Dude, good coaches are expensive -- and the fancier they are, the more work you have to put into keeping them polished and in good repair. I'd much rather people put their energy into taking care of the horses, and just leave the coaches a little rough around the edges. It's just conspicuous consumption after all.
For some reason I find myself speculating as to what odds 18-yr-old Stanley (or whatever age seems to make sense) would have given to someone who told him, "I predict in the future you will initiate an internet discussion with the words 'Observing a horse show yesterday'."
Nice try, but the internet didn't exist when I was 18, Stormy.
So really, really long odds, heh? Mr. Implicitly-lying-about-your-age.
I'm not sure what your point is. I'm supposed to feel bad about hanging around horse people? Many of them pay obscene gobs of money to compete in a sport. That's true of a lot of people-with-money pursuits. As an outsider, it's kind of fascinating to take in, but I'm not paying obscene gobs of money to be there. I'm still guilty-by-association or something?
Anyhow, I thought there was a point about coaching to be made, but we can talk about rich people throwing their money at things instead.
1. The Gold State Coach is a pain to maintain, I bet.
Holy Aggressive Defensiveness, Stanster! My comment was merely speculating that the set of future trajectories you envisioned for yourself almost certainly did not include "horse shows" and not for any class or money reasons. And similarly for coon hunts, tractor pulls, scrap-booking or any other number of such activities.
And I thought Stanley was misreading 1 in 5.
7-8: I suppose I'm bearing my own discomfort with the conspicuous consumption on my sleeve. Anyway, I did not, at age 18, envision dating a horse vet, but it also doesn't strike me as something I'd have seen as wildly improbable.
Yes, the horse wars were in full swing then.
I did not, at age 18, envision dating a horse vet, but it also doesn't strike me as something I'd have seen as wildly improbable.
And that is not at all what I described as "improbable"--it was the specific opening line, plus being a front-page poster on a blog at all--all of that. Plus ... never mind.
There were no blogs when Stanley was 18, though I guess you did just say "initiate an internet dicsussion".
And, I'm off to swim go play music with my hipster friends now.
And yes, many, many coaches suck.
I didn't realize Thundersnow was a vet -- I thought she was just a horse hobbyist (or, a horse, but we've been over that).
Buck is now jealous, or will be as soon as I mention it: he tolerates me, but his dream woman has always been a large animal vet.
but his dream woman has always been a large animal vet.
So Joey with the right sex?
Off to swim lift and treadmill. Maybe my attempts at humor will get less stupid (or baffling, anyway).
I ran 6.8 miles yesterday. My Achilles tendon hurts.
Both of them, now that I think of it.
A friend in college - a talented rider - competed on her school's equestrian team. She feuded with her coach for two years and gave up the sport, other than to ride for pleasure. On the surface, my friend was very stubborn, but anyone who spent any time with her would figure out that she reacted well to positive feedback. Her coach never really figured that out. It was a lose-lose for both of them, at least in the short term.
Maybe the horse needed negative pressure?
There was no argument that the coach took good care of the school's horses. She had a little trouble with the humans, including my friend. (In my friend's competitions, riders were assigned horses at random, and the horses being assigned were owned by the host school. So the meets were a contest of how well riders could ride unfamiliar mounts. The format favors the home team, so all the schools in a conference make sure to host a meet.)
Friday Night Lights is in fact the sum total of my experience with coaches.
I always had good experiences with coaches. Maybe it was that I was normally in local leagues, instead of being on an official school team or a "travel team" that represented my entire suburban area going up against other suburban areas. (until age 13 through 16, when our local league shrunk to 2 teams of kids who A] wanted to play soccer all the time and B] didn't aspire to greatness so we had to start traveling 20-30 miles for games)
Never had a coach who blew everything out of proportion and tried to motivate through fear. The main problem was soccer coaches who did not know anything about soccer and occasionally tried to get the better of us to play sports that the coach thought were more manly.
Looking back I think every youth soccer team I was ever on played a 3-4-3 formation, because it was easy to conceptualize. Center, left, right fullback. Center, left, right midfielder (or "halfback" as we called it). Center, left, right forward. And then the best player on the team was put in the middle and told to either help out defensively ("stopper") or help out offensively ("sweeper").
"try to get the better of us" s/b "try to convince the b better players among us"
And similarly for coon hunts, tractor pulls, scrap-booking or any other number of such activities.
I've been meaning to mention that, on occasion, I look at merchandise online, and recently I saw a category of purses which was labelled "Totes and Hobos" and of course I thought of Stanster.
Also, that Stormcrow. What an asshole.
I googled some stuff and it turns out that Achilles tendinitis is a whole thing and very common. Also, I should be stretching/strengthening my ankles and calves if I'm going to keep trying to run greater distances. Also, I should have started doing this stretching a long time ago, before my tendons hurt when I go down the stairs.
Did everybody know this and not tell me? I guess I assumed that trying to run at my age was supposed to hurt for some kind of veldt-related reason.
33: I went through exactly that process, but it was my knees, and I suppose people really did tell me. Then I got fancy barefoot-style running shoes to make my knees feel better, and my achilles tendon instantly started killing me. Lately I've been doing achilles tendon stretches and that hip exercises that ttaM's PT says is good for the knees, and hopefully next week I'll try running again (I mostly haven't been doing it for a year).
I had achilles tendonitis. It took a year to get better. Good times.
Buying shoes from a person who knows something is also in my plans.
After I get a new pair, you can have my old ones for free.
Looking back I think every youth soccer team I was ever on played a 3-4-3 formation
every team I ever played on, after tactics became a thing other than scurrying after the ball in a solid block, went 4-4-2 because anything else would make you a race-enemy. ttam has probably had the same experience.
Soccer for five-year-old kids played in a gym is great, except for the not laughing at kids part.
achilles tendon stretches and that hip exercises that ttaM's PT says is good for the knees
Will you e-mail me with these, please? Thanks.
It becomes increasingly clear that I'm stuck in a demented game theory exercise.
47 a continuation of this this I assume. I think you're just supposed to lie back and enjoy it; It's the "rational" thing after all.
More seriously, is it something where there might be institutional help, or does the context make them not helpful or actively harmful? Was not clear how you were linked into the "trip organizers".
Whoah! I hadn't seen the comment linked in 48. You know, since you're presidential, there's really no reason not to go into some detail.
As far as consequences for you personally... yeah, nothing'll happen.
But wow I would really like to know who is pushing this, and why they're so pissed, assuming I know all the details about what happened like I think I do.
Or oh, wait. Is there some question as to the mechanism via which bills were paid?
I think it's likely that when the people who are flipping out file the report they plan to submit to a(n unidentified, to me) government agency tomorrow, they'll be laughed off. I'm way out of my depth in understanding their culture, though.
To sum up, I am totally fascinated.
You could email me about it, though, if you have my email address.
52: That's ostensibly the reason why this seems to have escalated so much, although there may be cause to think it's actually related to a preexisting vendetta. In any case, all bills were paid with personal credit cards.
although there may be cause to think it's actually related to a preexisting vendetta
Ooooh!
Anyhow, the legal stuff sounds like absolute nonsense. Hopefully none of the pre-existing interpersonal animosity harms your current election campaign or worsens your nagging pneumonia.
An email has been sent. I can explain more, although it all sounds rather silly. Some of the communications have been pretty scary-sounding, though, and I think the local acquaintance is in real danger of losing his job.
Are you sure none of the other Americans you were in the bar with didn't try to do anything really stupid?
Absolutely sure. We were all in the same room the whole time, in plain sight of each other. Unless getting way too drunk is "really stupid," which in this context maybe. But only one was drunk enough to have a hangover the next day.
Huh, on re-reading the earlier comments I feel really rather embarrassed about my reaction. Sorry for flipping out at you, Stormcrow.
or worsens your nagging pneumonia.
Super pneumonia! Don't let them throw any snakes on you.
Working link. Hopefully. I blame Stanley.
Better link without the boring beginning stuff--right to the leeches and snakes.
Sorry for flipping out at you, Stormcrow.
Not a problem even one little bit (and it was hardly "flipping out"). As far as the horse stuff goes, I assume you may have seen Something to Talk About? I quite liked it, but it seems to have gotten distinctly mixed reviews. Touches a bit on "coaching".
My gout is still with me, for anyone who was keeping score. This really is an order of magnitude worse than any other gout attack I've had. I'm going to start working out and continue to try to eat healthily for real this time! Having important body parts continue to malfunction on a regular basis is really dragging me down.
66.2 Haven't seen that but I'll suggest it to T-snow. War Horse is actually the first time we went to the movies in nearly a year and a half of dating, which seems like a long time to date someone without going to the cinema, now that I think about it.
Speaking of large-animal vets, one of my dad friends was one. When I was little, he came over for a cookout. He looked at our dog from across the yard and told us, correctly, that she was pregnant. It seemed an impressive trick.
68: I'm certainly in no position to criticize, given how many traditional dating practices I've eschewed, but yeah, a whole 18 months without going to a movie? That is kinda odd. Of course, the kids these days with their bit torrents and their tweetin and the hippity-hop music!
I'm going to start working out...
Pain is little crystals of monosodium urate leaving the body.
69: I was impressed when the vet we took our beautiful cat to, immediately upon rescuing her from the streets, did a pregnancy test that consisted of grabbing the cat by the scruff of the neck, reaching under and gripping the cat's belly and kinda going wubble-wubble-wubble back and forth, then pronouncing "Yup, feels like there's something in there!" Long distance visual pregnancy testing is pretty neat though. Did he ever try it on people?
69: well, she'd confronted him at the office a couple days prior.
71: As long as the crystals stay little, it's copasetic.
72: Manners would have stopped him, one assumes.
73: The bitch. Damn you, Tweety.
People tend to object to the wubble-wubble-wubble test.
77: It's mandatory now in Virginia if you're considering an abortion.
Bob McDonnell's forthcoming political book, detailing how he screwed up his chances of becoming VP, address the matter and is tentatively titled Wubble-Wubble, Toil, and Trouble.
Wubble-Wubble, Toil, and Trouble
aka Everything I Know About Sluts' Women's Sexual Health I Learned From Rush Limbaugh
I don't think my dad thought our dog would wait until marriage. I think he just forgot about taking care of the dog, possibly because of confusion over whether girl-dogs get spayed or neutered.
I still remember my proudest moment of high school football was playing at left back when we beat a far, far better team 2-0 by playing classic 4-4-2 with a flat back line, a tall guy & and a wee guy upfront, knocking two or three long balls into the box, and defending like fury for the other 88 minutes.
But only one was drunk enough to have a hangover the next day.
On a business trip? That's impeccable behaviour. I'd be astonished if your folks back home didn't laugh it off.
Trouble is, not knowing where you were makes it hard to interpret. Is this bar mobbed up? Part owned by the Assad family? Heavily in debt to the cops? Who knows? I'm guessing you don't.
a whole 18 months without going to a movie? That is kinda odd.
When Tweety and I first started dating we didn't go to the movies. We would talk about maybe seeing this or that, but never actually go. When we finally did try to go see something, several months into dating, there was a fire alarm and the movie theater was evacuated. It got to be quite a joke.
I think the first movie we managed to see together might have been the Harold and Kumar sequel.
83.2: I was assuming the illicit activity was prostitution, but I guess it could be lots of things.
re: 85 That was my assumption based on the mysterious commentator's previous comments.
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I am trying to decide if I should bother to vote in tomorrow's election. The only "contested" election is for town committee. There are 34 names on the ballot, and I'm not supposed to vote for more than 35 people. I have no idea who any of these people are.
The real town election isn't until April.
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Well, I do know that my State Rep and State Senator are on the ballot. It would be pretty strange if they weren't on the town Democratic committee. There are 35 slots, so I think that the slate will win.
Honestly, I found it easier to follow DC local politics than my small town's.
We're now being told that the government will not follow up on the report that was filed, and it's now very plausible that the whole thing was drummed up due to some kind of long-running interpersonal feud and was all about trying to prevent the local acquaintance from getting a job offer from a particular institution. My standards for what counts as nasty workplace politics have now been completely revised.
89: Whew. That makes a lot more sense than any of the other options, but still seems pretty scary to me. now you know what you should do is kick back and relax and I know this little place....
Part owned by the Assad family?
I can understand not liking their guitar playing, but this seems a little extreme.
I cannot repeat some of the things my college coach screamed at our team.
He has toned it down in the last decade though.
a whole 18 months without going to a movie?
We've probably seen 5 movies at the movie theater in 8 years.
Probably fewer than that. Mrs y finds the volume of the soundtrack in theatres intolerably loud (I'm inclined to agree), so we don't go unless there's some ulterior motive, like it being somebody else's birthday or something.
93: I'm at about half that rate. I don't get anything at all from: 1) The screen being big 2) The sound being loud 3) The surrounding people fucking with their phones 4) The search for a parking space 5) The lack of a "pause" button.
I do sort of want to see the new Tim Riggins/space alien movie, because Tim Riggins and space aliens.
92: Apparently abuse is a motivator for some people, but for me it'd just mean dropping the sport. Which might end up being to the net benefit of the team, but still...
I know I've talked this about this before but my elementary school gym teacher was a former Hungarian olympic soccer player who firmly believed that all five-year-olds needed was intense discipline and shaming in order to overcome their unconscionable deficiencies on the field. Pretty much turned me off team sports (well, coached sports) for good.
Yeah, movies (especially in a theater) aren't anywhere on my priority list. Now that the days are getting longer (2mins/day!) it seems even less likely that we'll go to any.
One year, my tkd team brought in a (woman - three time world champ, lightweight) coach from Korea, who would hit us with a broomstick across the back of the thighs if we missed a drill or weren't fast enough. It hurt a lot. But it was the fastest I've ever been. I'd bet money that no one on the team ever complained about it to the head coach, but she must have gotten pulled aside, because hitting us stopped abruptly after about four months.
The thing I think she missed is that by the time you're on a college team here where we have tons of options, including doing nothing, the kids who choose the cult are really driven. They'll punish/shame themselves if they miss something, and they'll show up and work out just because they believe.
Or maybe not, because we all got faster the semester she hit us.
I sailed for an old guy who would yell if you fucked up or occasionally swat at a crew-member who wasn't moving fast enough in response to an order. I thought he was great, and we won a lot, but I usually agreed with him as to the merits of the decision to yell/swat in any given instance: he was perfectly reasonable as long as you did everything right and quickly. There were definitely people who stopped sailing for him because of the affront to their dignity, though.
Wilt!
(Dang it ... 50th anniversary of that night was 3 days ago and I keep trying to catch one. Kobe = Wilt9.)
100: I wonder if she would have gotten the same results with a tap rather than a painful blow -- that you're right about the motivation of it all, but the hitting served a pedagogical function in vividly communicating errors.
My wife just read to me from the continuing education catalog that came in the mail: Wedding Boot Camp.
I'm imagining John E as a drill instructor.
I still remember my proudest moment of high school football was playing at left back when we beat a far, far better team 2-0 by playing classic 4-4-2 with a flat back line, a tall guy & and a wee guy upfront, knocking two or three long balls into the box, and defending like fury for the other 88 minutes.
The U.S. women's national soccer team plays a version of this, with tall Abby Wambach and a smaller forward (e.g., Alex Morgan) up front. Works very well, although they just lost to Japan at the Algarve Cup 0-1.
50th anniversary of that night
Now I guess I'll have to point on the doll where Wilt touched me.
I doubt the usefulness of making athletes afraid to screw up. It might be less harmful in more pure effort based sports, but when they have to make decisions it seems likely to be harmful. Besides, sports are supposed to be fun, and being yelled at and humiliated isn't for everyone.
I dunno. After the first time, I really scrambled so she wouldn't hit me again. It hurt!
But a coach I loved might have gotten similar results by having us race each other, or just by inspiring us and calling out slacking.
I dunno. After the first time, I really scrambled so she wouldn't hit me again. It hurt!
But a coach I loved might have gotten similar results by having us race each other, or just by inspiring us and calling out slacking.
107 is confusing if you read "Wilt" as "Witt".
108: It's probably not generally a good idea, and usually for teaching I'm all about the positive reinforcement. But if the expectations are reasonable, and you trust the judgment of the person dispensing the punishment (that is, it doesn't seem arbitrary) I think it can work fine.
4-4-2 with tall forward and small forward is about as traditional as it gets. It's the standard neanderthal British football tactics. Strikers traditionally break down into lumbering target-man [for the headers and the barging] and small sleekit devious fucker [for turning the oppositions brains inside out].
The only coach-hitting I ever experienced was in swimming, when we'd practice starts off the block. The coach would say "Take your mark. Hup!" and then swing a kickboard towards your backside. If you didn't get off the block quickly enough, you got smacked, but it didn't hurt. It was just embarrassing, er, um, I mean motivating.
Come to think of it, there's a lot of negative reinforcement built in to learning kickboxing, or grappling.
Tkd has these double kicking pads, where if you get them to slap together, they make a giant noise. They're padded, soft, so when I taught white and yellow belts, I would occasionally swat a slow one on the backside. The same Korean coach who would hit us with a broomstick saw that, and told me that I wasn't allowed to hit students. That was I realized she must have heard from on-high that it isn't allowed at Berkeley. Right, lady. Yes ma'am.
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Today the novel writer and I are debating the college loan system. He seems to have heard about for-profit colleges, and not to have distinguished between accredited public/non-profit colleges and for-profit colleges.
His solution is that schools should have to fund all of their own student loans, so that if the student defaults, then the school eats it, instead of the government.
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His solution is that schools should have to fund all of their own student loans, so that if the student defaults, then the school eats it, instead of the government.
To be fair, that would be kind of awesomely hilarious to do to for-profit schools.
Wouldn't that give schools a strong incentive to only teach rich kids?
Obviously I hit/kick people all the time at my sport-thing. I don't really do it in a consciously motivational sense, except at the level of 'parry this punch; oops, too slow'. But there's no real hierarchical element, they are just as likely to hit me if I'm slow. I could probably up the power a bit, sometimes, though. As a couple of people who train in our class got a bit of a shock at their first competition.
I'm not a big fan of deliberate humiliation, or infliction of pain as a learning tool, though. It's not much of a thing in the martial art I do compared to Japanese/Korean stuff, in my limited experience of the latter.
I'm not a big fan of deliberate humiliation, or infliction of pain as a learning tool
Only for pleasure then? Hey, whatever gets you through the night.
Not really sure why if we're OK with humiliation/corporal punishment in athletics we shouldn't also be OK with it in academics. I probably would have learned all the parts of the feral pig in high school bio if the punishment for not doing so was being hit with a stick.
Wow, I would have learned all the parts of the pig if we'd used a delicious feral pig instead of the fetal pig we had.
Stick beating would have taught me to spell. And think.
122: Well, I'm not wholly on board with beating athletes with sticks, but I think there's an important distinction around voluntariness. You have to go to school, you don't have to play a particular sport.
As long as there's somebody that can be beaten with a stick.
Like you don't have to shop at Wal-Mart.
No one needs to play a particular sport, true, but being able to do some kind of athletics is an important part of human life and about as important as most of what people learn in school. Having kids who suck at sports driven away permanently from athletics because of asshole coaches (reader: this was me, until my late 30s) is a really big problem.
I'm ok with coaches hitting kids with sticks as long as there is no punishment, legal or administrative, if the kids choose to bash them with a baseball bat in return.
The way law school tuitions have gone up over the last 10 years, as, I think, a direct result of policies that make schools utterly unconcerned with repayment, I'd be plenty willing to end federal programs for grad school. Absent some kind of Congressional finding of a shortage if some narrowly defined field, which justified a 2-4 year loan subsidy program of some kind.
Undergrad I'd be more sympathetic to, but with a fairly low cap. No one needs to go to Cornell.
That's perfectly right about the assholes. I guess I was speaking up for a certain amount of minor violence/negativity as compatible with one style of being a good coach/teacher.
a certain amount of minor violence/negativity as compatible with being an effective wedding boot camp drill instructor.
I'm not wholly on board with beating athletes with sticks
Keegan's last hockey tournament of the season just ended (this weekend was Delaware; the previous weekend was Nashville). So now his lacrosse season is in full swing, where the players beat each other with sticks for practically the entire game, relieving the coaches of any such obligation.
101; IME sailing always involves yelling, due to the nature of the beast, unless everyone is super efficient already. The swatting I am surprised at. I can't see why the skipper would even waste their time. Shoving out of the way, sure.
Oh, I'm not even counting yelling in the sense of raised voice -- you're on a boat in the wind and you need to do things fast, everyone's yelling all the time.
Swatting at people and yelling with negative emotional content happened very occasionally, and was for someone failing to start moving in response to an order. We were teenagers, and some were lacksidaisical about moving fast.
http://www.dfa.cornell.edu/treasurer/bursar/studentsparents/tuition/index.cfm#CP_JUMP_45030 vs. http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=103
4-4-2 with tall forward and small forward is about as traditional as it gets.
Bring back the 2-3-5!
I'm ok with coaches hitting kids with sticks as long as there is no punishment, legal or administrative, if the kids choose to bash them with a baseball bat in return
This, yes (although I am not sure about a literal baseball bat). We had a shouty arsehole games teacher who seemed to regard being decked once a year by one of the lads on the eugby or football teams as part of the cost of doing business.
Cornell is a state school!
Only half. Although Charley's links in 139 seem to indicate that tuition for the public half is roughly in line with other SUNY schools.
139 -- so, the state school portions of Cornell are a little more expensive than a SUNY. Still about 1/2 the cost of any other Ivy League school. Go Big Red.
Natilo, my grandfather used to swear by cherries for getting rid of gout, and there's apparently some scientific evidence backing it up -- something in the cherries (and other dark berries) helps your body get rid of the acid before it crystallizes. It's not a cure, but drinking cherry juice might help prevent recurrence.
Apparently, there are substantive reasons not to attend Cornell.
In state tuition SUNY Oneonta: $6,596
In state tuition Cornell: $25,185.00
It's not perfectly clear to me that the former is full year, rather than a semester, although I rather suspect it is. I guess Cornell students don't need to eat, and can sleep outdoors. Camp down by the lake, and live off fishing and trapping squirrels? Not really Ivy after all, I guess.
Still about 1/2 the cost of any other ivy league school, which Carp has chosen to ignore because his brain was eaten by a bear.
I mean, if you're going to bemoan the high cost of higher education, have at it, but there are so many worse offenders.
Of course. And there's no reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing them through a general unaccountable loan program. Only rich people can go to Bennington is just not that tragic an outcome.
Cornell is about to build a massive science and tech campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River. Camping there would be tough.
148: Isn't Bennington rather generous with scholarships? I know several not-rich (before or after they attended!) alums.
I know several not-rich (before or after they attended!) alums.
Fancy horsing set! Privilege!!!
Hmmm, that might not have been the best choice of words to excerpt and italicize. I feel shame.
Charley's point is a reasonable one, although Halford is right that Cornell is kind of a weird example to pick given its unusual institutional setup. I'm not sure private v. public is really the most important axis here, though; public universities can also be pretty damn expensive.
Furthermore, it's quite plausible to think there's a societal interest in ensuring that the fancy colleges that bestow enormous amounts of social capital on their alums are not limited completely to the already-rich. On the other hand, there's not much evidence that the current student loan system is doing much to stop that from happening anyway.
John Quiggin had a post at CT a while ago expressing shock at discovering how small the Ivies are (compared to institutions of similar caliber in other countries). He was like, "but this will only lead to the further entrenchment of the privileged elite!" My reaction was basically "Well, yeah. That's kind of the point."
"At the top of our rankings for the 11th consecutive time, UNC-Chapel Hill stands out on virtually every measure of quality and affordability [...] UNC-Chapel Hill also ranks number one in value for out-of-state students."
If joking about Halford's misspent youth is wrong, I don't want to be right.
My youth was mostly misspent, but at least I got laid. The same can't be said for Teo, so stay away from Cornell.
140: BRING BACK THE 3-4-5!
Yeah, I don't really recommend Cornell for most people, especially people like me.
158:
Florida and UNC in front of UVa!??!! Are you kidding me?
Nobody would go to those schools instead of UVa. Unless you were a basketball or football player. Or maybe just wanted to go to a party school.
Also: Another Durham prosecutor goes down for being bad.
The list in 158 was totes rigged.
Actually my most recent undergrad institution is something like twice as expensive as it was when I went there, so oh well.
Furthermore, it's quite plausible to think there's a societal interest in ensuring that the fancy colleges that bestow enormous amounts of social capital on their alums are not limited completely to the already-rich.
Teo is, of course, entirely right. Especially as employers move farther and farther away from any kind of apprenticeship model, and instead rely more on sorting mechanisms and proxies for ability that have been refined by elite colleges and others earlier in the pipeline.
On the other hand, there's not much evidence that the current student loan system is doing much to stop that from happening anyway.
There's an argument to be made that it is at least mitigating some of the consequences. Couple of links coming in a minute, when I can pull them up....
It's such a tough problem. On the one hand, I sometimes think that if you made clear that e.g., Yale was just for rich people, then we'd have a broader social recognition that the fancy private schools really aren't "better" in any remotely meaningful sense than equally academically good, much cheaper and more accessible colleges, e.g. UCSD. On the other hand, when Yale was full of rich preppy morons it was still very prestigious and still bestowed an enormous amount of social capital, so maybe we'd just be walling off our elite even more. On the third hand, maybe even within the fancy institutions much of the social capital depends not on the school itself but on who one's parents were.
In conclusion: My head hurts.
OK, here we go. Penn State student dances in NYC subways to raise tuition money.
It's hard not to read an article like this as an indictment of our educational system. Obviously he's determined and dedicated, but how is schlepping from Central PA to NYC every weekend going to help him concentrate on schoolwork, not to mention build the kind of research/mentoring relationships with professors, study abroad experiences, or other kinds of informal networking that will make his college degree truly worthwhile?
The more we cut student aid,* the more we're putting a thumb on the scale of the students whose families are savvy, well-prepared, and with-it enough to give their kids a running start. That's not what this country is supposed to be about.
*And I say that as someone who think colleges that irresponsibly recruit unqualified students into non-discharageable debt are guilty of gross misconduct and ought to be prosecuted.
Maybe this will make your head feel better, Halford. A refreshingly optimistic, pro-active report on the factors that help young black men succeed in college.
Get this: The researcher actually went and asked successful students to reflect on their experiences. What a concept.
Then, with 200+ qualitative interviews under his belt, he turned the study into a clear, forceful recommendations. One of them being that lack of financial stress is important in helping students persist. No surprise there, but good to see it documented.
169 gets it right. What kind of buffoon would work during college, instead of going into massive debt? Yglesias and Tyler Cowen have taught us that the theoretical college wage premium on average is so huge that you'd be well advised to spend half a million dollars on college, let alone the piddling sums no doubt involved in going to Penn State.
171: I'd tend to assume that that kid is both working and going into massive debt, wouldn't you think?
I think Ned was being sarcastic.
I will say that my own beliefs on this issue have evolved. For a long time I was pretty righteous about the value of working and going to college, since I felt it gave me a pretty different perspective than the kids whose parents were paying for everything.
But as I've gotten older, I've had enough experience with young people, especially first-generation college students, that I've come around to thinking that while 10-15 hours a week of work, especially on campus, is still a good idea, 30+ hours off campus may not be.
I'm a little confused. I thought the original point of contention upthread was that Ivy League colleges don't necessarily give an education superior to that provided by various state schools, so students might be better off incurring less debt by going to the latter. It was then pointed out that the social capital provided by an Ivy was still superior to that of most state schools, and so a student might should want to attend the former for that reason. Then it's argued that yes, we should ease the path wherever possible for students to attend Ivies for the social capital ... rather than the educational value.
?
Okay, given that social capital is of as much, or, apparently, even more value than educationally-gained chops, I guess that is the conclusion, but I have to say that grasping after social capital seems wrong-headed, at least in an ideal world, where education is concerned.
I agree with 173.3.
I like the idea of the rich schools spending tons of money to help folks move up. Federal loans, though, beyond a certain level, ought to be based on a bunch of factors, including the likelihood of repayment. I don't mind our helping kids go to school, if they're going to make something of it. I have no interest in helping kids go to school because they don't want to be out of school. (And believe me, I knew such people in law school, and have no doubt that law schools, at least, have a whole bunch of such people even now.)
And, you know, is Penn State charging this guy in-state tuition? Because if they aren't and if, as is clear, he comes from a place where there is not merely an adequate public post-secondary system, but an exemplary one, what is the federal taxpayer getting for her subsidy?
174: Those are more or less the issues we've been discussing, yes, but I wouldn't say we've reached any firm conclusions at this point.
Clearly I haven't gotten the gist of the discussion. I doubt that anyone attending an Ivy League school could manage not to flunk out if s/he were working 30+ hours/week off-campus. I could be wrong.
Clearly I haven't gotten the gist of the discussion.
Charley started questioning the idea of government-subsidized student loans and the rest of us have been reacting to him.
It's not really a discussion focused on the Ivies specifically.
what is the federal taxpayer getting for her subsidy?
What a weird question.
At my quasi-Ivy league school, I (often) spent 30+ hours/week drunk or cripplingly hungover, but still managed not to flunk out. I did get an education in horrible work and study habits, forgetting large chunks of one's early 20s, and nearly becoming a genuine alcoholic, together with learning lots of interesting but practically useless things. Tens of thousands of taxpayer subsidized dollars well spent!
174 -- Put me down as a pretty strong believer that you can get as good an education as you want pretty much anywhere (barring some geographic and specialized anomalies -- eg if you want to study marine mammal rehabilitation, the program at Oregon State is going to be a much better idea than attending Southern Illinois.) Now, it's true that you have to really want it.
Put me down as very weak on the proposition that having smart people in your classes is worth all that much. Yes, it's nice, but you can engage the material and the professor plenty, and now, with the magic of the internet, it's not that difficult to find smart people interested in talking about that same thing all over the world.
178, 179: Thanks, teo. The Ivies thing threw me off.
180: I'm not dead sure what Charley's point is, but I think he's saying that this kid could be going to school at SUNY cheaper than Penn State, and so would require less subsidy and incur less debt for the same education.
I'm not sure that any of that is definitely true, but if that's what he's saying there's at least something to it.
Charley Judgmental President's author friend started questioning the idea of government-subsidized student loans and the rest of us have been reacting to him.
I doubt that anyone attending an Ivy League school could manage not to flunk out if s/he were working 30+ hours/week off-campus. I could be wrong.
I worked 25 hours a week off-campus for the first three and a half years, and full-time (40 hours) for the last two years. It took me 5-1/2 years to get a degree, but I got one.
185: Fair enough, but you seemed to be more or less agreeing with him, and you we can interact with.
180 -- Penn State reached out to an undistinguished (by his own account) student in another state. Are they waging class war? Or are they seeking to maximize revenue by getting banks and/or the feds to pay out of state tuition?
The Ivies thing threw me off.
Given how many people around here went to Ivies, education discussions tend to veer in that direction, but in this particular case the issue is more general.
Put me down as very weak on the proposition that having smart people in your classes is worth all that much.
I dunno, English classes at my public University were pretty painfully useless. A baseline level of competence among students taking general education classes can be extremely useful as far as giving the instructor room to move faster and cover things more usefully.
182: Sadly, and this is not a popular sentiment, I know, but I feel that I got a much better education (in philosophy) at H---d than I would have elsewhere. The faculty and fellow students, the level of discussion, not just in that field but in related ones, would have been more or less impossible to reproduce on my own; I was challenged in a way I'd never otherwise have been. In other types of fields, this might not be the case, so there's that.
But this is an unpopular sentiment, as I say, and I won't push it.
It took me 5-1/2 years to get a degree
So rushed!
H---d
I thought Harrad was fictional.
My central (and yet quite poorly expressed) contention is that tuition charges are set based, in part, on the availability of federal subsidy for tuitions. This is particularly so with law schools, but, I'd bet, infects undergrad pricing as well. I'm all in favor of subsidizing class mobility, if that's what were doing. Mobility of students, that is, not of university administrators.
174 -- Put me down as a pretty strong believer that you can get as good an education as you want pretty much anywhere (barring some geographic and specialized anomalies).... Now, it's true that you have to really want it.
Put me down as very weak on the proposition that having smart people in your classes is worth all that much.
I dunno, Charley, I agree and disagree. IME it is indeed true that in college, as in many other parts of life, you get out of it what you put into it.
And heaven knows I have met my share of people who kept going to school because it seemed less scary than having responsibility for figuring out their own lives. (For which I blame them -- and our educational system. But that's a longer digression.)
But in the 10-12 years I've been supervising college students, I've had a fairly lengthy set of experiences with impressively incompetent professors and advisers at poorly funded universities and colleges. I've gotten a firsthand look at just how bad some students' resources are.
I'm about as supportive an internship supervisor (in my curmudgeonly bad cop way) as a college student could hope to have. If I'm enraged by the sheer incompetence and ignorance of your advisers, it's very likely to be because they're not doing their jobs.
Put me down as very weak on the proposition that having smart people in your classes is worth all that much
Huh. I'd say sciences maybe, humanities no.
That doesn't mean that you're only going to find smart people at high-prestige schools. But in anything without clear right answers, the feedback from and interaction with the other students is a large part of what you're getting out of a college class.
195 cont'd, and somewhat agreeing with parsimon in 191 -- if your professor can't think or write clearly, or can't manage to follow through on minimal support for your internship, or return phone calls, or come up with minimally sensible assignments -- you are disadvantaged as a student. No matter how smart and determined and hardworking you are.
Huh. I'd say sciences maybe, humanities no.
I am confused about what this means. You think he's wrong for the humanities and maybe right for the sciences, or you think he's maybe wrong for the sciences and right for the humanities?
192: Ha, I wouldn't have thought anything could make me smile when I've been home sick for three days and am getting mighty tired of this couch.
Put me down as very weak on the proposition that having smart people in your classes is worth all that much.
If you're very smart and motivated, true. If you're not that smart and not that motivated, having a lot of smart and motivated people around you can force you to up your game.
194: This, I think, is right. In my fantasy world, we solve this by generously funding both high-prestige, academically excellent state universities and open-admission available-to-all students community colleges that feed into the excellent state universities, with negligible tuition. Smart kids of whatever social class go to the excellent and nearly-free state universities; underprepared kids who would be able to handle the excellent universities after some remedial work go to the community colleges first (and kids who want vocational degrees do the same), and the cheap excellent state schools exert downward pressure on tuition at all other universities.
This is where I talk about what color I want my sparkly ponycorn to be, right?
195 -- And your experience with students from other institutions is materially and uniformly better? If so, useful data point for me.
196 -- I've been high, and I've been low, and all I can say is that it never made any difference for me or, so far as I could see, anyone else I knew at either place. I've met lots of people in my profession who've been high, lots of people who've been low, and it doesn't make any difference (other than social capital) that I can see. Social capital is a really big deal, of course. But I don't think people should be confusing it for the other thing.
My central (and yet quite poorly expressed) contention is that tuition charges are set based, in part, on the availability of federal subsidy for tuitions.
Ah, okay. I suspect that's probably true, and problematic.
198: The first -- could be that you can learn science and math just fine in a class full of idiots, so long as the subject matter isn't dumbed down for them. I'm not sure, but I'd buy it. But a literature/history/philosophy class full of idiots is going to be a different thing than a class full of clever students, and you're not going to learn as much without a strong peer group.
Anyhow, as quite possibly the commenter with the greatest breadth of experience at attending different colleges, I would say that having smart (enough) people in your class is enormously important for lower division humanities classes, sort of important for lower division science classes, and likely to happen by default in difficult upper division courses in whatever subject at whatever school, just because people who can't figure out what the fuck is going on tend to avoid those classes if possible.
the commenter with the greatest breadth of experience at attending different colleges
Breadth at? If only somebody had been able to teach me to write coherently.
200: If you're very smart and motivated, true. If you're not that smart and not that motivated, having a lot of smart and motivated people around you can force you to up your game.
Not quite: you can be very smart and motivated and not know how to proceed, intellectually, without the structure and peer group around you to clarify the intellectual mountains to be climbed. Erm, as it were.
I can agree with 205, and yet still call the relative lack of really smart people in lower division classes a fairly modest obstacle, that can be overcome, more easily now than ever.
And your experience with students from other institutions is materially and uniformly better? If so, useful data point for me.
Here's the split (where elite = Ivies/Tufts/MIT/Bryn Mawr/Swarthmore/etc., and the others = state school satellite campuses, underfunded HBCUs, small Christian colleges, etc.)
Student work ethnic -- no discernible difference
Student motivation and interest -- no distinguishable difference
Student aptitude for our highly specialized work -- no differences by institution, but slight edge to students with working-class backgrounds regardless of which institution they currently attend
Student literacy -- significant differences, typically showing up not at the cover letter stage but after they come on board, when I ask them to write a basic e-mail or draft a newsletter blurb, and give them 2-3 samples to work from.
Student computer skills -- minimal differences (nothing I can't teach the non-elite students, but clearly shows they didn't spend HS making PowerPoints -- which, more power to them!)
Professor reachability by phone/e-mail -- major edge to elite universities
Professor/adviser's level of organization re: internships -- major edge to elite universities
(The infamous example, which I know I've ranted about here before, is the college that called us out of the blue TWO YEARS IN A ROW on *Friday of Memorial Day Weekend* to well-nigh demand that we provide a summer internship opportunity for their students. But even on a more mundane level, when I have two interns and one of them tells me at the beginning of the semester what kind of reference/evaluation she needs from me, and the other one spends four months with me trying to get his college to tell us what they're going to require ....argh.)
Professor/adviser's responsiveness to questions about student assignments -- definite edge to elite universities
Professors' likelihood of coming up with reality-based assignments -- slight edge to elite universities
OK, this got long. Wrap-up comment in a sec.
Parsi, I'm not sure how much experience you've had with non-elite post-secondary education, but even at places that don't make the Princeton Review 375, there are structures and peer groups (including the people in those upper division classes . . .)
209 -- Feel free to respond offline, but I'd be particularly interested in your experience with the large public school on the north side of town.
I disagree with carp, but having finally surmounted the many obstacles my non-standard path to higher education presented me with I have a shockingly large amount of studying to do and can't spare the mental capacity to make my objections coherent.
Yes, probably best if I stop monopolizing the thread!
210: My only experience is that I've taught at them. I don't know what to say: it may well be that philosophy is an outlier anyway.
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I've been going back and forth with Novel Writer all day, and I'm running out of steam. Help?
Me: My main problem is with the consequences of your solution. I can't see any way that it doesn't drive poor students out of colleges.
Novel Writer: My argument doesn't delve into the issue of fairness because there are too many opinions as to what's fair. However, what's clear to me is that in all aspects of selling a 'thing' (in this case education), if the 'thing' is financed but the seller has no consequence if the loan isn't paid back, the cost of the 'thing' will increase out of control.
I like grants and scholarships. I also don't have anything against loans as long as they're from the private sector. This way, if there are losses, the lender takes them. Therefore, the lender considers how much they'll lend vs the likely income the student will have when they graduate. That keeps a lid on tuition because enrollment drops off if tuition increases too much.
I have a big issue when the government 'guarantees' all the loans and grants them to everyone because this allows a bad situation, rising tuition costs, to turn into looting.
Think about it this way. If you ran the school and you could raise tuition without a drop-off in enrollment, you would argue for a tuition increase and tell your board you should get paid more for a job well done, you increased revenues. I see government guaranteed debt as an enabler of sorts.
(End of NW's side.)
Any help? I've talked about how this will prevent poor kids from going to college, and also what a wide range of schools that he's lumping together - rising tuition at Posh Private is very different from rising tuition at Eastern Michigan.
This is an interesting thread for me because I went to a mid-level small liberal arts college and had a great experience there but have always wondered if I missed out on anything important compared to a quote-unquote better institution.
Overall I think I'm happy that I stayed on the West Coast, that I might have benefited from doing more writing (though I did a lot more writing than most of my friends) and I think it was better for my sanity to not be at a place that emphasized competition. But I do wonder about it from time to time.
215 --I'm no help. And will drop out as well. Hope you feel better soon, Witt.
Yes, probably best if I stop monopolizing the thread!
Gosh no (and, for the record, I'm planning on looking at the report that you linked in 170 later).
Oh look, I should read the thread.
208: Somewhat. I teach at a third-tier school, and while I haven't dumbed down my classes content-wise, there are a lot of people in the class that shouldn't be there, and a lot of bright kids who would no doubt being doing better if they weren't working 30 hours a week on top of going to school full-time. Of course the lower division classes would be better if there wasn't as much distribution in ability/effort/preparation.
Upper division I run exactly as I would anywhere and almost everyone figures out where the bar is pretty quickly.
Anyhow, I don't think cutting aid is the answer, but iirc there was a specific change in 2005 that made it so private lending wasn't dischargeable, and now there's a much bigger problem because it's much easier to get large loans. I took out the max in undergrad loans through 2001, and that left me with a payment of $150 per month for ten years, and I paid it off in four. That seems like a good deal for everyone involved (better than me working my way through community college because my dad wasn't rich, at least), and average student debt these days puts you at around $250 per month. (Hundreds of thousands for art history is an outlier.) At that level it's a calculation: does it make more sense to take out the loan and finish in four years, or work full-time and take six to finish?
I'd be okay with cutting the loans if I believed that legislatures would actually fund public universities, but if wishes were horses I'd have a ponycorn and a bigger research budget.
Whoops, I meant work ETHIC in 209.
219: Oh, do! It's awesome. (Incidentally, it suggests I was wrong the other day about black fraternities -- of the men interviewed for the report who weren't in frats, they said it was because of hazing.)
Idle question: I seem to think that at H----d, you couldn't take 5 1/2 or 6 years to finish. This is undergrad. It had to be done in 4, except in the odd case in which you'd been put on academic probation for a year (for bordering on flunking out) and were told to leave and get your shit together, then you could come back the next year, so total time to finish would be 5 years.
I may be wrong -- maybe you could just take a year off of your own volition. I don't think you could just carry on (without this official taking a year off) for 5 or 6 years, though.
The point/question is just that in that scenario, working 30+ hours/week wouldn't just extend the number of years you'd take to graduate, because you couldn't do that.
Why are we google proofing Harvard?
Huh. What would happen to someone at the end of year four who didn't have the credits to graduate? No degree, no permission to re-enroll next term? that seems harsh.
224: because, due to the British commenters, writing, "I went to school in Cambridge" gets confusing and is cumbersome to boot.
I don't think that's right, or at least I'd be very surprised if Harvard were different from all of its peer institutions. It's rare that people take more than five without a reason, but that's because it's expensive and most students aren't working their way through Harvard.
Huh.
So condescending. I bet you went to school in Cambridge, didn't you?
Also, Harrad is totally weird in all kinds of ways (almost everybody lives on campus their whole tenure! Students clean other students' dorm bathrooms! They have a special dorm for students that require extra high security! It's free for students with a family income below $70k or something!) that make it less than completely useful as an example of anything.
This is kinda the opposite, but at CalPoly SLO, jewel of the Cal States, the engineering department has informed its students that a degree now takes six years. They've capped the number of credits you can take per quarter at twelve(because they can't afford to offer more classes), and the resulting schedule now takes six years.
I cannot believe how hard we're making life for Millenials. I have no idea what to tell my baby sister and brother. Well, I do, but they get mad when I tell them to learn a trade for economic security. Tragically, my baby brother, a junior in high school, thinks he wants to study history! We'll just have to support him his whole life.
In math there are really big differences is student quality between schools. At any liberal arts college in the country I would have run out of math courses sometime freshman year. Large state flagships would have had classes for me but where I'd be 4 years younger than anyone else, which I was kind of tired of. In terms of having classes where I had peers my age, there's 5 or maybe 10 options. It's a really genuinely different educational experience to have classes with students who are smarter than you than to always be the outlier.
223. Pretty sure this is the case at most British universities - you might repeat one year under some circumstances, usually medical or if your mum died or something, but rarely and not more. What would happen to somebody? They'd be airbrushed out of history, looking at a lifetime flipping burgers. Why would the university care?
Tragically, my baby brother, a junior in high school, thinks he wants to study history!
Seriously? Why? I mean, it's fine to study history as an undergraduate. If pressed, I can make a reasonably decent case for the discipline in that regard. But please tell me he doesn't want to get an advanced degree in the subject.
Parsi's basically right about Harvard. All classes count equally, you can't take fewer than 4, you only need 4 per semester to graduate. So unless you fail some classes (which is rare, we're not talking about MIT's grading scheme) you graduate in 4.
The situation described in 223 applied to me at Reed. I was completely dependent on financial aid and had to get out in 4 years or lose a big chunk, enough that I'd have had to drop out.
229 Isn't there also some sort of weird sexual thing going on? Maybe I'm thinking of something else.
British universities are run very differently, though, aren't they? Not the same sort of constructing a course of study by picking courses out of a catalog that almost all US colleges do.
I don't think 231 is really a problem of sufficient scale that we need to worry about. The geniuses will take care of themselves.
Anyhow, I agree 100% with LB's 201, which, as Megan notes, far from being only possible in a world of sparkly ponycorns in fact actually existed in California from, I dunno, roughly 1950-1995, and still is sort of creakingly present while being beaten into the ground by the State.
He likes it and thinks that is reason enough to study something. Honestly, I don't know how this tragedy happened. My sister and I would never have gotten away with it.
It is a little soon for him to have plans past undergrad. But I am pushing hard for him to apply to your school, VW. You might be seeing him around in two years!
Isn't there also some sort of weird sexual thing going on?
Probably somewhere at Harvard, sure.
Oh, yeah, I know it used to be real, and not just in CA, although probably better and more completely in CA than elsewhere. But politically getting back there seems like ponycorn land.
224: Because we're embarrassed to say it.
236. Well, a much more restricted catalogue. You usually arrive with an stated intended major, which you can usually change at the end of your first year. The differences are mostly down to having three year undergrad courses, which means that the second and third are heads down, no messing, 12 courses and you better pass them all.
But politically getting back there seems like ponycorn land.
Getting rid of a small handful of recalcitrant Republican state representatives? Not really, no. Amending the state constitution? Probably not, no. Dealing with the issue for the rest of the country? Not my problem, yo.
234 is right -- courses aren't (or weren't in my day) assigned or counted in terms of credits. A course was a course, you couldn't take less than 4 per semester, so it was not possible to hit the end of 4 years without enough courses to graduate.
What if you changed your major, or dropped a class or something, so at the end of the four years you hadn't met the graduation requirements? I could see it being set up that almost everyone does graduate in four years, but it'd seem weird to me that if something happened so that you didn't they'd tell you to go home with no degree.
245: See, this is why that friend dropped you; they knew all the questions they'd have to answer.
245: Then you take the extra year, or take a summer class. Harvard and its peers are good at getting most of everyone through in four, and there's a lot of reasons to be done in four (USNWR ranking, etc.), but people switch majors and sometimes take summer classes. The difference seems to be that they will work really hard to make sure you can graduate in four if at all possible -- double counting, substitutions, etc.
245: Right, the distribution requirements were specific - you'd have make sure that you had the requisite number of courses in your concentration, and had met what was called the core curriculum (basically gen. ed. distribution) requirements. Your advisor, in my case the head of my department, had to sign off on the courses you proposed for the upcoming semester, but it was pretty much on you to make sure you were fulfilling the various requirements in the appropriate categories. I think there was a House Head Tutor person who was supposed to be checking up on you on that front.
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Tangentially related to sparkly ponycorns: last fall, I drove a vehicle around my field site to do a bunch of sampling, logging the vehicle's position as I went. Now I'm preparing a map of the vehicle track and sampling locations, and evidently I drew a My Little Pony on the sediment, complete with flowing mane and a little star of sampling sites on the brow. Pic's in the flickr pool. I think I won't be lingering on this slide.
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There was a lovely SF novel from the seventies where the main character had a rich relative who had left a trust to pay his tuition and living expenses so long as he was enrolled full time working toward an undergraduate degree and maintained a given GPA. And by changing his major over and over again, he'd been an undergrad for twenty years, and was getting to the point that any single additional course would complete the requirements of some major or other.
That wasn't what the book was about, just a sidenote, but I liked it.
245: or dropped a class or something
You couldn't drop a class without picking another one up. As far as I know.
There wasn't any way to drop a class partway through the semester?
250: That sounds like the ideal life. I want to go back and re-read Zelazny, but I'm always disappointed when I re-read authors I liked in elementary school.
he'd been an undergrad for twenty years, and was getting to the point that any single additional course would complete the requirements of some major or other
No biggie, just make sure that you're never majoring in a subject whose requirements would be satisfied by the course you're now taking. One changes majors; one doesn't accumulate them. Plus, even if you've satisfied the requirements, one doesn't—does one?—have to graduate.
There wasn't any way to drop a class partway through the semester?
No, there is. But it's pretty rare, because there's a team of people who are checking up on you the entire semester. If a student is slipping, it is expected that the teacher (TA, prof, whoever is dealing with the student's grade) will get in touch with the student's resident dean.
255: I think in the rules of the bequest as stated (and the rules of the university in the book) if at the end of any semester he had accumulated credits that fulfilled the requirements of any valid major, he would either graduate or at least get kicked off the gravy train.
257: so what was the novel? I feel like I've read it but who knows.
I'm not sure 255 is quite right; I received a degree in a major I hadn't declared, the department apparently having noticed that I'd completed the necessary coursework. I only found out at convocation.
But aren't there often rules about old coursework expiring after some (longish) set time? I think there's something about that at my current institution.
252: There wasn't any way to drop a class partway through the semester?
Sigh. I don't know, but don't think so -- maybe in extreme cases. See, there was registration at the beginning of the semester. Then there was a couple week long period known as "shopping for classes" during which you could experimentally visit this or that class that you weren't completely sure you wanted to take. Then there was a flurry of activity prior to the add-drop deadline, when people might drop classes and add different ones .. and at that point you'd have your class schedule signed by your advisor, and you were set. This was the slate of classes you were taking. I don't seem to think you could just decide to drop a class halfway through the semester, though maybe there was some kind of very late registration second deadline; but basically, no, you couldn't just take 3 courses.
Students clean other students' dorm bathrooms!
Whoa. Really?
235 Isn't there also some sort of weird sexual thing going on?
I deny everything!
261: There's a summer dorm clean-up crew staffed by students -- you could really clean up there, so to speak, with with all the stereo equipment and whatnot the students would leave behind at the end of the year.
It should also be pointed out that Harvard students don't fully register for courses online: it's a sort of hybrid of picking out courses with the online course tool and then using it to print a study card which you then have to get signed and physically hand in. In two thousand fucking twelve.
There's a summer dorm clean-up crew staffed by students
Students do it during the year as well.
231 is correct and I don't really understand 237's "The geniuses will take care of themselves." I mean, it's possible, at a stretch, for someone with enough talent to give themselves a rigorous education with enough motivation and a well-equipped library, but it isn't easy and it's going to be nearly impossible for them to find their way into a research community in that way. I feel like most of the discussion here is about classwork, and I don't think that's what elite educations are about at all.
The "Fall Clean-Up" is another pernicious relative of Dorm Crew. This piece from last summer goes into it.
I just mean that experiences like UPETGIs are so rare that they're not really worth factoring in to a discussion about federal support for student loans. The ultra-smart can depend on very high end merit scholarships and the like.
233 is about right. I've worked with exactly one history major; he drifted into a totally unrelated career, and he is now arguably the single most important person in his profession (definitely in the top 2).
So in my experience 100% of people who study history in undergrad but don't go on to grad school turn out well.
Especially as employers move farther and farther away from any kind of apprenticeship model, and instead rely more on sorting mechanisms and proxies for ability that have been refined by elite colleges and others earlier in the pipeline.
Who knows, it might start swinging the other way... I recently interviewed with (and got an offer from) a large tech company for a DevOps-style gig, and college didn't come up at all. (I'm a dropout, and didn't list anything on my resumé. This was 6 hours of technical interviews with 7+ different people, so it's not like they didn't have time to cover it.) I admit I was surprised because (a) I kept reading they insist on 3.8+ GPAs and whatnot, and (b) I'm in my late 20s, but look about 5 years younger (occasionally got carded until 24).
Hopefully, the magic of the Internets is going to lower some barriers to entry. E.g. for a software developer, substantial open-source contributions might carry more weight than formal qualifications -- that's how it worked out for me at least. And a solid investigative blog might work the same way for an aspiring journalist, if not now, then sometime in the not-too-distant future. Or perhaps something like Udacity or even the good old Open University will become more of an accepted route.
(Going presidential because it's fairly easy to fill in the blanks.)
268: Ick. That article kind of makes me want to go burn shit down.
It's not relevant to policy, but it is relevant to the value of the ivies.
269: Ah. Agreed. I think it provides a strong case for the existence of very elite institutions to concentrate people who wouldn't be served well elsewhere, but I agree that it's not something to build policy around.
268: Ick. That article kind of makes me want to go burn shit down.
Yes. I thought it was very well written.
For getting students into research, one of the big differences is the norm among your peers. Does everyone you know start asking around among faculty in the winter of sophomore year, trying to line up a summer research project? It will probably occur to you that this is a thing you ought to do too, maybe even in time for you to meet the deadlines for summer fellowship applications. Does no one? Unless a professor pulls you aside, then probably not.
Further to 209, I've been amazed by the difference between letters of recommendation written for the best students at second- or third-tier schools and those written for the best at top-tier schools, students who I firmly believe are each other's equals in raw ability. Swanky schools yield glowing letters: specific evidence adduced in support of the student's keen and sensitive intellect, gracious leadership skills, etc., etc.: it's not the over-the-top praise that makes an impact, but that the writer will go on to rank the student with respect to former students, now variously Rh@des scholars and leaders of men. Letters from many lower-tier schools are like an entirely separate genre, mostly concerned with applicants' punctuality. Even knowing that this probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the students' relative abilities, it's really, really hard not to filter out the students whose recommenders don't know which game is being played.
276.2 -- Right. I wasn't thinking of that kind of thing as an educational so much as a social capital difference. But that's probably just as wrong a categorization.
not an educational
Shit. Lower tier education shines through. Again.
Shit. Lower tier education shines through. Again.
For serious, man. Why I shoulda not learned good word-make.
Sounds like you two could have used some more subsidized loans.
250: presumably he ends up being a second Alexander von Humboldt, the last man to know everything.
209: Tufts has really gone up a lot in rankings, though not as much as Northeadtern. I never thought if it as elite or even very good when I was a kid. Northeastern used to be a commuter school. Now it's expensive and the kids are richer, and it's better ranked. Kenyon and a bunch of liberal arts schools used to be considered really top notch. I remember a guy from high school who was from the Bronx who transferred to NYU from Kenyon. At the time I understood why he'd prefer to be in NY, but I thought that he was stepping down a class. I wouldn't think they today.
* My comments about Tufts never applied to the Fletcher school.
280 -- I probably should have gone to Cornell; way less distraction than either of my undergrad institutions.
If you wanted a 9th term at Harvard there had to be extenuating circumstances, and you got no aid. You could take time off on your own. This meant that a lot of classes were always offered as a matter of course. St Cal Poly it takes people at least 5 years because required courses aren't always offered.
UVa makes it mildly difficult to go for more than four years, requiring students to apply for a fifth year and go through an interview (I think) to explain the reason a fifth year is needed. I don't know anyone, of the small number that applied, that didn't get the fifth year after going through the process. But I definitely knew students who stayed in a major they had become disenchanted with, because they were already well into their third or fourth year and wouldn't be able to finish in four or even five years.
St Cal Poly
One of the less well known saints.
Yes. I thought it was very well written.
I'm not disagreeing, not exactly, but the style--Gawkery-IM-conversational--has started to really, really bug me, in a way that it never used to. It's probably just that now it makes me feel old.
The Paris Review article they are reacting to is written in the same style. I don't know if they're intentionally matching it.
The all-caps "SAY MORE." early in the conversation, for example, provoked me to an audible sigh, though a lower-case version would not have, and I myself often use that very same phrase for the very same conversational purpose. Hmm.
288: really? I don't agree, but I'm hardly an expert at stylistic analysis. The Awl piece seems very Gawker-y, full of exaggerated emphasis and sarcasm ("I HAVE SO MUCH CHARACTER NOW, THANKS."); I don't find that in the PR piece. Though I never really read Gawker; I guess I'm actually thinking of Jezebel, back when I read it--Mo Whatshername, in particular. Whom I totally had an internet crush on.
"SAY MORE" is a phrase I've noticed a St.-Johns-educated colleague saying a lot. Maybe I'll start saying it to sound fancier. And I'll start sending links to that Awl piece to people who wonder what the point of Occupy Harvard was/is.
286: My iPhone typing skills are not advanced.
Dorm crew is weird. During the year, it was a crap job but one which paid by the number of bathrooms cleaned, so you could make money if you were quick. I never did that job. I did clean up after exams to prep for the reunions. That was a prerequisite for reunion jobs. All I did was babysit the kids of someone who was there for his 25th reunion. If you did dorm crew during the year, you might get assigned to day activities. The best jobs involved the 50th reunion classes who often golfed, because the older men tipped well. You could fund a low-paid internship in 2 weeks.
Professionals cleaned the bathrooms in my Freshman dorm. The suites were cleaned by students, but I always round up cleaning my own anyway.
I don't really think Novel Writer is insane on this point. Loans are a shitty way to fund education. We'd all be a lot better off if the federal government gave a lot more grants and/or direct funding to schools designed to directly lower tuition. Cala is certainly right that cutting the loans preëmptively is no good, but there is something real and pernicious about the way that federally subsidized loans are "funding" for education that don't really subsidize much for the student.
Oh boy! I was way behind without realizing it. sorry.
From that article:
SJC: And trying to fit in just ends up meaning you're not a part of ANY group, which was the saddest part of Glouberman's article to me. This line: "There was someone who was the first person in her town to go to Harvard, and she talked about how this completely tore her apart, and how the whole time she was at Harvard she always felt out of place and everyone treated her badly, but when she went home everyone thought she was stuck-up so she felt out of place at home, too."
Reminded me immediately of this. I should be ashamed, right?
I actually love "say more," and I use it all the time, but in a quietly-but-intensely-interested tone of voice. I certainly don't yell it, the way that ALL-CAPS SEEMS TO IMPLY. Hrmph.
296: I don't think that should be anywhere near the top of your shame-list, no, but I'm perhaps not an trustworthy resource here.
What, so what should be at the top?
I don't think I say "say more", but I don't disapprove of its use.
Nobody should say "say more" in ALL-CAPS, so rest easy.
A friend of mine who was educated at the best value in public universities employs the question "What else?" to great effect whenever there's a long pause in a conversation.
Many CLASSMATES are sitting in a common room, discussing a case in a lively fashion. Suddenly, JOHN enters the room, looking distraught.
SAM: Hey, is something wrong?
JOHN: I just got off the phone with my mom—my dad was killed in a car crash.
After a wave of sympathetic murmurs, silence settles over the room.
BAVE'S FRIEND: What else?
JOHN (shaking with anger): SAY MORE
I agree that the current system is shitty, and saddling new graduates with this much debt is disastrous and wrong. I agree with NW's assessment of the problem, and maybe even the mechanism - that federally backed loans have caused some of this tuition rise.
I just think his solution - have schools back all their loans themselves - is insane.
Higher taxes are needed to pay for things like schools, including universities. That's simply a reality we'll have to face.
We could tax private schools and apply the revenue to better funding for public ones, for a start.
What if the private schools paid the public schools to supply students to clean the private schools' bathrooms?
302/303 made me laugh because I am a bad person who has debased her humanity.
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The advice that you should contact potential references first is pretty sound. You might find out you had a completely different impression of a prior work experience than the potential reference did.
It would have been nicer to hear "your work was subpar/rushed" than "you seemed not to agree with how things are done here", which makes it seem oddly personal. Also, wasn't true.
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312: Ugh, Hannibal, that sucks.
167
It's such a tough problem. On the one hand, I sometimes think that if you made clear that e.g., Yale was just for rich people, then we'd have a broader social recognition that the fancy private schools really aren't "better" in any remotely meaningful sense than equally academically good, much cheaper and more accessible colleges, e.g. UCSD. On the other hand, when Yale was full of rich preppy morons it was still very prestigious and still bestowed an enormous amount of social capital, so maybe we'd just be walling off our elite even more. On the third hand, maybe even within the fancy institutions much of the social capital depends not on the school itself but on who one's parents were.
This is all nonsense. Federally guaranteed student loans aren't about poor kids attending Yale. See here .
Yale offers fully funded need-based financial aid and for 2011-2012 has expanded its full coverage to families with incomes of $65,000 and below. Yale financial aid packages do not require a loan; however, all students receiving financial aid are expected to contribute to their education. This "self-help" expectation will be $3,000 for 2011-2012. Students may choose to earn the self-help contribution through campus jobs, which pay an average of $12.50 an hour.
Federally guaranteed student loans are about suckering poor kids into attending third rate law schools (and the like) where they obtain worthless degrees and hundreds of thousands dollars of nondischargeable debt which will likely haunt them for the rest of their lives.
314: I wasn't poor in a lot of ways, and I had family help with college, but when I did apply for financial aid, loans were part of the package.
I think all the Ivies now offer full rides for people whose families make under some amount, but this is a recent development. They started doing it (Princeton was the first) shortly after my time.
304
I just think his solution - have schools back all their loans themselves - is insane
What's your solution?
My solution. No federal guarantee. Loans can be discharged in bankruptcy if you forfeit your degree.
313. Thanks. At least it was a nice place to live.
