There’s a campaign here to start a food bank for students who can’t afford food, even though many work full time. Many also are raising families.
It’s a stark view of the reality of American higher education, in which rich kids go to elite private and flagship public campuses while poor kids — including those who score higher on standardized tests than their wealthier counterparts — end up at community colleges and regional public universities with much lower success rates, assuming they continue their educations at all. And new federal data analyzed by the Hechinger Report and the Huffington Post show the gap has been widening at a dramatically accelerating rate since the economic downturn began in 2008.
We can get to whether rich students are destroying free speech once we are done with this. A fucking food bank for people trying to get a goddamn education. We can go back to wall-to-wall-ing the morning shows with stories about how too many scheduled activities are ruining your kids, when this is done:
Average tuition has more than doubled since 1970 when adjusted for inflation, according to the Pell Institute, and income and financial aid have not remotely kept pace. Among other reasons for the huge tuition increases: the pricey arms race in amenities to attract higher-income students, a huge increase in the number of administrators, and other non-academic expenses, all fueled by the easy supply of government-subsidized loans.
In 1975, the maximum federal Pell Grant covered two-thirds of the average cost of college; today, that’s fallen to about a quarter.
Talk to me some more about how all the kids do is text, and don’t know how to have real interactions! Talk to me about slutwalks and how young women don’t appreciate their rights. Tell young men to pull up their pants. Let’s have ANOTHER summit on the violence of video games and movies. Is anybody reading books anymore? I know: Hookup culture! That’s a good segment for tomorrow’s newscast. Are smartphones and dating apps ruining intimacy?
Let’s keep talking about that shit. Let’s keep talking about it over and over, louder and louder, and maybe all the messy details of all the messy lives of actual young people in college will go away.
Via Thers.
A.