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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to Swarthmore in the ‘90s. They don’t care about sports recruiting, but they definitely care about FGLI and legacy.

Although I have always thought i[b]t was very cynical of them to try to persuade low-income students that careers in academia in the humanities are a path to the middle class[/b]. I know many people from Swarthmore who wasted their 20s in PhD programs and never got tenure track jobs. They would have been much better off in anything else: nursing, accounting, IT, engineering, even K-12 teaching. It’s fine to go that route if you have family money, but not if you need to get a job and lift your family out of poverty.[/quote]
I'm a Swattie who graduated in the mid 90s as well, and I never received this message. I came from a working class family, went to Swarthmore with a Pell Grant, and made spending money as a work study student and babysitting for faculty and families in the 'ville. It's true that many of my friends did pursue PhDs (and FWIW we are *all* miraculously now tenured faculty), but the overarching message was that the life of the mind was a worthy pursuit. It's equally true that many of my friends when to law school and medical school and pursued professional degrees. Only one of my close friends chose not to go to graduate school, and choose a traditional route of getting married young and SAH. [/quote]
On another note, if you’re going to swarthmore, you have a good chance of getting into a top grad school, where getting a position in the humanities on the tenure track is way more likely. Even if you’re permanent visiting faculty, you’re still making $70-80k which is a living, middle class wage in the majority of the country.[/quote]

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