Privileged
Good morning, friends. We're facing a major weather change here in central Kentucky, with heavy wind and later some severe storms, although it pales in comparison with the "bomb cyclone" that hit the Rockies yesterday! We received a report from our daughter in the Denver suburbs of heavy snow and wind and cold, such that none of her gang even ventured out of the house!
This week's revelations about the college entrance cheating scandal have been astounding in their creativity and downright meanness, and I have a few things to say on this subject.
First, anyone who does not or did not already recognize that wealth offers certain people discernible advantages over those without it should come to this realization quickly. Money and the advantages it offers pervade so many areas of our society, from where we live to what we drive to what we wear and how we're sometimes treated based on all of that.
But this whole scenario, which involves a college admissions program that fraudulently helped students whose parents paid gain entry to major, exclusive universities on false pretenses (often helping students pose as athletes to put them into the "admitted" class) was best explained by someone I saw on television this morning.
He said that we have all long accepted that in an airliner that there are multiple classes of passengers, with first class being reserved for those who pay the most or have earned the privilege of a larger seat and more space, with more personalized service. He added that this scandal means that for some people, first class simply isn't enough. These people feel the need to pay even more for the chance to sit by themselves, theoretically, and receive the equivalent of one-on-one service. To me, this is an apt analogy, and it's relatively easy to connect the dots.
Let me take you back some forty-plus years, to when I was a high school student considering options for college. I had good grades. I was not an athlete but was active in other areas of student life, editing the school newspaper and participating in speech and drama and a member of the Beta Club. In Kentucky, back then we took the ACT, unless we were sure we were going to attend a school out of state. In those days any Kentucky student who HAD an ACT score was automatically eligible to attend any state university. And I had a very good ACT score.
It wasn't long before I began getting inquiries from various colleges, mostly of the liberal arts variety, and I was fascinated by this. But with a brother two years ahead of me, I already saw that my father was unwilling to sign financial aid applications necessary to attend such colleges (that's a story for another time), so it did not take long for me to realize and accept, gratefully, that I would be attending the University of Kentucky, a scant twenty miles away in Lexington.
Am I bitter about this? Not really. I knew plenty of kids who weren't all that smart whose parents sent them off to their alma mater or some other private school out of state, and they almost all came back because they got themselves into trouble of the academic or behavioral kind. Most of them wound up working in the family business, because they didn't know what else to do. I rather like that I have walked my own path throughout my post-collegiate life.
And let's be clear: it was a given that these other kids would go somewhere befitting people of their station in life, and I would go to little old UK. I worked an after-school job from the time I turned 16, most of them did not. And so on. But privilege wasn't something I never saw.
So back to the scandal in the news. This is just the latest iteration of the same issue. Twenty years ago a family would make a sizeable contribution to the endowment fund of a college or university, and magically Junior would be admitted when it came time for him to be educated. Now, that's apparently not enough to assure a spot.
And meanwhile, so many people, including my two kids, are saddled with seemingly endless student loan debt, repaying for the privilege of having attended these institutions of higher learning.
No, I don't think college should be free. No, I don't think that student loans should be completely forgiven. But there is less question than ever that the "system" needs to find a way to level the playing field, at least a little.
This week's revelations about the college entrance cheating scandal have been astounding in their creativity and downright meanness, and I have a few things to say on this subject.
First, anyone who does not or did not already recognize that wealth offers certain people discernible advantages over those without it should come to this realization quickly. Money and the advantages it offers pervade so many areas of our society, from where we live to what we drive to what we wear and how we're sometimes treated based on all of that.
But this whole scenario, which involves a college admissions program that fraudulently helped students whose parents paid gain entry to major, exclusive universities on false pretenses (often helping students pose as athletes to put them into the "admitted" class) was best explained by someone I saw on television this morning.
He said that we have all long accepted that in an airliner that there are multiple classes of passengers, with first class being reserved for those who pay the most or have earned the privilege of a larger seat and more space, with more personalized service. He added that this scandal means that for some people, first class simply isn't enough. These people feel the need to pay even more for the chance to sit by themselves, theoretically, and receive the equivalent of one-on-one service. To me, this is an apt analogy, and it's relatively easy to connect the dots.
Let me take you back some forty-plus years, to when I was a high school student considering options for college. I had good grades. I was not an athlete but was active in other areas of student life, editing the school newspaper and participating in speech and drama and a member of the Beta Club. In Kentucky, back then we took the ACT, unless we were sure we were going to attend a school out of state. In those days any Kentucky student who HAD an ACT score was automatically eligible to attend any state university. And I had a very good ACT score.
It wasn't long before I began getting inquiries from various colleges, mostly of the liberal arts variety, and I was fascinated by this. But with a brother two years ahead of me, I already saw that my father was unwilling to sign financial aid applications necessary to attend such colleges (that's a story for another time), so it did not take long for me to realize and accept, gratefully, that I would be attending the University of Kentucky, a scant twenty miles away in Lexington.
Am I bitter about this? Not really. I knew plenty of kids who weren't all that smart whose parents sent them off to their alma mater or some other private school out of state, and they almost all came back because they got themselves into trouble of the academic or behavioral kind. Most of them wound up working in the family business, because they didn't know what else to do. I rather like that I have walked my own path throughout my post-collegiate life.
And let's be clear: it was a given that these other kids would go somewhere befitting people of their station in life, and I would go to little old UK. I worked an after-school job from the time I turned 16, most of them did not. And so on. But privilege wasn't something I never saw.
So back to the scandal in the news. This is just the latest iteration of the same issue. Twenty years ago a family would make a sizeable contribution to the endowment fund of a college or university, and magically Junior would be admitted when it came time for him to be educated. Now, that's apparently not enough to assure a spot.
And meanwhile, so many people, including my two kids, are saddled with seemingly endless student loan debt, repaying for the privilege of having attended these institutions of higher learning.
No, I don't think college should be free. No, I don't think that student loans should be completely forgiven. But there is less question than ever that the "system" needs to find a way to level the playing field, at least a little.
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