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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: College Success

Lies We Tell Each Other When In College

04 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Big Lies, Campus Climate, College Culture, College Retention, College Success, Dishonesty, Disidentification Hypothesis, Grade Inflation, Higher Education, Lying, Stereotype Threat


Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauilt, January 4, 2014. (http://izquote.com).

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauit, January 4, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

I thought about posting this at the beginning of this week, but decided against it, figuring that I should end ’13 on a more positive tip. But it must be said that one of the critical issues that we in higher education face in terms of college retention and success is the sheer lack of honesty surrounding student performance, especially in the first year or two of any student’s enrollment. No, I’m not talking about grade inflation — for students doing okay, especially at elite colleges, that’s another rampant issue. It’s about the lies students tell themselves, each other and their loved ones about their performance prior to either being caught in a web of them or, worse still, dropping out altogether.

As a college student and as a professor, I found and find it fascinating and disheartening when I’ve learned of the fantasy life of a student’s alleged good grades being shattered by reality. I fell into this trap myself during my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I only tell part of this story in Boy @ The Window. Yeah, I was nowhere near dropping out after a 2.63 GPA first semester (A in Astronomy, B- in Pascal, C in Honors Calc I, and a C in East Asian History), but I relied on an annual GPA of a 3.0 or higher to maintain my academic scholarship.

Yet from about the second week in December ’87 until I received my grades from Pitt on this date twenty-six years ago, I maintained the lie that my GPA was “around a 3.2.” The main difference — I gave myself a C+ in Honors Calc and a B in East Asian History. Mind you, I hardly showed up for either class most of the month of November! I was homesick, heartbroken, and unhealthily horny (and on two occasions hung over) most of the last six weeks of that semester.

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

So I told my former classmates like Laurell and Erika that my GPA was a 3.2. I told my dorm mates Samir and Chuck the same. It was a mild lie, I realized even at the time, and I knew that if I buckled down, that I could overcome my own lie, especially since I could lose my scholarship if I didn’t. And with a 3.33 second semester in Winter ’88, I did pull my GPA over the 3.0 mark, and in the process, decided not to tell any lies that big ever again.

But over the years, I’ve learned that I was hardly alone in the lying-about-my-college-experience category. The first time I figured this out was at the end of ’88, twenty-five years ago this week. It was a lunch outing with Laurell, her friend Maria and former classmates JD and Joshua at a pizza shop in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon. After the previous sixteen months of the Phyllis obsession, rage and grade-raising campaign, homelessness and financial struggles, I was finally fully on track for graduation and potentially, grad school. With this group of former classmates, though, almost all White, all but Laurell with upper middle class resources, I realized too that their struggles, or blues, weren’t exactly like mine.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

There was a lot of “everything’s goin’ well” type of discussion going. Yet I got the sense that things weren’t all that great. Then JD admitted that he was a semester away from academic probation at Berkeley. His engineering classes were kicking his butt. From the looks of things, he was doing much better athletically than anywhere else, having bulked up to 190 with twenty extra pounds of muscle. Josh then admitted that his academic and social life wasn’t exactly going as planned. “I don’t know which one is worse,” he told us. He’d grown four or five inches since MVHS, good enough to put him around five-five or five-six. Laurell, of course, had a killer GPA at Johns Hopkins…and just loved things there. What she didn’t mention, between home and school, was that she was on the verge of burnout, 3.6 average or not…As for me, I talked a bit about some of my new friends and a couple of my classes. Nothing, though, about the drama of the previous year.

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Given how they had reacted to my previous revelations of tiny nuggets from my life while we were in high school, I knew that they would have nothing to say about overcoming homelessness and my Phyllis obsession, much less my now 3.2 GPA overall. At the same time, though, I thought it better to say nothing at all than to tell half-truths and bald-faced lies about my college performance and experiences.

I’ve seen so many students do what I and my former classmates did during our first semesters of college over the years. They lie to me about their issues with my courses, they lie to themselves about their performance and preparation. Mostly, they lie to their friends and family to protect themselves from embarrassment. They lie until the truth of their performance shows up, in their grades, in academic probation, in suspensions and expulsions, in dropping out, in other myriad and dangerous ways.

And we in higher education encourage these lies, as if the money and grade trail won’t expose the reality of struggle and failure for so many. This is where we as educators and administrators need to be much more proactive, to encourage students to seek help, to tell the truth and not bury themselves in a coffin of lies.

Who I Was Thankful For In ’88 — Ron Slater

28 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Break Point, College Success, Money, Money Problems, Pitt, Ron Slater, Self-Reflection, Sera-Tec, Student Aid, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving 1988, Trust


Stretching the dollar, November 28, 2013. (http://kidminspiration.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/stretching-dollar.jpg).

Stretching the dollar, November 28, 2013. (http://kidminspiration.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/stretching-dollar.jpg).

From September 6, ’88 through the beginning of Thanksgiving week twelve weeks later, I had a grand total of $335 to work with. That included money for food, rent and washing clothes. It included the $75 I made over three weeks and six sessions with Sera-Tec donating plasma. It wasn’t the first time I’d tortured dollars into submission, and it’s hardly been the last. But it was the first time in my life I reached out for help beyond myself and family.

From Boy @ The Window:

Despite these acts of generosity and my acts of desperation, I knew that I’d probably starve before the semester was over. I had less than ten dollars to work with after the first week in November. I went to Thackeray Hall to register for classes for next semester. While there, it occurred to me to go upstairs to see one of the financial aid counselors, an older Black woman named Beverly who’d been really nice to me while working through my bill issues earlier in the semester. I told her in detail what was going on. “You need to talk to Ron,” she said, referring to Ron Slater, the university ombudsman, the person who normally resided over tuition payment issues. So there I was the next day, explaining to the ombudsman my situation.

“We’ll take care of this, we’ll find you some extra money. Just hang in there for a few days,” he said. Slater actually offered me money right out of his wallet.

“No thanks, I’ll be all right,” I said, my voice starting to crack because I was so grateful that anyone cared enough to help me through my dire straits. I somehow found a way not to cry right there on the spot.

Hypodermic needles used for donating blood or plasma (note the gauge or thickness), November 28, 2013. (http://dmplgrl.blogspot.com).

Hypodermic needles used for donating blood or plasma (note the gauge or thickness), November 28, 2013. (http://dmplgrl.blogspot.com).

The week before Thanksgiving, I went to check in with Beverly. “I’ve got good news for you, but you’ll have to wait a few days.” Through the ombudsman, the university had recalculated my financial aid package, increasing my Pell to the maximum amount allowed, and added the federal SEOG grant (Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants) to my aid menu. Both gave me an extra $800 to work with. After that weekend, one where Regis’ potatoes became a part of my diet, I bummed five dollars off of one of my classmates from General Writing. The next day I got my check from the ombudsman. “I’m so glad to have been of help. It’s part of my job. I just wish you’d come to me earlier,” Slater said. Hearing that did make me tear up. I was in the spirit of the season already. It was two days before Thanksgiving. I spent that holiday at Melissa’s house with her and her father, an ailing contractor in his early-sixties.

Slater’s wasn’t the only act of generosity I was thankful for that semester. Between my friends Regis and Marc and Melissa, I didn’t starve in those last couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. But Slater’s job, his work had made it so that I could graduate, not just eat peanut butter crackers, horrible tuna sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice into that December.That was a quarter-century ago.

Fast-forward nine years. My then girlfriend and now wife also ended up seeking help from Slater, as she could not finish her degree because she owed several thousand dollars to Pitt in tuition. I encouraged her to write and meet with Slater. He deferred her tuition payments for the upcoming spring semester so that she could graduate in April ’98.

It’s not every day that I get to thank someone for not only helping me, but others in my life as well. I don’t know where Ron Slater is now, but I am truly, truly thankful that our paths crossed in the fall of ’88.

On Pitt’s Concrete Slab & A Labor Day Pirates Game

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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1988, Bucs, College Success, Darryl Strawberry, Forbes Quad, Forbes Quadrangle, Handouts, Homeless, Homelessness, Labor Day, Mets, New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, Schenley Park, Self-Discovery, Three Rivers Stadium, Wesley V. Posvar Hall


Wesley V. Posvar Hall (formerly Forbes Quadrangle, formerly Forbes Field – I would’ve been on slab in stairwell in SW corner of building 25 years ago), University of Pittsburgh, September 2, 2013. (http://www.tour.pitt.edu).

It was a quarter-century ago that I think I finally became an adult. Or, at least, was no longer stuck at the age of twelve psychologically and emotionally. I understand that five days without a permanent place to sleep, eat and shower isn’t much when compared to many who’ve lived with homelessness much longer. But it was more than enough to wake me up to the fact that my already tumultuous life was on the verge of being a full-blown nightmare if I didn’t find shelter in the form of a South Oakland firetrap.

From Boy @ The Window:

Tuesday and Wednesday were the worst two days of my life since the summer of abuse. Even with the luggage well hidden [in Schenley Park], I worried that fire ants would get a hold of my clothes or that a homeless guy would steal my stuff. But I had no choice. I saw no one from the second half of my freshman year on campus, so I didn’t ask for any other help. I kept looking and calling places for apartment availability. Whether efficiencies or studios or one-bedrooms, the response was always, “the place is taken.” I spent part of the evening at William Pitt Union, watching the news and the Pirates game, thinking all the while about where I’d sleep that night. The student union was out. Pitt Police were always prowling around and looking into the TV room. Hillman Library was still on a summer schedule, and wouldn’t open for its normal hours until after Labor Day. The other buildings were classrooms and faculty offices, better places to hide. My runaway experience in ’85 gave me that idea.

Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2, 2013. [note the heavily wooded area behind the lake]. (http://post-gazette.com).

Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2, 2013. [note the heavily wooded area behind the lake]. (http://post-gazette.com).

I went over to Forbes Quadrangle (formerly Forbes Field, where the Pirates used to play) and hung out at The Second Plate deli on its benches for a while, pretending to study until well after midnight. Then I looked around for a good place to sleep. Unfortunately, maintenance and security guards locked up all of the classrooms and faculty lounges at night. I settled on the stairwell in the farthest corner of the building away from its two main entrances. I walked up to the fifth floor ledge, laid down on the hard concrete on top of my clothes, and fell asleep. This wasn’t a good sleep, maybe four or five hours. The fluorescent lights were always on, the guard or students would use the stairs, and the ledge was the hardest thing that I’d ever slept on. I woke up on Wednesday and Thursday morning stiffer than I’d been the day before….Before I went to sleep Wednesday night, I got real with myself and real humble with God and started praying. I said, “God, I don’t pray nearly as much as I used to, but I could really use your help. I am your child because of Jesus, and I need you to help me find a place to stay. If you don’t help me find somewhere to live, I’ll have to go home and go to school from home.” I knew full well – and God knew, too – what would happen if I went back home. Nothing. Nothing good, anyway. I was three or four days away from buying a plane ticket back to New York and withdrawing from the university. Thoughts of going to Fordham University or Hunter College crept into my head. They were good schools for someone like me. Living at home, though, wasn’t.

Of course, I did eventually find a house with a room available, one where I’d share a kitchen and bathroom for the next two school years with other Pitt students, reputable and otherwise.

I slept away most of my Labor Day Weekend, except for spending some of my remaining money to take in a Pirates-Mets game at Three Rivers. My Mets won 7-5, on the power of two Darryl Strawberry home runs.

…After what I’d just been through, I learned something new and foreign. That everyone needs folks in their lives – friends, family, mentors and authority figures – if for no other reason than the need to ask for help. I’d come to know at least a dozen people who I could’ve called on during my five-day ordeal, but I never looked through a phone book or gave them a call. Heck, I didn’t even try to keep in touch by getting their addresses and numbers at the end of April. Not to mention contacting Jack Daniel, an Associate Provost at Pitt and the author of the Challenge Scholarship, the one that paid for half of my tuition. If anyone had any incentive to make sure I had a place to lay my head, it would’ve been him. All of these thoughts had been in my head during the week. I didn’t trust them or the instincts or wisdom from which they originated. “I’m so stupid God,” I said to myself, “I’m so incredibly stupid.”

Mom’s constant mantra in my head, of not depending on others for help, was a lie, at least for me. I couldn’t will myself through school. Especially when it came to money. I needed all the help I could get. Besides, my family had now been on welfare for five and a half years. If that wasn’t one of my Mom’s examples of so-called handouts, I didn’t know what was.

My approach to college changed with this revelation…I knew that all the things I shied away from talking about were now things I needed to discuss. But I also knew that I had to draw out my better, more sociable self in order to welcome others in my life with open arms. That meant taking some risks, which meant that I could get hurt emotionally or psychologically by them.

My life hasn’t been the same since, thank God.

K-16 Education Reform and the Unlevel Playing Field

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Adult Learners, College Affordability, College Success, Degree Attainment, Dr. Steve Perry, Economic Inequality, Education Inequality, Employability, First-Generation Students, High-Stakes Testing, Higher Education, K-16 Education Reform, Michelle Rhee, Poor Students, Private Foundations, Student Loans, Students of Color, Teacher Accountability, Two-Tiered System, US Department of Education, Wendy Kopp


President Barack Obama speaking college affordability and a rating system, University of Buffalo (NY), August 22, 2013. (http://sfgate.com).

President Barack Obama speaking college affordability and a rating system, University of Buffalo (NY), August 22, 2013. (http://sfgate.com).

The shape and direction of education reform in America’s public schools and in US higher education is such that one can only conclude that this is the century in which social mobility will be limited to a precious and lucky few. With high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind on the K-12 side, and the rise of for-profit online institutions in postsecondary education, we’re well on our way to a two-tiered system of education. One tier for the affluent, who will attend private schools and elite colleges, and a much lower tier for the rest of us, who will increasingly receive a watered down public education and have ever more limited higher education options.

The Problem With Mainstream K-16 Reformers:

The problem is, though, most reformers actually believe that their efforts at reform will result in a fairer and more level playing field for our kids and for first-generation college students of every stripe. They have an unwavering desire to make testing the cornerstone of curriculum revisions and the key determinant in measuring teacher effectiveness, and thus, tying future funds to school performance levels. Or, in the case of for-profit online higher education, they believe that financial aid in the form of student loans, accelerated classes with a curriculum strictly geared for current job market trends and lack of academic support is the shape of their river. Leaving vulnerable millions of first-generation students — particularly low-income adult learners (many of whom are of color) — to dropping out of college with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off and with few good career prospects.

Mock Time Magazine cover with Michelle Rhee alleging her full knowledge of cheating scandal in DC Public Schools, April 14, 2013.  (By a college student whose mom is a 7th grade teacher -http://www.susanohanian.org/)

Mock Time Magazine cover with Michelle Rhee alleging her full knowledge of cheating scandal in DC Public Schools, April 14, 2013. (By a college student whose mom is a 7th grade teacher -http://www.susanohanian.org/)

These reforms go further in providing an unlevel playing field. One where only a privileged few get to go down Mount Everest in a helicopter. The rest of us, meanwhile, must climb up Everest, ill-equipped for the climate while dodging rock slides, avalanches and other land mines all along the way.

An Unasked Question About K-12 Reform:

That reformers don’t see this is one thing. That they don’t even ask the questions that they should about their reform endgame has been the real problem for years. For example, they don’t ask the simple question, “Will high-stakes testing and teacher effectiveness measures close the achievement gap and make it so that students regardless of race and family income will be well prepared after graduating high school for college or for workforce training?”

The answer to this, of course, is no. High-stakes testing cannot and will not close the achievement gap or lead to students graduating high school better prepared for college and the 21st century working world. Teachers and administrators will continue to devote more of their time and efforts to testing than to other aspects of their jobs, for fear of losing their jobs. Reformers will continue to use the mantra of testing to siphon those precious and limited taxpayer dollars out of state legislatures and school boards to cover the costs of test development and test-based teacher evaluations. And students attending the allegedly worst performing schools will continue to lose good teachers and move from school to school in search of the promise — but not the reality — of a quality K-12 education.

Reformers like Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp and Dr. Steve Perry (not to be confused with Journey’s lead singer) don’t ask this question. They are too busy procuring funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, the Wallace Foundation and the US Department of Education to discuss the shape of their reform river. They are much more interested in proving a strong correlation between teacher effectiveness and student achievement via test scores, because they believe this is the way, truth and life for K-12 reform. And pretty soon, we will know that this correlation either doesn’t exist or is a weak one at best, under some rather ideal circumstances.

An Unasked Question About Higher Education Reform:

Futurama poster "A Mindless Worker Is A Happy Worker," August 23, 2013. (http://d3.ru)

Futurama poster “A Mindless Worker Is A Happy Worker,” August 23, 2013. (http://d3.ru)

For-profit institutions involved in online higher education do no better in asking fundamental questions about their endgame. University of Phoenix, Kaplan University and Capella University don’t ask, “Is an accelerated online college format that is highly dependent on underprepared first-generation college students, provides few or no academic support services and is heavily subsidized by federal student loans the best possible postsecondary education for these students?” Of course it isn’t. Over the past 20 years, these institutions have been too busy figuring out ways to increase the enrollment of low-income students to ask this question. They have been more interested in drawing in as much federal student loan aid as possible to cover the costs of student enrollment to ask whether they are providing the best services.

For those not-so-lucky students attending these institutions, they face a great distance between the promises of this new higher education regime and its brutal reality. For-profits promise an online education that is tailor-made for students’ job and career aspirations, one even more alluring because it is an allegedly convenient fit for the demands of any adult lifestyle. For-profits seem to be proud of the fact that fewer than 20 percent of their students complete a degree eight years after they first enroll in one of their courses. For those few students who do manage to complete a degree, many are finding that their narrowly focused degrees don’t match up with their career aspirations.

Irony and Shame:

The irony is that for-profit online higher education has all but moved away from testing at a time when the only thing that matters in K-12 education is testing, from a child’s first week in kindergarten to his or her last day of 12th grade. The ironic shame of it all is that reformers in both K-12 and higher education never ask the question of what we should expect at the end of the reforming rainbow. Their reform efforts are purely about making a profit, for themselves or for others. The rest of us, meanwhile, can’t wait for Superman, with reformers stealing his powers on both ends of the K-16 spectrum, and placing kryptonite for real reform at every turn.

—-

I wrote all this months ago. Now, with President Barack Obama offering a formalized version of accountability for higher education institutions that connects market-relevant degrees and employment to college success, him and his administration are pushing the two-tiered agenda even further. Private elite colleges can easily opt out of this Race to the Top-esque rating system for higher education costs-to-employability ratios, and create their own measures around affordability, degree-attainment and career pathways. Or not, for that matter.

Public institutions — the ones tied most directly to US Department of Education funds — will have little choice but to go down this money-wasting path. One that in the end will do nothing for first-generation students, students of color, older students, heck, any student who comes from a humble background. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say.

edX and Ex-lax (& Higher Education’s Future)

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture

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Tags

Affordability, College Access, College Success, Education, Education Reform, edX, Elite Universities, Ex-lax, Future of Higher Education, Harvard, Higher Education, iCollege, K-16 Education, MIT, Online Education, Sebastian Thrun


Ex-lax Chocolated Laxative, September 26, 2012. (http://overstockdrugstore.com).

Last May, Harvard and MIT announced a $60 million partnership that would provide free online courses to 600,000 students worldwide. That this came on the heels of an experiment in which former Stanford professor (and now co-founder of the Udacity.com online classroom platform) Sebastian Thrun made his “Introduction to AI” course available for free online in the fall of 2011 says something. The current model of providing a college education or postsecondary training – for-profit, public, community college or otherwise – will be dead for most students by 2030.

What will this new form of higher education look like? Will students who can now take a couple of Harvard or MIT online courses for free so overwhelm these schools that paying customers will also demand a free online education, and lead to the disintegration of higher education as we know it?

The answer lies somewhere in between higher education feast and famine. For the selected few, Ivy League and other elite institutions will continue to thrive, no matter the costs. Parents will continue to send their kids to Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown – and students will enthusiastically attend them – for far more than a degree. The social networks that students will build at these universities and use as alumni for jobs, careers and even marriages easily outweigh the high cost of tuition. Just ask the Obamas.

For most college students, though, edX is but the tip of the spear. Ultimately, a decade or so from now, going to college will be as simple as clicking on an app on your iPhone, iPad, or whatever an Apple, a Google or some other corporation comes up with next.

edX logo, May 2, 2012. (http://news.harvard.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws – main subject of post.

No one institution or single university collaboration can take charge of this transition to a national and international online higher education experience, even with edX’s implementation. But with an Apple or a Google’s history of collaboration, technical expertise, and innovative vision, they can pull off the moving of the higher education platform to an accredited application. One that even Harvard, MIT and Oxford could get behind – though they may have to hold their noses at first.

By the time this transition is complete, online college – or, dare I say, iCollege – will look more like a combination of EA Sports’ Madden NFL ’13, Skype, Twitter and Facebook than the standard threaded discussions and video recordings we have today. It will be a process where any professor could be put in a lab with sensors and a classroom full of students asking every possible question and providing every possible answer to a series of topics that would add up to a course. And an Apple or a Google could do this over and over again for the thousands of possible courses an undergraduate student could take, in the US or anywhere in the world.

That alone would make this a decent revolution, at least technologically. Combining it with Apple’s or Google’s ability to negotiate agreements with accrediting agencies and with universities across the country, though, would make iCollege an all-out revolution. Because of these partnerships, the future iCollege would be light-years beyond the new edX, as this would enable students to transfer their credits to a UC Berkeley, Harvard or New York University if they so chose to take an in-person course whenever necessary.

Corridor in code, The Matrix (1999) screen shot, September 26, 2012. (http://luisangelv.wordpress.com).

This could be a one-time $500 million investment that could yield tens of billions in profits annually. In the process, it would make higher education much cheaper, more democratic and less exploitive of students and government resources. For an industry or job-related certificate: $5,000. For a two-year or associate’s degree: $10,000. For a four-year degree: $24,000.

There would be casualties, of course. Testing entities like the College Board, Educational Testing Service, and ACT will somehow have to adapt to this democratization of higher education or die out. The current set of for-profit institutions, community colleges and large state public institutions will have to become specialists in specific career training activities, partner within an iCollege consortium, or go out of business. Like it or not, this is the road that American and international higher education is on, one rapid stride after another. But it’s all for the better. Or at least, it could be?

College Isn’t For Everyone

07 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Adult Learners, College Access, College Success, Economic Inequality, Education, Education News, Education Reporting, Educational Inequality, For-Profit Colleges, Ivy League Schools, Jay Mathews, K-16 Education, Parental Advantages, Parents, Politics of Education, Poverty, Public Education, Public Institutions, Taking Advantage, Washington Post


Sterling Memorial Library (cropped), Yale University, New Haven, CT, September 3, 2008. (Ragesoss via Wikipedia). Permission granted via licenses with GFDL and Creative Commons cc-by-sa-2.5.

In May ’05, I attended a conference in DC hosted by the Council for Opportunity in Education on college access and college success. Jay Mathews, an education columnist with The Washington Post, was a guest speaker. Mathews spent most of his talk telling educators that the public doesn’t care for our extensive analysis of what does and doesn’t work in K-16 education reform. “Readers only care about two things,” Matthew said — testing, and “how can I get my kid into Harvard, Yale or Princeton?”

I certainly didn’t like Mathews’ smug and dismissive talk, but he was right about one point, however inadvertent on his part. That most Americans don’t think about education news unless it either confirms their worst fears — that public education is a waste of taxpayer dollars — or confirms their highest hopes — that an Ivy League school (or the near equivalent) accepts Tyler or Courtney as students. Little else matters for most of the American reading public, because columnists, reporters and editors like Mathews have long since abandoned the idea that education is a playing-field leveler for most people. “College isn’t for everyone,” is the common refrain in Mathews’ world, and in the world of most right-thinking Americans.

What does go unreported and underreported, though, is that most Americans with the money and knowledge to give their kids every advantage possible, and do so in a rather ruthless fashion. All while denying other kids in their community similar opportunities, deliberately or otherwise. Over the past thirty-five years, property taxes and other taxes that cover the costs of a public education have been slashed, as taxpayers revolted in places like California and New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

That alone has meant two things: the contributions of the federal government to public education increased to make up for these long-term tax cuts, and the ability of most American school districts to provide all of the necessary resources for students has gone down. This opened the door for the politicized hammering of teachers unions as too powerful, and the growth of the testing mandate since the early 1990s, further weakening public education. Need I even mention public charter schools as the suggested alternative for Americans of lower-income?

Gated community, Houston, TX area [but virtual gates in education for years], February 13, 2012. (Chelsea Lameira via http://www.houstonagentmagazine.com)

But that’s only part of the story. There are plenty of parents who take even more advantage of loopholes based on money and knowledge. They hold their kids out of school a full year before kindergarten, giving them an extra twelve months to become proficient readers before they’ve ever stepped into a classroom. They pay for tutors and Kumon early on, but not because their kids are struggling with reading, writing and math. No, these parents pay for this extra help to give their students the ability to score in the top percentiles on tests that will label their children as “gifted.”

Some parents even transfer their children to different schools within a district with the “right” demographic mixtures to ensure their student’s success and their ability to be noticed. Some parents will begin the process of preparing their kids for the SATs and for AP courses via Kaplan or Princeton Review as early as fifth and sixth grade. And all to ensure that, in the end, their kids will have the post-high school choice of an Ivy League school, or at least, an equivalent elite school, like a Stanford or Georgetown.

These parents, the majority of Americans who would only readily agree with Mathews’ worldview on education news, aren’t evil. But, then again, we all know what the road to Hell is paved with. And in this case, these advantages on the one end point to the severe disadvantages on the other end, no matter how rare it is for the likes of Mathews to write about.

I’m not talking about poverty from birth to eighteen per se, although I could go there in detail. No, it’s the end result, the young adult or over-the-age-of-twenty-five person who finally decides after years of educational neglect to take advantage of the twenty-first century, to go to college after struggling to finish elementary, middle and high school. Most of these students never knew a tutor, never had a parent who understood the loopholes in public education of which to take advantage.

These adult students come into college — often a for-profit institution like University of Phoenix, a

University of Maryland University College administrative offices, Largo, MD, July 2, 2010. (Donald Earl Collins).

community college or a public institution like the one in which I teach now in University of Maryland University College — as raw and unpolished. These students are often long on enthusiasm, yet short on the skills and especially knowledge they need for success. And they have a sharp learning curve in order to get there. One in which these students have to learn in a year or what it took the most advantaged Americans eighteen or nineteen years to learn. The graduation rates of these institutions illustrate how difficult it is for most adult students to climb Mount Everest in their shorts, and all in the middle of a blizzard.

“College isn’t for everyone,” I hear Mathews and millions of other smug Americans say. Of course it isn’t. Especially when you make sure that it isn’t, through money, knowledge and cunning politics.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

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Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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