It's easy to agree with this in the abstract, but the fact is that it's easier to have a good life if you have enough money, and it's easier to make money if you go to a prestigious school. The employers and industries that pay the most and offer the most obvious path to prosperity hire disproportionately from these schools. That is also true for the jobs and fields that wield the most power in this country - when was the last time there was a supreme court justice, or even clerk, who didn't graduate from an Ivy/Stanford? You can get a great education many places, but the more "status" a university has, the more options it keeps open for the future. Obviously there are successful people who didn't take this route, but it's harder without that type of a well-worn path. How many of us are visionary entrepreneurs? I'm certainly not. Biglaw has been a good fit for me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love the section about halfway down that starts with this: “The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking.”

How many threads on DCUM include assertions from parents that a degree in anything other than business or STEM is useless? That they expect a return on their investment in their child’s education? That they would not *allow* their child to study what interests them?

I grew up poor and when I did go to college, ensuring I could immediately transition into a well paying job was the top priority for me which I knew I could do with a BS in engineering. Growing up UMC or higher offers a lot more insulation, but when the standard of living is falling for everyone below the 90th percent income level, is it any wonder that this results in overall financial anxiety for basically everyone outside the top few percentage income?

Totally agree.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Love this: Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, once quipped that "the next thing they’ll do is rank churches. You know, ‘Where does God appear most frequently? How big are the pews?”

Ok Bard. But where will our future astrophysicists come from? Bard? Maybe but I think is fair to say that there might be a better option for them out there.

Sure but how many books in the school library probably don’t matter then. You missed the point.

Anonymous wrote:Focusing intensely on career and future wages is because of the insane price of college these days. If you pay full price, 80k for 4 years, you don’t have the luxury of saying I went to college to enrich my mind. You need a high paying job to justify your parents having spent over $300,000 for college for only one child. For 3 kids, you can end up spending close to $1 million. How can you not be career focused with these kinds of costs. Canada and Europe have figured it out much better than the US in my opinion. Maybe Asia too although HS stress in Asia is just too much

+1 parents are expected to save from the time their kid is a fetus or risk the kid having lifetime of crushing debt, yet we’re supposed to pretend that salary isn’t an outcome that matters

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Love this: Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, once quipped that "the next thing they’ll do is rank churches. You know, ‘Where does God appear most frequently? How big are the pews?”

Ok Bard. But where will our future astrophysicists come from? Bard? Maybe but I think is fair to say that there might be a better option for them out there.

I wonder how many professors he hires with phds from third tier schools

Focusing intensely on career and future wages is because of the insane price of college these days. If you pay full price, 80k for 4 years, you don’t have the luxury of saying I went to college to enrich my mind. You need a high paying job to justify your parents having spent over $300,000 for college for only one child. For 3 kids, you can end up spending close to $1 million. How can you not be career focused with these kinds of costs. Canada and Europe have figured it out much better than the US in my opinion. Maybe Asia too although HS stress in Asia is just too much

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because somewhere along the way a ticket to an elite college also became, in the eyes of parents of privilege, an entitlement to an entire life of privilege for their (aided and abetted by parental wealth).

Because if you went to Princeton or Harvard in the 1950s it was something different?

Very different. Was there a single female at Princeton the 50s?

The point is that the idea that this is some new development is ridiculous. If anything it was even worse in the past when only wealthy white males benefitted from elite colleges. I fail to see how the original sentence makes any sense.

Anonymous wrote:I love the section about halfway down that starts with this: “The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking.”

How many threads on DCUM include assertions from parents that a degree in anything other than business or STEM is useless? That they expect a return on their investment in their child’s education? That they would not *allow* their child to study what interests them?

+100

Problem is that colleges seem to be more and more run like corporations than academic havens. Look at Harvard’s endowment. What are they amassing their billions for? They are still clinging to legacy as they say it helps bring in money but they don’t even need the money. Many colleges and universities have a ton of real estate holdings. It all seems money driven and political rather than knowledge focused. Columbia University is the largest landowner in NYC. The president of Columbia makes close to 3M a year. Just like hospitals and medicine have become all about profit, so have universities. Maybe this is inevitable under capitalism.

And there is nothing wrong with trade school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Very interesting perspective. From the article:
“Education’s core purpose is (or once was) to help people engage with the world and grow into themselves—to discover the overlap between their interests and their talents and develop it. Different people and schools each embrace distinctive visions of empathy, understanding, wisdom, and usefulness: The scholar aspires to know the forces that drive history forward, the inventor seeks to bend technology to practical ends, and the activist strives to reform institutions and inspire citizens to embrace justice. Schools with different educational missions ought to favor different students, and students with different aspirations ought to favor different schools. ”

Yes! I have repeatedly said on here and say to my kids that college is not intended to be trade school!

+2 I don’t get this STEM or bust mentality. But we are family of two lawyers and both parents majored in the humanities for undergrad. I fully support STEM if my kid wants it, or music, art, theatre, English, anthropology, history....you get it.

A stem degree is not exactly trade school. It is a different type of truth seeking based on research and the scientific method and it has great value.

+1 I got my engr undergrad at a SLAC and the trade school mentality is pretty hilarious.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Very interesting perspective. From the article:
“Education’s core purpose is (or once was) to help people engage with the world and grow into themselves—to discover the overlap between their interests and their talents and develop it. Different people and schools each embrace distinctive visions of empathy, understanding, wisdom, and usefulness: The scholar aspires to know the forces that drive history forward, the inventor seeks to bend technology to practical ends, and the activist strives to reform institutions and inspire citizens to embrace justice. Schools with different educational missions ought to favor different students, and students with different aspirations ought to favor different schools. ”

Yes! I have repeatedly said on here and say to my kids that college is not intended to be trade school!

+2 I don’t get this STEM or bust mentality. But we are family of two lawyers and both parents majored in the humanities for undergrad. I fully support STEM if my kid wants it, or music, art, theatre, English, anthropology, history....you get it.

A stem degree is not exactly trade school. It is a different type of truth seeking based on research and the scientific method and it has great value.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Very interesting perspective. From the article:
“Education’s core purpose is (or once was) to help people engage with the world and grow into themselves—to discover the overlap between their interests and their talents and develop it. Different people and schools each embrace distinctive visions of empathy, understanding, wisdom, and usefulness: The scholar aspires to know the forces that drive history forward, the inventor seeks to bend technology to practical ends, and the activist strives to reform institutions and inspire citizens to embrace justice. Schools with different educational missions ought to favor different students, and students with different aspirations ought to favor different schools. ”

Yes! I have repeatedly said on here and say to my kids that college is not intended to be trade school!

+2 I don’t get this STEM or bust mentality. But we are family of two lawyers and both parents majored in the humanities for undergrad. I fully support STEM if my kid wants it, or music, art, theatre, English, anthropology, history....you get it.

Inasmuch as we're using scarce public funds to pay for it, we should align the incentives necessary to ensure a net positive public benefit.

Student loans should be dischargeable, and the schools teaching (or their endowments) should do the underwriting.

Agree with prior poster, and I am not rich.

I think you are choosing a place where your kid will finish forming into an adult. If you want them to do that somewhere full of frat bros or backstabbers, go for it.

My child was not fully baked when I sent her away, so we both gravitated to a place that would be forgiving and steer her/him towards independence and social responsibility. For example, at the parents session when I dropped my child off, the adminstrators shared their goals (for their students) with us, so we could all be on the same page.For example, if our kid called us freshman year asking for guidance how to approach a paper, they told us about campus resources that we should direct the kids to instead. So they would learn how to solve their own problems. Similarly, they had a slide with attributes that they hoped their graduates would emulate. One was kindness. I really liked that and wondered if it would appear on the list of some hard-charging school that prided itself on sending graduates off to Goldman Sachs?