I remember taking a small English Lit class my junior year at university with 2 guys from my friend group. They expressed their belief that I got A’s on every paper - as opposed to their B’s and occasional C’s - because the male professor had a “crush” on me. I pointed out that I got A’s from a number of female professors, as well as in large classes where the professors had no idea who I was or what I looked like, so the more logical explanation was that I was just smarter and a better student.
I ultimately graduated summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.9+ (and later graduated law school, also summa cum laude, and went on to a successful career as a civil litigator). But sure, white dudes, keep believing the stories you tell yourselves.
It won't take long under purely academic admissions standards before the Ivy league is significantly browner and femalier and then we will learn even more from the Supreme Court about tolerable race-based decision making than we did yesterday.
If I am approaching the situation with maximum grace, even if these men do not wish to go to college, I think there is something to be said that men who work full time at our grocery stores, gas stations, and day laborers, etc. should be making enough to afford a small starter home with decent health care and be able to support a kid or two.
I think as liberals, we are talking about this wrong. We are engaging in the same meritocratic rhetoric that the right does.
Back in the day, this was actually the case in many cases. But you can thank Ronald Reagan for destroying all that. It was like the Middle Class put a gun to its own head when it elected him.
I agree. And I think we have pushed too many people into college when there were other options that might have suited them better and they deserve a living wage.
It used to be like that. It started NOT being like that when Reagan came to power.
My mom and dad, who worked at a grocery store at the time, could afford to buy a starter home in 1974, when I was very small.
The same can't be said now and it's almost 100% due to the vampiric oligarchs.
ETA: I am highly educated with a Ph.D. and have always been more educated than my partners and made more. My current partner is an assistant manager of a grocery store, but it doesn't pay very well.
I grew up in an academic family so have a somewhat jaded perspective.
An exclusive private-college higher education is out of reach for everyone outside the top 2% of income, or those who match the demographic bingo card and have a 5.0 (out of 4) high school GPA.
Go to Community College for 2 years and take all your General Studies requirements there at a third the price of a public 4-year school. If you do well, transfer. You avoid almost the entire folderol nonsense of "Admissions" that way.
That's what my daughter did, and she now has a 4-year degree with $20,000 in loan debt.
If cis/het white males can't figure that out, well; we need somebody to dig ditches.
The cc I worked at got good data from the nearby research university on student success. Across the board, students who spent 2 years at our cc did as well in the subsequent years as students who started at the uni. There was one exception - engineering, where our students did better.
Community colleges are an excellent option for many, many students. In CT, there are many funding options available, and a variety of course/certificate/degree options. They are egalitarian by nature.
My daughter did that, and so did my wife to get Library certification when she decided to get out of elementary Special Ed.
Another benefit is that at CC, you usually don't get the freshman class that's twice the size of the sophomore class, full of 18-19 year-olds who are only there because their parents made them go. CC is more geared to people who really want to be there.
They're mostly the same profs as anywhere else. Except they either didn't get high enough in the hierarchy, or didn't have the taste for it, or needed to pay rent and took the gig. Same textbooks.
It's the worst. A sister of mine taught some low-level writing classes at SNHU (a notorious mill). She got paid $2000 per course, flat fee. Working full time, making $8,000 per term. Lovely.
Fortunately my brother-in-law is a mechanical engineer with a large bio research outfit.
And that's why I finally quit. I feel like I was taken advantage of by my "mentors" who later tried to make my lack of finding a tenure-track position "my fault" (when I was 1 out of sometimes 400 applications).
And these people all came from rich backgrounds and had hired "help" that I didn't have, and they don't tell you that, either. To get a tenured-track position you need large swathes of free time to write, and if you have kids, that's not happening unless you have help, which I did not.
I have now parlayed my English Ph.D. into paralegal work and am making 3 times the amount of money I was making with much less stress and NO work I have to bring home.
And I got out in time, too. Right before ChatGPT changed everything. The shitters already didn't want to be there b/c 75% of them aspire to nothing more than being a "YouTuber" or otherwise an influencer. It's just a shame, all around.
So many people who come from "academic families" look down their patrician noses at community colleges.
You might as well as some of them to hack their kids' legs off first. It's ridiculous, and I say this as both a community college graduate who went on to get a Ph.D. from a UC, AND someone who taught at community colleges.
That's true. And that's a pretty good subtle indicator of whether you're talking to an asshole or not.
Dad was a brilliant classroom professor. Also an alcoholic, and I'm pretty sure he had mental health issues. As a result, he never got out of the nomadic, underpaid tier of professordom. We were broke all the time. And we understood the "cursus honorum" of Academe, from the under-bus side.
When our older kid, The Boy, was a high school sophomore Minneapolis South High started the hard-sell on college. We went to a College Fair evening. We talked to the Admissions Counselor the University of Minnesota had sent. I told him our family background, and that it was a baseline expectation that The Boy would go to college.
He said, "Go to Minneapolis Community College. Their admissions process is to fill out a form online and hit 'Send,' and turn off your pop-up blocker because Acceptance is a pop-up. Then select the college you want to transfer to, and get all your Generals for a third the price and then transfer."
I couldn't believe it. My son decided to go to the U all four years, because he wanted to.
But our dyslexic daughter got great grades, but atrocious Admissions test scores because who knows what the hell she did with a bubble-sheet. Could have been anything. She took all her generals at MCC and transferred to the U of M Duluth, where she got a degree in writing because when your dyslexic nothing can be easy because you won't let it. And now she produces the 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM local news in Duluth, as long as everyone proofreads her stuff because she can't spell, and reminds her when she says, "I'll do that before the 6:00 show" that it's 7:30 PM already...
But she's got their ratings up 10 points in a year and a half.
I'm so down with community colleges and always have been. I love them and I loved my students there (more than I did most of my students at the UC I taught at).
That is so wonderful re: your daughter! Yeah, who cares if someone doesn't know how to spell; someone else can check (it's teamwork). It sounds like she's really thriving. I'm so happy for her!
Thanks! She's a real pistol, as the old saying goes. She got the worst job at first, but then filled in for the marquee shows and the old anchor who gets whatever he wants decided he wanted her to produce all his shows, because she wrote something so funny he couldn't finish reading it on air.
Now he's retiring so they've hired a new anchor who thinks he's all that.
He wasn't in his chair 10 minutes before Go Time as she'd told him to be. He said he had a different preparation routine. She said, "That isn't happening. Be there at -10." And walked away. Apparently everyone else in the room told him, "Yeah, you should do that."
If non-meritorious white men can't get into college, at least they can still run successfully for office in all the gerrymandered-to-hell-and-back republican redoubts.
Or, even worse for them, taking their ideas into serious consideration, using the rubrics of educated thought (which are the entire purpose of a college education in the first place).
Like the idiot girl at U of Oklahoma who turned in an essay that failed every aspect of the assignment and got the prof suspended for giving her the grade her work had earned.
This! Do men even talk about this shit? If they did, maybe men like you could point out how horrible they are and immature and how they need to grow up and practice some introspection and self-reflection and work on themselves.
I do have those, especially with younger men. And some of them listen because I have a great family, paid off house, top of my career, in physical shape, have hobbies and friends, and am the opposite of a Joe Rogan or Andrew Tate. Kids just need the counter example to combat the insidiousness of the manosphere.
We didn't have social media blaming our inability to attract women in the 70s and 80s, so we had to earn it by being better and actually recognizing women as fully realized autonomous equals (betters?). Now if you can't get a date, there are hundreds of influencers to tell you who to blame other than yourself. I'm not sure how we get out of that loop.
I remember taking a small English Lit class my junior year at university with 2 guys from my friend group. They expressed their belief that I got A’s on every paper - as opposed to their B’s and occasional C’s - because the male professor had a “crush” on me. I pointed out that I got A’s from a number of female professors, as well as in large classes where the professors had no idea who I was or what I looked like, so the more logical explanation was that I was just smarter and a better student.
I ultimately graduated summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.9+ (and later graduated law school, also summa cum laude, and went on to a successful career as a civil litigator). But sure, white dudes, keep believing the stories you tell yourselves.
It won't take long under purely academic admissions standards before the Ivy league is significantly browner and femalier and then we will learn even more from the Supreme Court about tolerable race-based decision making than we did yesterday.
You think the Ivy League is going to allow "pure academic admissions standards?"
I know Stanford isn't the Ivy League but it recently refused $$$ from the state of CA in favor of continuing its practice of legacy admissions.
You're probably right, discriminating on the basis of money will never be illegal.
I hope for your vision!
Well, that'll please John Irving, if nobody else
This is what happens when you assume dominance and stop being hungry. It’s playing out on a global scale.
"My Nose! Where did it go?"
- RWNJ's face
If I am approaching the situation with maximum grace, even if these men do not wish to go to college, I think there is something to be said that men who work full time at our grocery stores, gas stations, and day laborers, etc. should be making enough to afford a small starter home with decent health care and be able to support a kid or two.
I think as liberals, we are talking about this wrong. We are engaging in the same meritocratic rhetoric that the right does.
Back in the day, this was actually the case in many cases. But you can thank Ronald Reagan for destroying all that. It was like the Middle Class put a gun to its own head when it elected him.
GMTA!
I know, I thought the exact same thing.
We're both geniuses!
Seriously, it really is the truth, Reagan ruined everything.
Yep. :(
I agree. And I think we have pushed too many people into college when there were other options that might have suited them better and they deserve a living wage.
It used to be like that. It started NOT being like that when Reagan came to power.
My mom and dad, who worked at a grocery store at the time, could afford to buy a starter home in 1974, when I was very small.
The same can't be said now and it's almost 100% due to the vampiric oligarchs.
ETA: I am highly educated with a Ph.D. and have always been more educated than my partners and made more. My current partner is an assistant manager of a grocery store, but it doesn't pay very well.
There has to be a great name for this phenomenon....
The Bonehead Boomerang?
The Stupid-shit Snapback?
Unintended Consequences of your own BOTTOMLESS STUPIDITY??
Yung, Dum, and Fulovcum ain't just a restaurant in China.
Me while reading this:
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/09ea9ee2-d915-4d74-a646-0a86e7119720
I think college should just be required for all women, men, and other minorities. If so, we would have a better society.
I grew up in an academic family so have a somewhat jaded perspective.
An exclusive private-college higher education is out of reach for everyone outside the top 2% of income, or those who match the demographic bingo card and have a 5.0 (out of 4) high school GPA.
Go to Community College for 2 years and take all your General Studies requirements there at a third the price of a public 4-year school. If you do well, transfer. You avoid almost the entire folderol nonsense of "Admissions" that way.
That's what my daughter did, and she now has a 4-year degree with $20,000 in loan debt.
If cis/het white males can't figure that out, well; we need somebody to dig ditches.
Or work hard and get a scholarship?
The cc I worked at got good data from the nearby research university on student success. Across the board, students who spent 2 years at our cc did as well in the subsequent years as students who started at the uni. There was one exception - engineering, where our students did better.
Community colleges are an excellent option for many, many students. In CT, there are many funding options available, and a variety of course/certificate/degree options. They are egalitarian by nature.
My daughter did that, and so did my wife to get Library certification when she decided to get out of elementary Special Ed.
Another benefit is that at CC, you usually don't get the freshman class that's twice the size of the sophomore class, full of 18-19 year-olds who are only there because their parents made them go. CC is more geared to people who really want to be there.
The instruction can be excellent, too.
It can be, indeed (former cc instructor here, LOL!).
They're mostly the same profs as anywhere else. Except they either didn't get high enough in the hierarchy, or didn't have the taste for it, or needed to pay rent and took the gig. Same textbooks.
That's why the credits transfer.
Many of my colleagues specifically stopped at a Masters to teach at a CC rather than a uni, so there are some who specifically want to land there.
But they are paid badly. Adjunct professor's pay is a scandal.
It's the worst. A sister of mine taught some low-level writing classes at SNHU (a notorious mill). She got paid $2000 per course, flat fee. Working full time, making $8,000 per term. Lovely.
Fortunately my brother-in-law is a mechanical engineer with a large bio research outfit.
And that's why I finally quit. I feel like I was taken advantage of by my "mentors" who later tried to make my lack of finding a tenure-track position "my fault" (when I was 1 out of sometimes 400 applications).
And these people all came from rich backgrounds and had hired "help" that I didn't have, and they don't tell you that, either. To get a tenured-track position you need large swathes of free time to write, and if you have kids, that's not happening unless you have help, which I did not.
I have now parlayed my English Ph.D. into paralegal work and am making 3 times the amount of money I was making with much less stress and NO work I have to bring home.
And I got out in time, too. Right before ChatGPT changed everything. The shitters already didn't want to be there b/c 75% of them aspire to nothing more than being a "YouTuber" or otherwise an influencer. It's just a shame, all around.
So many people who come from "academic families" look down their patrician noses at community colleges.
You might as well as some of them to hack their kids' legs off first. It's ridiculous, and I say this as both a community college graduate who went on to get a Ph.D. from a UC, AND someone who taught at community colleges.
That's true. And that's a pretty good subtle indicator of whether you're talking to an asshole or not.
Dad was a brilliant classroom professor. Also an alcoholic, and I'm pretty sure he had mental health issues. As a result, he never got out of the nomadic, underpaid tier of professordom. We were broke all the time. And we understood the "cursus honorum" of Academe, from the under-bus side.
When our older kid, The Boy, was a high school sophomore Minneapolis South High started the hard-sell on college. We went to a College Fair evening. We talked to the Admissions Counselor the University of Minnesota had sent. I told him our family background, and that it was a baseline expectation that The Boy would go to college.
He said, "Go to Minneapolis Community College. Their admissions process is to fill out a form online and hit 'Send,' and turn off your pop-up blocker because Acceptance is a pop-up. Then select the college you want to transfer to, and get all your Generals for a third the price and then transfer."
I couldn't believe it. My son decided to go to the U all four years, because he wanted to.
But our dyslexic daughter got great grades, but atrocious Admissions test scores because who knows what the hell she did with a bubble-sheet. Could have been anything. She took all her generals at MCC and transferred to the U of M Duluth, where she got a degree in writing because when your dyslexic nothing can be easy because you won't let it. And now she produces the 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM local news in Duluth, as long as everyone proofreads her stuff because she can't spell, and reminds her when she says, "I'll do that before the 6:00 show" that it's 7:30 PM already...
But she's got their ratings up 10 points in a year and a half.
I'm so down with community colleges and always have been. I love them and I loved my students there (more than I did most of my students at the UC I taught at).
That is so wonderful re: your daughter! Yeah, who cares if someone doesn't know how to spell; someone else can check (it's teamwork). It sounds like she's really thriving. I'm so happy for her!
Thanks! She's a real pistol, as the old saying goes. She got the worst job at first, but then filled in for the marquee shows and the old anchor who gets whatever he wants decided he wanted her to produce all his shows, because she wrote something so funny he couldn't finish reading it on air.
Now he's retiring so they've hired a new anchor who thinks he's all that.
He wasn't in his chair 10 minutes before Go Time as she'd told him to be. He said he had a different preparation routine. She said, "That isn't happening. Be there at -10." And walked away. Apparently everyone else in the room told him, "Yeah, you should do that."
She's going to be just fine. Already is.
LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Good for her! A pistol, indeed. XD XD XD XD XD
THAT'S IMMIGRANT/BROWN/BLACK PEOPLE WORK! I'm white I'm a supervisor!
If non-meritorious white men can't get into college, at least they can still run successfully for office in all the gerrymandered-to-hell-and-back republican redoubts.
"...the one that would also bar them from “belittling” conservative ideas) in order to keep their federal funding,"
For the barely educated MAGAts among us, "belittling" means laughing our asses off at them.
Or, even worse for them, taking their ideas into serious consideration, using the rubrics of educated thought (which are the entire purpose of a college education in the first place).
Like the idiot girl at U of Oklahoma who turned in an essay that failed every aspect of the assignment and got the prof suspended for giving her the grade her work had earned.
....which could lead to more uneducated, angry, MAGA-type men running around ....which would be bad for women.
I wish my fellow men would just try harder at being better rather than pulling everyone down to their crabs in a barrel mediocrity.
A boy can dream.
Joe Rogaine sez I'm being held down by chudds and grey aliens! I'm smirt!
This! Do men even talk about this shit? If they did, maybe men like you could point out how horrible they are and immature and how they need to grow up and practice some introspection and self-reflection and work on themselves.
PERIOD!
I do have those, especially with younger men. And some of them listen because I have a great family, paid off house, top of my career, in physical shape, have hobbies and friends, and am the opposite of a Joe Rogan or Andrew Tate. Kids just need the counter example to combat the insidiousness of the manosphere.
We didn't have social media blaming our inability to attract women in the 70s and 80s, so we had to earn it by being better and actually recognizing women as fully realized autonomous equals (betters?). Now if you can't get a date, there are hundreds of influencers to tell you who to blame other than yourself. I'm not sure how we get out of that loop.
Thank you for doing that! That is great, and the modeling is great, also.
Yeah, not sure how we get out of this doom loop with these horrible man influencers and the manosphere. :(
I have two daughters and went down that rabbit hole just to see what they would be facing. Fucking horrifying
I did years ago when I was reading Free Jinger and it was horrifying.
The immaturity is a killer.
heh. she said 'period'!
Now she has to go live at the edge of the village for a week...
Tee hee!
OT: Now they are not giving Visas to anyone who is/was a fact checker or a content moderator.
Fuck this country. We need the shit bombed out of us. :(
The MAGA iron curtain is closing in on us
It applies to their family members, as well. Because the Maladministration considers it "censorship."
https://newrepublic.com/post/203984/donald-trump-deny-visas-fact-checking
I couldn't even make it through the Guardian article I was reading I was so fucking pissed off.
We are where we are, IMO, b/c we didn't have ENOUGH fact checking and content moderation to save the stupids from themselves.
And not by El Presidente in an AI slop video.
OMG, this.
...and now RFKJ will bring back polio and smallpox, now that he's going to bring back hepatitis B.