec-3985-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html
Pretty much right on. Only thing not mentioned is that this seems like a clear affirmative action case. She should have been a fit for a less expensive public school but since these liberal unis have de facto race quotas she rose to the level of her own incompetence by being promoted over much smarter white and Asian students.
This is another exaggerated NY Times article that takes anecdotal one example and extrapolates it to a bigger problem, undermining its own message and merely providing easy bait for people to blame the poor for their own decisions again. Unfortunately, the facts don’t support this narrative:
-58 percent of middle and lower income families actually rule out schools like Emory because of the sticker price, before they even get a chance to find out whether they will receive financial aid. More often than not, the Angelica’s of the world are not even considering ivys or fake ivys.
-Another study showed that 53 percent of high-achieving, low-income students do not even apply to a single competitive college. These are students in the top 1 percent of SAT ACT scores with at least an A- average:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/11/study-says-many-highly-talented-low-income-students-never-apply-top-colleges
-the sense of entitlement is far more pervasive at the middle class level than for lower income students. Around 80 percent of students whose families make 60k or above expect some form of merit aid for their “academic achievements,” compared to 64 percent of students whose families make below 60k. A large number of these students have average to abysmal SAT scores, but still expect merit aid, because schools give them out like its nothing. Merit aid is the bigger problem, because it’s usually given to students who can actually pay their own way.
-Yes, Angelica may selected the wrong major (though I don’t see how your bragging about making 30k right of school in the early 00s is particularly impressive, because I knew plenty of lib arts majors who made that amount or more during the same time period in the DC area), but more often than not the lower income students choose safer majors with a career path.
I wasn’t bragging on the absolute terms of that $30k, but how it more than offset whatever debt burden I entered.
Word.
I, as always, totally agree with you Roosh. The problem is that many people don’t think about what they wanna do, and take bad decisions without thinking what their real value is. It’s good to have dreams, but in my opinion knowing your own limits is something that people should try to learn and would avoid finding yourself stuck in this kind of situations. Little advice: do you know that american wages are simply ridicolous if compared to those of many other countries? If your country doesn’t let you have a high lifestyle, thinking about expatriating could be an idea to take into consideration=)
She is in trouble….My brothers GF is a college counselor in NYC, and she is always telling me about these “poor” kids who enroll for 2 years, drop out, and then default on their $18 in school loans…
School is an investment like anything else. My school loans were $35K, about $250 a month….I could pay them off working at a “Denny’s”. I still owe about $20K..
They should honestly start getting rid of some departments in these schools. NYU in manhattan charges kids $50K a year borrowed from the gov’t, and then the school goes around buying up real estate. The system needs a complete overhaul.
This girl’s specific case seems more like a story of studying the wrong major. She was obviously a decent thinker/reader/writer or she wouldn’t have made good marks in the humanities…so why not stick with that? Sure, there isn’t much work in the field with a bachelor’s degree, but she could’ve gone straight to a doctorate program or done something like Teach for America which forgives a portion of your federal student debt for every year you teach. Or any of many other choices.
And class definitely played a role because because students from wealthier socioeconomic backgrounds, most times, simply don’t come to these schools with the same baggage as people like Gonzalez. And lower income students most times don’t have the same level of family involvement, support/advice networks, etc that are extremely helpful in college and in navigating the post-college work world. And there are serious psychological and social behaviors that are indispensable in surviving poverty that are almost entirely counterproductive to forging a new path in an environment not defined by scarcity and violence (this I know from personal experience as someone who attended an Ivy after being raised in urban poverty).
While Gonzalez’s poor decisionmaking explains the lions share of her problems at university, I would wager that her difficult life beforehand seriously hampered her ability to engage in the dispassionate and informed decisionmaking that every burgeoning adult needs to be able to do. Class matters, and in America, it is beginning to matter more and more.
The liberals aren’t wrong about everything.
Teach for America wants mostly Science and Math teachers these days. All other majors face upwards of 400 applicants for each available position. Other than that, good idea.
Anyone can go to Harvard for cheap. Move to Cambridge get a job there doing whatever schmuck work necessary. Take extension classes at the employee rate, used to be 40 bucks a class. If you can do the work, you will end up with a shiny Harvard degree. It will take more then four years and you won’t get the sleepover/summer camp/road goes on forever party never ends experience of ‘classic’ college experience. But a good education with no debt is available for all(capable of doing the work.) I think the unspoken bit among the college for everyone crowd is everybody should get the 250k four year party and it is unfair some don’t, similar to the retarded old maid destination bday parties in lieu of a wedding.
“In the case of Yale and Harvard, if a student’s family earns less than $60,000 a year, they will pay nothing for their education.”
http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/college-planning/admissions/ivy-league-admissions5.htm
I know Stanford, Princeton and a of other very selective colleges are the same. The hard part is getting in, once you’re in you’re golden.
I find it hard to have sympathy for someone going to one of these private schools. They are paying an outrageous price, and in this case, because the girl’s grades weren’t good enough to get into an equally prestigious public school.
I know several smart graduates that didn’t have the grades to make it into the top public school in their state, so instead of blowing student loans on a second-rate education they are going to community college, working hard and getting top grades, and then transferring into a much better institution then they would have gotten into after high school.
This is very rewarding because they spend less money on the basic/core courses that make up the first two years of an education, they learn good study habits and spend less time doing keg stands, and they are more appreciative of the college experience when they arrive their in their junior year.
I think there needs to be stronger guidance and information about making the right choices. I find it nauseating that education is perhaps the 2nd biggest loan one will ever take out…. and you do it at such a young age. When your that young most people don’t truly know what they want, they go with a hunch and since they’re naive (which I don’t blame the for) decisions are made on weak grounds.
They now offer many Ivy League lectures online to view for free…if I watched the lectures, and took the same exam and passed…why would I not be allowed to get a degree from Harvard? because I don’t have 100 grand? Although your article was good and this country is full of people with entitlement issues.
Watch out, Tuthmosis may ban you for being racist writing articles like this
I believe that everyone should have a university education, subsidized by the government. Because, as a STEM professor, the higher-education bubble has been very, very good to me and I’d like to continue to ride it until I retire to my fortified, well-provisioned rural hideaway where I will ride out the imminent collapse of society caused by such stupidities as government-subsidized university education for every idiot who walks through the door.
Emory is an example of “worst of all worlds” — a middle-tier private school.
It is very expensive but it is NOT an Ivy League school and it won’t get you the prestige or connections of an Ivy.
Maybe there is a case for racking up big debt to go to an Ivy, but not for Emory, sheesh.
The actual top schools offer free tuition for low income students: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/9664/harvard-offers-free-tuition-for-low-income-students
Beat me to it, the article doesn’t mention it, but Princeton, Yale, Stanford and a few others have similar policies. I know some high school counselors and they don’t emphasize this to the poors enough. Too bad they didn’t have this when I went to college.
No!, to answer the question in the article’s Title.
No one deserves anything EXCEPT to play by the same rules.
A higher price tag for an Ivy League education is the same for rich and poor alike. I would have to assume that the entrance criteria are the same as well. If this girl could get accepted and enrolled, then she proves that there is no problem with the playing field. If anything, I see an unlevel playing field favoring the poor student who didn’t fit the Ivy League stereotype.
However, if she unwisely chose a Major league field to play little league ball, that was a bad choice on her part. Who’s responsibility is it to make choices and endure the consequence, if it’s not the individual’s? To make a bad choice anyone else’s fault or responsibility it to reduce freedom to collectivism, in which case we are all a guilty party to this girls poor choices.
To that I say, POPPYCOCK!
Suck it up, learn from the mistake and do something productive with the rest of your life. And for heaven’s sake, don’t ever, ever, use student loans for anything! It’s one of the few debts that will haunt you for life, even beyond Bankruptcy!
The problem with college nowadays is that everyone assumes future success by just showing up. Woody Allen famously said “80 percent of success is showing up.”
Finding that success through college might have been the truth back in the day, when only 20 percent of your class went on to college and your fellow coeds used it to marry high rather pursue a career (see “Mona Lisa Smile”).
Now that 20 percent is more like 80 percent. That larger pool of competition not only dilutes the value of that degree, but it raises the bar and the money required to distance yourself from the unwashed masses, that “shitty stock”. Commenter Trr is partially right in this respect.
Before college enrollment exploded in the 90s (University of Phoenix starting its online courses being the watershed moment), it was a way to gain access to the people who would get you hired, whether it was your professor’s friend in the industry, your rich roommate’s father running a hedgefund, etc. College was a marriage of the poor (or rich) and talented, with the simply rich and their money.
What happened the the last thirty years is that Academia saw a lucrative business opportunity to sell this dream to the general public. This college gold rush only intensified with diminishing economic opportunities, and the stigmatization of blue collar work.
In the mean time certain trends had emerged: the exceptionally gifted started bypassing college or dropping out early (Lebron James, Steve Jobs, Kobe, Zuckerburg, Google, etc.), jobs that used to require a high school diploma or vocational training only accept college graduates (general office work, fashion design). This created a culture of credentialism that values paying your way WITH CREDIT into a certain class rather than scholarship or merit.
That’s the big problem with a college education now. It’s a massive resource hit that doesn’t guarantee a way to replenish them or generate new ones. You have to be very discerning, intelligent and focused on what you are going to get out of it.
If you want to achieve great success, like the 20 or 1 percent, you will have to be massively gifted or socially savvy enough to leverage your connections. Otherwise you will get a poor return on investment.
“Lebron James, Steve Jobs, Kobe, Zuckerburg, Google, etc.”
Yeah, so Lebron and Kobe are extremely gifted athletes. As for Google, both Larry Page and Sergei Brin had already obtained a Bachelor’s degree before starting Google during their PhD programs. So I wouldn’t consider Google to be an example of people bypassing college (since clearly both founders got college degrees).
Additionally, if Jobs tried to pull the same stuff he did in 2012, he would’ve failed utterly. Both him and Gates were somewhat lucky to be young adults at the time they were, as in their late teens/early twenties it was prime time for personal computers to make their debut. Same goes for Zuckerberg. Really, all these guys got lucky more than anything else (FB definitely was not the first social network, timing was right and so was execution, I’ll give Zuckerberg that).
In short, for every person you can find that has been succesful without a college degree, I can probably find a dozen who used their degrees (and more likely the connections it brought) to be succesful.
Though I do agree with the rest of what you said.
Might be a late reply but Jpbs had connections so did Bill Gates
I have two Ivy league degrees. I have found that most people given opportunities to get to these schools and get good are determined by who you are born to and not your “genetic intelligence.” There are many dumb people that get the right training and tutoring to get into these schools and connections to get the right jobs. The genetic argument fails for me. I don’t buy it. Nurture>Nature
George W. Bush. Nuff said.
There’s no reason to expect Angelica to have made better choices considering her environment at home and in her community. Ignorance of upward mobility tools is pervasive in those sort of places. From the outside looking in, it’s easy to suggest better choices she could have made. For instance, she would have probably received a full ride to the University of Texas at Austin, UT’s flagship campus and a top-tier public university. Hell, even George W. Bush’s daughter and brother (former Florida governor Jeb Bush) graduated from there. She would have had many outstanding opportunities available to her without worry of financial stress. She probably would have also gained admission into Rice University in Houston which is a top-tier private institution with a huge endowment.
However, there’s no reason to expect Angelica to have known about this. At any rate, as a result of this high-profile plug from the NYT, I’m sure some benefactors have reached out to here; either wealthy individuals and/or organizations and maybe even admissions officers at some decent institutions willing to give her a chance.
I agree. The problems facing those of lower socioeconomic classes is they simply don’t have the tools and support to make good decisions when it involves complicated choices like she faced.
Roosh,
Excellent post and I agree. I went to a public 4 year college, worked part time, busted my ass to get decent grades and came from a poor family. I paid off my 12k student loan and managed to graduate with a 3.3 GPA while working 30 hours per week and study hard sciences.
Her psych degree wouldn’t be worthless at a top tier school if she had good grades. You can go into investment banking with just about any degree as long as your grades are good enough and your school is prestigious enough. I’m not sure that Emory makes the cut though.
So true! If you have a degree from top school in just about any major, it will open quite a few doors for you. Psychology is only useless if you don’t have any other personal or professional qualities to compliment it with. I am sure lots of recruiters from major companies come to Emory to seek out talent. What they are looking for is not a “useful” major. They know that no matter what you study in school, you will still be very green at your job right out of college and will pretty much have to learn everything. They are looking for motivation, work ethic and character. Some of the obvious signs of having those qualities are (1) being able to get to a great school; (2) being able to do well in a great school. Unless we are talking about accounting or computer science or a few other specialized majors, the kind of discipline you major in will be secondary, especially in such broader fields as business, management, pr, marketing, etc.
Emory is a good school. The student population is about one-third Jewish. Emory is the third leg of the triangle of prestigious private schools in the South (Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory). They have a strong alumni network and many graduates are successful in their careers. Not the place to go though if you have to work to stay in the game. Angelica would have been better served getting a full ride at a first-rate public institution (i.e. UT Austin).
Right on the money
The problem here is poor Americans like Angelica often have no financial education. Money is foreign to them, so they think a weesh college degree is worth the deep debt.
Don’t you have entrance exams in your universities in the US ?
Yes but the ability to pass standardized tests does not ensure the student will make wise choices once they are admitted. Lots of smart kids major in useless bullshit or flunk out through loss of motivation or excessive partying.
They’re starting to make those “optional” at some states’ public “State” universities.
Ummm…sometimes a cheap or state college doesn’t help either. I go to a college that costs the same as a state college (10k), and I didn’t get any help from my parents or gov’t or aid or whatever, so I’m gonna have to take out 40k to go to a crappy school that I didn’t even wanna go to. I took honors and AP classes in high school, had a 3.7 gpa, and got into all the colleges I wanted to go to. But I couldn’t, cuz i woulda had to take 200k in loans. so i have to go to some shitty college i didnt even wanna go to. and i have to pay 40k for it.
sorry roosh, but if someone works hard, they should be able to go to at least a decent college for free. other nations are able to do it. they shouldnt have to pay the price of a mercedes c-class. and u should have to pay some money to go to Ivy League, but not the price of a Bentley.
and btw…almost half of colleges give more scholarship money to rich students that perform worse than poor students.
“if someone works hard, they should be able to go to at least a decent college for free”
You can go to a decent college in the USA practically for free. There are many, many excellent state universities (which are subsidized by the government and thus can keep tuition low). You can’t go to a private university (much less an Ivy) for free, but there is no reason one *should* be able to do this. They are *private* — meaning they can charge whatever they want.
Or you could go to a local community college for the first two years to complete your general education classes and then transfer. I don’t care how smart anybody claims themselves to be, but if you pay 4-year prices to take standard college algebra or fulfill your state’s diversity requirement than you are an idiot.
You should drop this college before you spend money you don’t have. Get a job–any job–and work full time for two or three years, or do a stint in the military, and then go to community college part time, then transfer while continuing to work. You will have more cash saved up, and more real-life/non-academic work experience than many of your peers, which means you will look better to employers. If you look better to employers, you get successively higher-paying jobs. Frankly, most employers don’t give a shit about where you went to school, or for the fresh-out-of-college what your grades were outside of your major. Work experience is what counts above all else. Almost all employers prefer people with military experience.
Most large employers, from retail to professional, and all branches of the military, offer some kind of tuition assistance. Even the low-paid floor employees in MegaRetailLand are eligible, and also get some earned paid vacation, 401k matching, etc.
Doing this will also let you have a good hard look at yourself and help you figure out what you need, not want, to do with the rest of your life. If you really can’t afford to go to college right now, then don’t. Taking on huge amounts of non-dischargable debt to purchase a college degree is retarded, unless you are good enough to get into top-rated hard science, engineering, or medical programs.
In just about every state there are public schools that are just as good or even better than the ivy league private schools. They might not quite have the ivy reputation, but their admissions standards and curriculum are equal or better and more rigorous for half the price or less. Girls like this one in the article above should consider those public schools before deciding to spend twice as much on a private school.
Also, having heard stories from several of my friends who went to Cornell and a few other similar schools, it appears that some of those schools have reputation, rich kids, and… nothing else to back up their name with. They are hard to get in, but once you are in, studying is a breeze, but the snobbery you will have to deal with might just take the psychological toll on you that will make the whole experience not worth it, especially if you find yourself not fitting in with the rich, white, spoilt kids who suffer from chronic entitlement mentality.
I go to Cornell right now (third year) and let me tell you that not all Ivy schools are the same. Cornell happens to have ridiculous grade deflation and for most people the workload is heavy and stressful and it’s a bit difficult to get good grades. The Ivy schools are all great at offering income-based financial aid, but there are indeed a number of wealthier students, most of which are sadly just as you describe them. Bill Maher, an alumnus from the 70’s, said he hated Cornell back then and still did when he went back to the campus recently. For me, the main things that save the school are the faculty, grad students, experiences, and few good people I’ve met here.
yo what college? CALS, Ag, ENG, Hotel?
Don’t feel bad, Cornell was that way back in the early 90’s when I went there.
With the exception of lab work, education should have switched completely online over a decade ago when home broadband became affordable. This would have brought the cost of classed down considerably.
I think this would hurt us in so many ways – from making us miss out on listening to and learning live from a few inspiring professors that are still out there, to becoming even more isolated and less social than we already are due to spending too much time on Facebook, online dating, video games, etc.
“When anyone with a heartbeat and no money thinks they can easily graduate from an Ivy League school in a worthless major without having to experience difficulty, the problem becomes not one of class divide but entitlement. An elite private education and a $100,000 job is no one’s right, and not everyone is destined for an upper-class lifestyle. Unfortunately, some people–and their boyfriends—have to learn this the hard way.”
That’s gotta hurt.
Entitlement cuts across all classes. Just because your daddy was rich doesn’t mean you should have easier access to elite schools and jobs on Wall Street or The City. There are those who take advantage of such luxury, but many who are spoiled by a lifetime of entitlement. This, is also part of the problem. Although I know that doesn’t change the story with the example provided, just saying.
agree 100%
There should be no mistake why we keep traveling down the raod we are going in America. No one has to ever take blame for their poor decisions, and god forbid it be a minority. With the amount of information available today there is no one else to blame for your bad decisions except yourself. The going trend is that if you get a really expensive education you will be entitled to a fat paycheck waiting for you once you get your degree, regardless of the decisions you make. But the school of hard knocks is a self correcting system that will put your ass in check in a heart beat. However, with everyone crying out about recial inequality or social injustice for the poor, no one ever embodies the lessons you are supposed to learn form these mistakes, blame it on the rich bastards & society.
No mercy for these greedy lazy sheeps. LET them suffer! They took the free lunch (borrows)now they pay with their life (TIME)…A nation of people who will not work for what they want, who must rely on credit to get what they want, is a nation of welfare addicts.That’s what this global farm of cattle have been doing for centuries. And now it’s all coming to an end.
Arbeit macht frei. Work brings freedom. Hitter party slogan..
http://deathtothesheeple.blogspot.com/2012/06/poor-college-monkeys.html
“Taxpayers need to pressure lawmakers to keep public school tuition low, he said. [Ain’t going to happen unless everybody who has a loan out be KILLED, thus, balancing the accounts, and wiping the slate clean. It’s the only way.” HAHAHAHA
@ EvilGirl… wow ok, you are just an intolerable wench aren’t you… i hope to never meet the poor sap who would end up your spouse.
I feel that the notion of Inherent intelligence is very much akin to a notion of fiscal eugenics, utterly preposterous. If one can attain an Ivy collegiate education coming from nothing than I think it should be made available. Financial burden seems to be so much a factor here, but it is only the hurtle/ problem.
The ability to perform academically in any setting is no bearing to financial background. I came from a home raised by my grandfather who was career military from WW2 to Vietnam, raised in a trailer in Alaska and i have an Ivy League education because I made it available to myself. Hell i sold drugs to rich kids to pay for tuition, but the point is that i finished, because i had the resources to do so.
Angelica … sent a last-minute application to … Emory [which] promised to meet the financial needs.
…
But Angelica had failed to complete all the financial aid forms.
Feel sorry for the boyfriend. He never had a chance at a degree, an education, or a long-term relationship. She would surely have broken up with him and defaulted on the loans eventually. Now he is stuck with student loans he can never escape. This is because his stupid, immature girlfriend couldn’t be bothered to fill out the correct forms, apply to multiple schools, or wait a year.
“She initially qualified for financial aid, but it fell through for mysterious reasons,”
Mysterious reasons?
“A low-income but high achieving American girl named Angelica wanted to go to Emory…In spite of the fact that she had trouble graduating from a high school that was declared “academically unacceptable,”
So in what made her “high achieving, exactly?
I disagree. Crapola community colleges and many non-flagship colleges are fairly worthless outside of STEM majors. The courses are so ridiculously easy that graduate degrees are necessary to show that people have the necessary intelligence.
Whereas a bachelor’s from a good school is all you need for credibility.
At the crapola schools, it’s just memorize and regurgitate. Tests are multiple choice. Essay exams are used at good schools.
I strongly disagree that community colleges are worthless. They provide two key, legitimate educational services: a low-cost platform for transfer to good schools, and trade school education.
To the first point, a community college transfer program frees up many thousands of dollars that would otherwise be spent on the same curriculum toward the same goal. And if your goal is to earn a STEM degree, then the opportunity cost cannot be ignored.
For example, if you live in California, come from a not-wealthy background and don’t want to rack up tons of student loan debt, then you have two choices. You can either go to a Cal State school in your area, or a community college. The difference is that if you bust your ass at the community college for 1/10th the price of Cal State, then you can use the cost savings to finish your degree at a UC school instead of CSU. (If you don’t bust your ass, you can still transfer to CSU with significant cost savings.) Why pay more?
And to the second point, not everyone is cut out for a university education, as the article indicated with crystal clarity. Most community colleges have trade school programs for a wide variety of vocations. If your goal is to get a good paying job a few years out of high school, then are you better served with a BA in psychology with tens of thousands in debt, or an AA in auto mechanics?
People deserve better options than the student loan rat race affords. Community colleges provide those options.
Of course poor Americans deserve an Ivy League education if they can get in.
I looked at her SAT score and it appeared to be below average for that kind of school – usually the 25th percentile at private schools is around 1350 m/r. Standardized testing is a standard, it doesn’t care about whether you are poor or rich. SAT or ACT can be taken multiple times so why not try again?
for the first time i since i have been reading you I think you are making some really really uninformed generalizations Roosh. Not every low income person is a slacker like this girl. Emory is not on par with an ivy just because one magazine (not U.S News) deems it so. If you work hard enough to get into an Ivy you are by no means a slacker. If you work hard enough to get into an Ivy the Ivy will give you a full scholarship if you cannot afford to go. if they are hard working and will be debt free why shouldn’t a low income student deserve an Ivy League education. and to add the example you used didn’t even involve an ivy so the title does not match the story.