I saw this New York Times column by Frank Bruni on the overscheduling of kids and it struck a chord with me:
Scelfo wrote about six suicides in a 13-month period at the University of Pennsylvania; about the prevalence of anxiety and depression on college campuses; about many star students’ inability to cope with even minor setbacks, which are foreign and impermissible.
Those students almost certainly need more sleep. In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.
I went to a school for undergrad where the unofficial motto was “Choose two: sleep, friends, work”
The cultural expectation was people were expected to run themselves into the ground even past the point of negative returns on work. People were in the computer labs at two in the morning on Saturday night trying to do homework that was not due until Wednesday as they created more errors than they solved. If you weren’t zombie-eyed and involuntarily celibate, you were slacking.
I happened to be able to choose all three plus Paris plus a few other amazing adventures while graduating with honors and getting into a top graduate program in my chosen field. I quickly realized that my best work did not happen at 11:00 at night. Quality went downhill dramatically by 1:00AM. The one exception was a repeated science experiment which involved filling unused condoms with cheap beer and chucking them off the roof to see if drunk people liked beer from heaven. Three years worth of data showed most people appreciated it although the campus cops weren’t cool with the non-IRB approved experiment.
There was also a spate of suicides on campus in my freshman and sophomore years. The underlying cause was most of the people I went to school with were not able to cope with being normal within their immediate peer group. They never were normal before then. Not being locally exceptional (while still being globally excellent) was a massive shock to people’s self-conceptualization of worth.
I was lucky in that my neighborhood Irish Catholic parish school had a crazed nun running it. She made sure 10% to 15% of her graduating classes every year went to Ivy equivilents. My classmates were like me, the kids of the skilled blue collar tradesmen. The 80 kids who graduated with me plus or minus a year sent three to Harvard, another four to other Ivies, a pair to MIT, me to where I went, one each to Amherst, Stanford and Duke. Most of us went on near half rides or better. When we talked in our early twenties, we all agreed 8th grade English was probably the hardest class we had until senior thesis or master level synthesis projects.
I don’t know how to fix this problem, as I was lucky enough to be able to side step it personally but I saw too many of my peers, classmates and friends during undergrad be burned out, lose themselves and lose their passion and potential because they were exhausted eighteen years olds.
Cermet
Tragically, two of my daughters friends committed suicide last year at her school/dorm. The rates are far too high thanks, in part, to expectations of performance.
Tommy
My niece is 6 and her day, every day, is scheduled down to the second. She seems very happy but I do wonder why it has to be that way. I guess I am getting old but when I was a kid I just went outside and played. Almost nothing was scheduled.
Emma
As I mentioned in the thread below, I am a (former) public service librarian who spent most of her professional life dealing with student problems. Most kids seem to handle college just fine with the usual bumps, aches, and pains; others slip into depression; some become manic overachievers. Of the last two, I don’t know which is worse, but I suspect suicides fall into either group. And I know for sure you can’t predict it except in extreme cases.
Parental expectations and social pressure are a lousy combination for some kids.
Richard Mayhew
@Tommy: Speaking as a dad of a 6 year old, event scheduling versus free time/minimally structured is a conversation that I have with my wife every week. Does she want to take gymnastics this fall? If so, what day? And what is she giving up to do gymnastics? Do we want to do anything in the evening, or is it a space-out/play/walk to the library and post-office night?
Right now she is with Grandma and Grandpa for the week and their biggest plan for the week is to go to the community beach on the river to go swimming and eat popcorn. She needs a week of nothing much as she had been on the go for most of the year.
Punchy
And here’s where I go all shouting at clouds. Back in my day, kids failed at shit all the time. Only actual winners of swim meets got trophys/medals. Teachers actually gave out Ds and Fs. Kids seemed to learn that absent absolute superiority in an athletic or academic event, one was likely to go home sans awards and with a bit of frustration. Nowadays, the prevaling parenting method seems to be the Helicoptor Method, in which kids aren’t allowed to fail, or allowed to feel as if they have (trophies for 11th place!) even when they suck.
Shorter: to raise kids to be completely unfamiliar with the thoughts and sensations of failure/setbacks will inevitably lead to kids unable to cope with them.
Now get the fuck offa my lawn.
Another Holocene Human
Yes! When you’re the weird kid, but your grades are good (or your scores on standardized tests are good, or you placed high in latin or math or physics competitions), that becomes your identity and sense of self worth. Then you go to an engineering school or suchlike and there are hundreds of people just like you … oh, and they’re killing you on the midterms.
There’s more to the suicides, though, as my former high school seemed to have a suicide every year, usually over grades pressure. The school refused to post rankings for that reason but it kept going on.
I think it’s capitalism. It’s not okay to be average, or just good and not the best, because how are you going to survive? There are very few basic science, field work, or research jobs. There’s even less money. Arts are extremely cutthroat as well, although there is more of a culture of hustling. But some of these kids get into very negative clusters of behavior as well. Young people on college track are basically unemployable (except in retail hell scutwork jobs where your job is to be a smiling face the customers can dump on because you’re young and you really need that job so they can push you around with impunity–oh, and forget about even shitty retail if you’re black … you’re wearing a funny hat). You have no options but to stay the course. It’s really, really fucked up.
The lack of sleep is huge. It starts with high schools opening before the crack of dawn, which research shows is completely the wrong thing to do. OTOH they have elementary schools starting late, for the convenience of the parents, even though kids that age should be in early and out early.
MattF
I went to Bronx Science back in the ’60s. The teachers (who were the cream of the NYC crop) were generally careful not to make impossible demands– some of the kids were amazing, most were not. I recall my physics teacher (who went on to become principal of Stuyvesant HS) once explained that the guiding philosophy of the school was to give the students a chance to be aimless and fail without serious penalty.
Another Holocene Human
@Punchy: It’s the opposite. There is too much at stake to fail. These kids have never been taught a Plan B. For many of them there IS no Plan B. You can’t pay rent in a major city on minimum wage.
And believe me, everybody knows the difference between a participation trophy and a championship trophy, lol.
Another Holocene Human
@Emma: I was already depressed well before I got to college but the adults mostly wouldn’t have known it.
Tommy
@Richard Mayhew: I don’t what is right or wrong, I don’t have any kids. But something about every second of her day being planned just doesn’t seem right.
C.V. Danes
Unfortunately, we live in a winner-take-all society where failure is not an option. Until we change that, failure will not be accepted as an option by our teens, especially when they have their parents up their ass every second of every day. The teens aren’t going to chill until their parents do.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: Kids used to be able to roam over large distances. This engages certain cognitive functions and I suspect it’s good for their brains. They also learn how to solve problems while playing. They also learn things about the world. But thanks to stranger danger and all of that, kids are penned in.
I think the shrinking size of families may be part of the reason that parents are so protective now. Too much locked up genetically in a few packages. We also just judge other parents so much more harshly now. I recall they were going to sent this poor young woman who lived in a trailer to prison because her 2 year old did a runner and went into a retention pond and drowned. The woman was doing laundry. How is that negligent? (There were gates the child MacGuyvered through.) Have you ever taken care of a 2 year old?
Tommy
@MattF: I come from a family of doctors and PhDs. I got terrible grades until I got to college. I was frankly bored with school.
My parents kept a happy middle ground of pushing but not pushing to hard. Funny thing once I got into college and got to take classes I wanted to take and fI pretty much never got anything other than an A.
I am not sure what would have happened if my parents pushed me a lot harder.
Another Holocene Human
@C.V. Danes:
This.
These suicides have been going on for years. They started with the middle class. By this I mean the traditional definition, not this “upper middle class” crap. Comfortable, but MUST work for a living. Every middle class parent’s ambition is for their child to be middle class as well. Failure is NOT an option, and they will do anything and everything, including making the child feel their self worth is tied to their school performance.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human:
This is what I was thinking and you said it better than I would have.That was exactly how it was for me. I roamed far and wide. Often miles and miles from my house.
I’d leave the house early in the morning and not return until dinner, which was at 5:30 PM sharp and you were NEVER late for.
These were some of the happiest days of my life and I feel other children don’t get to experience. Have they ever built a fort? Climbed a tree? Maybe done something stupid and hurt themselves?
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
I think that mentality’s gone berserk in America. “If you’re not first, you’re last.” Same mentality that, when you’re an adult, tells you to “start your own business” as a solution to all your problems, because if you’re not the boss, you’re a loser.
Applejinx
@Punchy: Holocene Human has this one nailed. The trouble here is that all these systems have adapted to the conditions of advanced freemarket unregulated capitalism with no welfare state, in which everything’s being offshored or automated.
We pretty much gotta fix the system ASAP. The kids projecting outcomes, (failed this which means I can’t qualify for X which means I can’t graduate and compete for Y which means I’m working McD’s with 80K student loan debts set against cost of living Z which I won’t be able to maintain on the McDs pay, hence die now, why go through all that?) those kids are not necessarily misunderstanding the situation. They are inclined to cooperate in a world that’s a meat-grinder just for them.
I’m pretty stressed and I have decades of specialization in things those kids don’t know, extensive contacts in public services and a ‘name’ and identity in my industry. In so many ways I’m doing WAY better than most kids out of college could hope to. One in a hundred will do as well as me and I’m barely scraping by with all the cunning I can muster. I DO run my own business, have for years, but I gotta kill all the other businesses apparently. come again? How is that part of my job description for my customer service, to kill other shit they can use?
It is absolutely capitalism. This situation was created. This is not a state of nature, because nature is not the ‘everything kills everything 24/7’ libertarians and rightwingers imagine. Nature is a set of interlocking welfare states politely preying upon each other, because anything more ‘arena-like’ doesn’t persist over the long term, it goes boom-and-busty and extincts itself. The nature equivalent of welfare states, the moderating influences, smooth out the system.
We have to fix this, by hobbling or discarding raw capitalism. It ain’t working, any more than raw state socialism or raw communism. Humans’ abilities to think up ideal systems seems, shall we say, a little suspect!
Richard Mayhew
@Punchy: But in the subset of kids who the article is talking about (elite over-achieving strivers) most of them don’t know how to fail because locally at least, they really are that good.
My freshman year dorm floor had 25 guys who went to US high schools on it, There were 15 valedictorians or salutorians, seven National Merit Scholars, several national academic contests (for a variety of fields, music, art, science, math etc) participants, three patent holders, two Equity members and then me. These people on the whole were very, very, very, very good at at least one thing on any objective scale. It is hard to learn how to fail when the raw and later on cultivated talent level is so high until they are put in a mix with other kids who are literally 1:10,000 or rarer in their specific field. Most people just did not have the odds of running into too many actual peers unless they either went to a crazy neighborhood grammar school like me, or they were at big cities with large local aggregators of top tier high school kids (Brooklyn Science or Boston Latin for instance).
In general, learning to fail is a good skill to have, but this population has typically had few chances to actually learn to fail gracefully.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: I was pushed. A lot. I couldn’t take the pressures of college and flamed out a couple of times.
One problem with being pushed is that I lost touch with my strengths and weaknesses and couldn’t honestly evaluate my class/major choices and course load. I also emotionally couldn’t make the decision to drop a class until it was too late. This lead to academic and personal problems.
My parents were also so fixated on college that they talked me out of a very good job offer that would have set me on my chosen field. I saw this the other day about working moms but it’s true for other things too “There are many off ramps, but on ramps are hard to find.” It’s easy to go back to school (they want your money), very hard to get a job offer. I’ve paid for that decision for years.
Aimai
@Emma: also a lot of kids with a variety of mental health or ither issues who had support structures in place prior to college age out at college, leave home, and dont get what they need in college in terms of maintenance. Lots of people who never would have gone away to school before go now. Its a huge cohort.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: My parents were rock stars. I think my father learned from how hard he was pushed by his father. Military school most of his life. Pushed, pushed, and pushed some more. Nothing was ever enough. He didn’t do that to me and I am so grateful for it.
Belafon
@Punchy: I graduated near the top of my class because I worked my butt off. My kids are doing more work than I did at the same age. I could come home, do my homework, and be outside to play after an hour or two. My kids regularly are at the table doing homework until bed on weekdays, and working all day Sunday. I feel really sorry for the families whose children really struggle with homework.
Emma
@Another Holocene Human: I know. I saw my share of bad outcomes. But a parent can sometimes short circuit the disaster. There are no good answers.
Richard Mayhew
@Another Holocene Human: Agreed, that was my childhood. By the age of 12, I had the freedom to either take my bike on about a 25 mile radius of action (going too far northwest was out as there was a nasty set of ridges and switchbacks that would take most of the fun out of an adventure).
If I had lined someone to cover my paper route that afternoon, biking down to the train station and getting on the commuter train and heading to Boston for whatever fun I could find was a good time . Half the time that meant people watching at the Common or Harvard Square or Fanueil Hall or the Public Library, and the other half meant chasing random things across the city.
As long as I was home before dark OR I called (collect was acceptable although I needed to pay that portion of the bill back the next week), I was fine.
Tommy
@Richard Mayhew: I went to a small school on a DI golf scholarship. I was the best of the best where I lived. I recall playing against the University of Illinois and paired with a player now on the Pro Tour.
I recall thinking to myself he was playing a game I was not familiar with. I better study my rear end off because no chance I am making my living playing golf.
Aimai
I don’t like the implicatiin of the post that working class kids are somehow more robust than others or immune to self doubt, depression, or suicide. That suicide or the various other forms of self harm are “the problems of a subset” ie (unless I’m misreading) some kind of upper class self indulgence. Poor people, working class kids, minority kids get stressed, depressed, lack resilience, flunk out and even kill themselves.
Emma
@Aimai: I know. Believe me, I know. But sometimes if we’re lucky, we see one disaster coming and are able to avert it. Not a satisfying answer but the best we can do at the moment.
Chris
@Applejinx:
Yep.
As for the whole point in re unregulated capitalism, it all goes back to the basic principle of whether the economy should serve the people or the other way around. These days, it’s papered over with pithy after-school-special sounding aphorisms like “you’re not special” and “the world doesn’t owe you a living,” but what it comes down to is that we’ve accepted that it’s our duty as humans to dance to the Market-God’s tune. Instead of remembering that society is a human construct in the first place and that it is, in fact, supposed to serve human beings’ needs instead of the other way around.
OzarkHillbilly
A buddy of mine’s son graduated HS with 5.7 GPA (I think I know that avg isn’t possible but my point is that his GPA was stratospherically high) with all the honors etc etc. Got a full ride academic scholarship to SLU. 2 months into his first semester he quit. Just couldn’t do it anymore.
A year later he was a union pipefitter and happy as a clam. Now he’s a journeyman, works 60+ hrs a week, when he works, and has more money than he knows what to do with.
sparrow
@Another Holocene Human: My SO is from Greece, and this problem is virtually unheard of. Of course, in high school and college in Greece, the cool thing is to totally slack off and do the bare minimum to pass, and for gods sake don’t be seen as an over-achiever. I don’t know if it’s good for national productivity, but suicides at age 20 are a lot more rare.
raven
@Richard Mayhew: Did you catch Smoltz’s comments at the Hall of Fame about kids and sports? Good stuff.
Tommy
@OzarkHillbilly: It pisses me off everybody thinks college is the only way to make a good living. The plumber/handyman I use charges $75/hour. We live in the same part of the country and that is a darn good living and he has more work than he can take.
Gin & Tonic
@Richard Mayhew: She needs a week of nothing much as she had been on the go for most of the year.
Dude, she’s *6*. WTF does “on the go for most of the year” mean? She’s fucking *6*.
I really don’t mean to judge, but stop and re-read what you wrote.
raven
John Smoltz calls out domineering travel-baseball culture at end of Hall of Fame acceptance speech
I want to encourage all the families and parents out there to understand that this is not normal to have a surgery at 14 and 15 years old. That you have time. That baseball’s not a year-round sport. That you have an opportunity to be athletic and play other sports.”
He then went on to fire a shot at the moneymakers dangling empty promises:
“Don’t let the institutions that are out there running before you, guaranteeing scholarship dollars and signing bonuses, that this is the way. We have such great dynamic arms in our game that it’s a shame that we’re having one and two and three Tommy John recipients.
Chris
@sparrow:
A culture shock for a lot of people switching from the French to American systems; cheating is no longer considered OK. I’ve seen more than a few French kids amused and bewildered that an American teacher could leave his classroom in the middle of an exam, unattended, and be more or less sure that the kids wouldn’t be passing notes or telling each other the answers or whatever.
I used to be on the American side of this equation, but there’s something to be said for the French mentality that’s more tolerant of cheating, because… once you grow up, people cheat all the time.
Tinare
I remember a few years ago watching the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys about how a group of kids from California totally changed the sport of skateboarding. Basically a drought in California in the 1970s lead a group of bored tweens to start using drained swimming pools as their playgrounds. They started skating the banks and doing flips leading to a whole new sport fusing what they knew from surfing with skateboarding. I remember thinking that not many kids today have the freedom to roam around inventing ways to entertain themselves. I’m sure some of the homeowners whose pools they used were not overly amused, but sometimes a little boredom can lead to great creativity.
Maybe since I’m a middle-aged fart and not overly tuned into youth culture these days, but it seems like there is less organic stuff happening with this generation. Everything seems so corporate. Where’s the punk and grunge and street rap of today? Are new apps the only things the kids today create?
Another Holocene Human
@Richard Mayhew: Sometimes New England Telephone operators would let you call home for free. Especially if you cried and said the telephone ate your quarter (note: local calls were only 10c).
Ryan
Our unofficial motto where I went to undergrad and grad was “Work hard, play hard,” which is only marginally healthier. I remember toward the end of grad school, I was doing 36 or so hours at a stretch between teaching and dissertation, then would get drunk and sleep. Every two day block, for 17 months. It was never that bad in undergrad, though the first year came pretty close in intensity.
I don’t have an answer either. I know I selected out of tenure track because I didn’t want to sacrifice my 30s, in addition to my 20s, 10s, and aughts. I think universities should take the idea of social support and mental health more seriously than it seems they do at times. I also think they need to do a better job of working with the idea that their students have high aspirations, are self conscious, and evaluate themselves against their peers. Again, I don’t have a solution, just my own sense of the problem.
TheMightyTrowel
@Richard Mayhew: I just want to second this. I am a text book high achiever. High school valedictorian, Ivy league, prestigious grad school scholarship, phd at 26, tenured (!!) position at 29. I have worked my tail off (sometimes), been lucky (a lot), won the genetic lottery (only child of a doctor and a shrink in massachusetts) and I really really really suck at failing. When things don’t work out (let’s talk about my phd examiner who took personal offense at my phd and tried to fail it) I lose my shit, get depressed and highly anxious. Because I was always so good at so many things, it was ok not to do the things i sucked at (music. oh music. also running) when i was younger – there was always something equally acceptable but more fun (because i could do it).
Aside from setting bright kids up to fail more frequently (e.g. shitty fucking team picking in gym class), i’m not sure what we can do. As said above, it’s not that people get gold stars, it’s that failure is not an option and if you’re not naturally prone to failure, how do you build up those calluses?
I’m not sure this post made any sense, but the OP certainly resonated.
as an aside: my best academic year was senior year of uni when i’d just come back from a year of drinking (and catching up on sleep) in Europe and then proceeded to spend most of the year drinking and sleeping in. Happiness, sexual fulfillment and sleep make for much better essays, apparently.
raven
@Tommy: Read “My Losing Season” Pat Conroy about playing basketball in the old Southern Conference. He was an all-state point guard in South Carolina (he honed his game on the playgrounds of DC). When he got into college ball he quickly realized how much better so many of his competitors were. It happens to nearly everyone that plays, the idea that hard work alone will take you to the top is just so much bullshit.
Tommy
@raven: Good for him. I played a ton of sports. I was good at several of them. Tennis and golf (how I paid for my first year of college) at the top of the list. I was that guy that went to tennis camp over X-mas break and almost slept on a cot on the courts.
I was told at a very early age by “experts” I needed to pick one sport. My parents didn’t think this was a good idea. I needed to experience a lot of things.
At one time I used to hit golf balls until my hands almost bleed. Parents would take away my clubs and tell me to do something else.
You need to experience life. As I said in another comment my parents were rock stars!
raven
@TheMightyTrowel: Hey, fuck it, you do the best then adjust. I dropped out of high school and went in the Army on my 17th birthday. Got my GED in Korea in 1967 and my doctorate in 1999. Sure, I trashed my retirement but I don’t regret much.
Belafon
OT: If you want to see something awesome, check this out: Markos Moulitsas’ Shameless, Racially Divisive Hit Job on Sanders Campaign/Supporters Continues. It’s bobswern on Daily Kos. I’m not a bobswern fan. He writes sensational titles with exaggerated stories, but he’s gone after the blog host over Markos pointing out the lack of diversity in Sanders campaign staff and how it’s affected how Sanders has dealt with issues of race. Stuff I’ve seen most Sanders supporters eventually acknowledge. Well, except for bobswern and people commenting in the diary. As I said in a comment, they remind me of Christians who feel the need to protect God.
Walker
I read applications at one of the universities mentioned in this article. Mental health is a major concern; our campus health services are being overwhelmed by the issues. Mental health has become the number one thing that we look at when we read student essays.
Tiger parenting is a major red flag. If we see evidence of that in the essay (students freely admit it more often than you would think), then we are very unlikely to admit that student. I am convinced that this is the primary source of discrimination against Asians in college admissions.
TheMightyTrowel
@raven: Oh for sure. I see this first hand at home: Mr. Trowel has 5degrees and has quit three separate careers, does a bit of teaching and mostly stays home, gardens and makes beer. You do do. etc.
I spend my life pushing 18 and 19 year olds to work harder – and I fail a fair number of them (avg in my classes is US equivalent C- and this is in the arts/humanities). I just wonder if there are healthier structures we can be developing to help the ones who won’t fail until the one day they do so that it’s not such an over-the-cliff moment.
Tommy
@raven:
Yes. My time I realized I would not play tennis for a living was my Junior year. Over Christmas break I went to tennis camp. I beat every player from the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago.
I was kind of full of myself.
The owner of the camp put me on the court with a 12-year-old girl. She beat me 6-0 and 6-1. I am totally sure she gave me that one game just because she felt sorry for me. She hit me off the court and there was nothing I could do about it.
Richard mayhew
@Gin & Tonic: School (Kindergarten) for for 9 months, and day care.
There is some structure there (ie show up for 9:00, reading circle at 9:15, math at 10:15 etc)
She has two days of afterschool activities a week (either swimming or Girl Scouts) and one activity on Saturday mornings (dance last year, gymnastics this year)…
Having absolutely no schedule beyond get back to Mom and Dad’s house on Saturday is what I am referring to as her no structure week.
RSA
@Another Holocene Human:
I agree with everyone else that this is the kernel of the problem. (I saw a little bit of the stress that students go through, as undergrad pre-meds at Johns Hopkins. I was in engineering, though, where there was less pressure.)
I hate seeing the winner-take-all mindset creeping elsewhere in our society. For example, consider XPRIZE: Wikipedia has it that “…$10 million was awarded to the winner [of the Suborbital Spaceflight contenst], but more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize.” Or the DARPA Grand Challenges. Great results, right? Except that you generally have to be in a very special position even to work on such projects, because either you can afford a 10-to-1 risk with your time, or you can gain some side benefit from the work.
BJ had a front-pager a long time ago who suggested more XPRIZE-like contests to come up with solutions to hard social problems. I once asked in comments whether he’d work for a company that would pay only one out of every ten employees, but ten times the going rate. No answer.
Capri
@raven: This is a huge problem. It’s one thing that doesn’t usually come up in the over-scheduled kids discussions. I had a daughter who played volleyball in high school. That one activity sucked up most of her free time. She had the actual practices and games in season, which included some bonus all-day tournaments. Then there was the out-of-season club volleyball, which meant traveling all over the god damn country to play as well as 3 practices a week. And her high school had open gyms in the summer so the few times she wasn’t at a club thing, she was supposed to be there.
She didn’t have violin and latin and mathcounts etc. etc just 1 thing. A high school kid really doesn’t have the option of playing on the varsity squad of their school sports team without devoting a huge chunk of their year to that 1 activity.
I was lucky in that her temperament is similar to a Border collies and she loved being busy every second of the day because it was a grind.
jon
College was a few more years of high school for me. Not terribly difficult once I gave up on caring about the difference between an A and a B, then not being too worried about a C, either. D is for Diploma, after all. (Never got that grade, did get the paper.) Grad School wasn’t very difficult, since it was more of a preaching to the choir exercise than a rigorous program of new learning. (I test well, so I got in with a 3.09 GPA.)
The big problem many of these college students at high-pressure colleges have is that they were pushed into a course of study and when you’re at an expensive school it can be difficult to go back to your parents and say you don’t want to go into law or engineering or whatever when those parents have a third mortgage because of you. I’m so glad I went to a state university and was able to not become a teacher or a studio artist or a journalist or a humanities professor or any of those other silly ideas. Ended up with a degree in library science, and I will be happy until I die if I can be paid reasonably well to help people find books they like and good answers they need.
Keith G
The so-called American Century was based a very massive anomaly. It occurs to me that the conditions that fueled our economic power were about as transitory as any in human history.
Even though far too many were left out, those conditions allowed for the positive experiences that Tommy, Richard, and others have commented about.
Well, that was then. We better figure something else out because working, scaring, testing, and competing our children to death is not going to be an acceptable answer.
Our fetishism over an idealized/mythic version of capitalism needs to be tossed out the window.
raven
@TheMightyTrowel: I hope there are and I hope they happen. I don’t kid myself, I had a shitty childhood but I still had many of the advantages of being “middle class”. With all the trouble I was in I always had it in mind that I’d go to college. Had I not broken my back in the mid-70’s I might have ended up doing union labor like some many of my buddies did but my injury ruled that out. My diss looked at people who quit school and went back to get their GED’s. I know there is a great deal of controversy about the new “corporate” GED but people have ti have some mechanism for a second chance.
Walker
@Capri:
Colleges do not like long lists of extra-curriculars. That is a myth. What they like is seeing one or two things that the student has a strong passion for doing.
raven
@Capri: Yep, I fought for sanity in kids sports for 20 years and, finally, decided to do something else. People are morons when their kids are involved.
esc
I remember a university VP telling my RA training session in 2003 that the uptick in on campus suicides and attempts was because of September 11th. It couldn’t have possibly been what Richard is talking about (this was also a top 10 school) or the truly abysmal availability of mental health services (you could have 12 sessions over your entire undergrad, so one big crisis only before you’d have to tell your parents). I really hated that man.
Tommy
@Richard mayhew: Well I am not all in with the schedule every second of every day but IMHO gymnastics is about the best thing you can do for a young child.
Happy your kid gets to experience it. I’ve always felt I was later good at many sports because of gymnastics. Why at 46 I still feel totally nimble on my feet.
Another Holocene Human
@Walker: Bullshit. White admins have been anxious for years about “too many” Asian undergrads. In a previous gen, it was “too many” Jews.
schrodinger's cat
Is this comment thread a competition for the best humble brag?
Am I so good, I don’t know how to fail. Poor me.
Another Holocene Human
@jon: I have friends my age and a little younger who went into library science.
Big debts, no jobs.
ArchTeryx
I’m sort of on the other side of that. Went into science over art in high school because science was the ‘practical choice.’ Did very well in college. Hit the wall in grad school and flunked out. 3 years of unemployment then a temp job. Returned to grad school a second time and about 8 years later I had my Ph.D. in molecular virology – and had my body fall apart on me during the process, nearly killing me. Recovered and postdoced at the NIH…
…and now I’m once again in my second year of unemployment. The “practical” choice has as few jobs as my would-have-been computer art field, and many, many more bioscience Ph.D.s competing for them. Now I’m staring straight at the abyss.
The kids aren’t stupid. Many of them can put 2 and 2 together – they’re very smart! – and they’re looking at that same abyss, only alot younger then I am. They see a life of nothing but pain and drudgery at best, living out of their cars as long as they can survive at worst, and thinking, ‘Why should I play the whole wretched chess game out when I can just resign my king and walk away now?’
The one thing I wonder is this. The only thing that’s kept me on this Earth has been my friends and my fiancee. Where are these kids’ friends and loved ones? Do they have so very little social support at their age now, that nobody really cares if they off themselves? Is everyone in their lives just a slave driver or a competitor now?
Fully agreed with everyone above, too: The problem is our economy. Full stop. It’s become one where, if you’re aiming for a white collar career, you’re either a MickeyD/retail drone for life, or you’re well connected enough to be the boss. There’s no room for the middle any more.
Another Holocene Human
@schrodinger’s cat: We could talk about being suicidal, flunking out, failed relationships, student loans … but that’s kind of depressing.
Walker
@Another Holocene Human:
I read admissions. I can tell you exactly why we fail to admin them. This is the reason. No other. There are no racial quotas for whites or Asians.
Another Holocene Human
@ArchTeryx: Cars! Luxury! Kids today sleep in public libraries and travel around the country on Megabus … $1 a ride if you bid early enough.
richard mayhew
@schrodinger’s cat: @Tommy: I want her in it for the strength and coordination aspects of the sport. I want my son to take a year or two of gymnastics so that he can learn to fall safely and hopefully avert at least one or two ER visits.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: That is sad. I have something of a hobby or past time. When I travel I always want to see the local college. First place I go is the library.
But I guess with the Internet. Things like Wikipedia, they are not as “important” as they used to be.
I think many people here are my age or a little older. A library was where I studied most days. We didn’t really have computers so go to the card deck and Dewey Decimal system to find a book.
Libraries rock!
FourTen
This actually sounds like it should say “voluntarily celibate” since you are passing up on …opportunities, lets say, in order to work some more. Involuntarily celibates are people on deserted islands or some such. (the term also an MRA rat’s nest don’t Google it)
Tommy
@richard mayhew:
I almost wrote that and figured most people would think I was dumb for saying it. Gymnastics taught me how to fall and not hurt myself as you said. I think that is kind of important.
Kathleen
@raven: Thank you so much for sharing that.
Bobby Thomson
Can’t imagine drinking beer laced with Nonoxynl 9 (at best).
Richard Mayhew
@FourTen: Nope — voluntarily celibate is when the opportunity is present but you decline to pursue the opportunity to get it on.
Involuntarily celibacy is when one wishes to get it on, but the opportunity is not present for a prolonged period of time.
Or why one did not voluntarily go to the 7th floor of the libary after 11:00PM on the Thursday night at the end of finals week — people were finding the first opportunity to get some during the semester and one really did not want to see that.
Tommy
Totally OT. Just watched Running w/ Bear Grylls. I so now want to marry Kate Winslet. That is a fearless and a free spirit of a lady.
Richard Mayhew
@Aimai: Agreed completely, but there would be other drivers. From my neighborhood, the primary parental pressure when I was growing up was a quest to get the fuck out of a depressed city with poor hopes and fewer dreams. Anyone who could get the out was seen as a success, even if “leaving” meant moving 10 miles up river as that was a massive success.
The parental pressure was to do well enough to leave, not to do well enough to show up on the front page of Time magazine.
satby
@Richard Mayhew: I’m a grandmother, so what do I know, but my rule was one activity per semester. As much for me because as a single mom I worked 60 hours a week as to prevent them from being overscheduled. I know the impulse for a lot of parents is to schedule all these activities so they know the kid is safe and supervised while they work long hours, but I thought it was important for my sons to have downtime and time to learn to amuse themselves and cope with things. They turned out ok, no one burned the house down or cut off a limb, so I lucked out ;)
MattF
@Chris: It’s also not called ‘cheating’. It’s called ‘looking stuff up’ or ‘asking a co-worker.’
Tommy
@satby: It also takes a fair amount of time to be average at something if not good at it. Not even talking great. I don’t see how you doing five things at a time is helpful. Want to learn to play tennis or play the trumpet it takes more than a little time.
Let them focus on one thing and have a chance to learn it. Enjoy it. That seems reasonable/smart to me. But then I don’t have any kids so what do I know :).
FourTen
@Richard Mayhew: I think we are bogged down in the definition of celibacy, not voluntary/involuntary. A celibate does not partake, so maybe it should be “purposefully celibate” (one works so hard as to preclude partaking). Or just “celibate.”
Kathleen
This conversation has been fascinating to me and has triggered my thoughts about why my experience was so different from what’s been described here.
First, I am 65, so when I went to school, we still had the luxury of being able to count on having a job for life, if we so chose. Though that proved to be a myth, we still had the belief. Also, “back then”, good blue collar jobs (welders, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, etc) were still valued and not as much of a stigma as they are today. I had never realized that, so thanks to the comments here that helped me put that in the context of current economics.
Second, I worked hard during high school and college, and I maintained a lot of activities, but I somehow had time to devote to playing my guitar and singing folk songs and reading books. All of the activities stemmed from my desire to do them; my parents did not force me to do any of them.
Third, my parents supported and encouraged me, but I was my own worst enemy when it came to setting excessively high standards.
Fourth, I was never athletic growing up (and sports options for women were limited “in my day”) so scheduled sports activities/competition was just not part of growing up. I started running when I was 35 and am still at it 30 years later. I am actually grateful that I didn’t have that option as a kid, because today I could have been burned out or injured.
Fifth, I went to Catholic schools from Kindergarten through college. While a lot of my religious training was problematic (“recovering Catholic” syndrome here), at least our fear of failure was wrapped around committing sin and not being good Catholics vs failing in school. Sounds crazy, but…
I feel for kids today. I really do.
C.V. Danes
@Tommy: College is not the only way to make a good living. But college is a good way to make a sustained good living.
Chris
@Keith G:
I’ll never understand why the economic glory days of the mid 20th century are so often discussed as an American thing when the West Europeans (and I believe the Japanese) remember it exactly the same way.
@MattF:
Well, that too. I just meant actual, for-real rule-breaking cheating. It’s kind of hard to look at the upper echelons of politics and business and not conclude that cheaters do in fact prosper very well.
Richard Mayhew
@FourTen: Fair enough, I was using the language that I used with my friends in college as we discussed sex lives or lack there-of over beer.
Tommy
@Kathleen:
My grandfather when he came back from WWII took a job with Snap-on. Started at entry level and worked his way up to management over 30+ years.
If you don’t know Snap-on they made like the Ferrari of tools. His was proud of his job. I am proud of what he did for a living. Don’t understand the stigma I also see from time to time that making something, not going to college, well that isn’t a bad thing.
Chris
@C.V. Danes:
Also, while good blue collar (and, generally, non college) jobs are not extinct, they’re still a lot harder to find than a generation ago.
Obviously, even thirty five years of Reaganism couldn’t destroy every last good blue collar career option in America. But it destroyed a considerable amount of them. As we’ve seen recently with union busting governors in the Rust Belt, it’s still destroying more.
FourTen
@Richard Mayhew: Agreed. I let phraseology distract me from a meaning that was clear within its context.
EconWatcher
I started high school in ’79, at the tale end of the “Dazed and Confused” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont” era. We mostly worked for money ( me at the IHOP) to spend on booze, weed and other psychoactive stuff, and (with some occasional luck) dates, and my academic performance would have very much limited my future if I had not gotten lucky on the SATs. I found a good college that accepted my promises of getting serious, and I actually kept my end of the deal.
But I don’t regret my misspent youth in high school . I got to know a lot of real people and got the wildnesss out of my system. I wouldn’t want my kids to take the iditoic risks I did (drunk driving was a way of life), but I’m not sure I want them entirely on the straight and narrow all the time, either. You have to get out there and live a little to understand life.
Richard Mayhew
@EconWatcher: High school for me was far later, and I had a good time mis-spending my high school years. I did well enough on cruise control to have a good GPA. The only classes where I actively worked my ass off were my APs as I got to choose them as things that I actively enjoyed working on instead of having to do.
I counted on the fact that I can quickly write a good essay and fill in bubbles extremely efficiently for my college career. I ended going to where I wanted to go because of an administrative mistake (I took some SAT subject tests my freshman year and did very well on hem) so my eventual alma mater mass mailing program thought I was a rising junior the summer before my sophomore year and sent me thirty seven pieces of mail in three months. When I finally went to visit the school, there was a engineering physics class doing (plastic) cow catapult contests (for distance, power to weight, and max height) on the campus quad. I was hooked.
Richard Mayhew
@EconWatcher: Agreed, I hope my kids don’t drink quite as much as I did in high school, but drunk driving reduction campaigns were effective for my cohort. I just remember the 7 to 10 mile walk home from the bonfire fields after a good night out… did that one more than once.
Interrobang
I’d be willing to speculate that the workaholism pressure at elite tertiary schools is similar all over the world, to be honest. I went to Canada’s answer to MIT to get my Master’s degree, and got literally (and not in the sense of “figuratively,” like actually as in a thing that really happened) ridiculed by other students for taking a week off from classes after I was nearly hospitalised for double-lung pneumonia+ear+sinus+throat infection. (The only reason the doctor didn’t have me admitted to hospital was because I had a close friend living across the hall who was willing to basically move into my apartment and make sure I didn’t die in my sleep before the antibiotics started to work.) The culture at that school was nuts. I’ve also heard similar things from Reedies.
I actually know a surprising number of people over 40 who flamed out of elite schools (two people who did it more than once, actually), and while I don’t personally know of any suicides, I’m sure they happened too.
rikyrah
Mama used to say – tell the truth…nothing to remember. Tell a lie, and you have to remember it, when you tell another. Too much trouble to tell lies.
…………………………………………………..
Tragedy of ‘golden’ daughter’s fall resonates with Asian immigrant children
By Yanan Wang July 27
For a while, Jennifer Pan’s parents regarded her as their “golden” child.
The young Canadian woman, who lived in the city of Markham just north of Toronto, was a straight A student at a Catholic school who won scholarships and early acceptance to college. True to her father’s wishes, she graduated from the University of Toronto’s prestigious pharmacology program and went on to work at a blood-testing lab at SickKids hospital.
Pan’s accomplishments used to make her mother and father, Bich Ha and Huei Hann Pan, brim with pride. After all, they had arrived in Toronto as refugees from Vietnam, working as laborers for an auto parts manufacturer so their two kids could have the bright future that they couldn’t attain for themselves.
ut in Pan’s case, that perfect fate was all an elaborate lie. She failed to graduate from high school, let alone the University of Toronto, as she had told her parents. Her trial, for plotting with hit men to kill her parents, ended in January, and she’s serving a long sentence. But the full story of this troubled young woman is just now being told as a complete and powerful narrative by someone who knew her — and indeed, it’s searing.
In a story published in Toronto Life magazine last week, reporter Karen Ho detailed the intricate web of deception that her high school classmate at Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School in north Scarborough spun to prevent her parents from discovering the unimaginable: that their golden child was, in fact, failing. Using court documents and interviews, Ho pieced together Pan’s descent from a precocious elementary schooler to a chronic liar who forged report cards, scholarship letters and university transcripts — all to preserve an image of perfection. The headline: “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge: the inside story of a golden child, the killers she hired, and the parents she wanted dead.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/27/tragedy-of-golden-daughters-murder-plot-against-parents-resonates-with-asian-immigrant-children/
Jeffro
@Richard Mayhew:
Sounds like a good plan. My wife and I have the kids enrolled in something every fall and spring, but only 1 ‘something’ each season. And summer is pretty unstructured (other than their day camps) because…that’s what summer is for.
Kathleen
@Tommy: Part of it has always been a “class” thing, but this wholesale contempt for working people is a huge shift in our culture in that while contempt may have been hidden before, now it’s out in the open. It seems to have occurred the same time with the rise of the right wing and its mainsliming by msm. Don’t know if my perception is valid, but I think it would be fruitful research for a historian or sociologist.
Emma
@Another Holocene Human: Are your friends willing to relocate? Are they willing to start in a position they may not like? Even really crappy entry level work?
I guess those who went to school with me (my generation, if you will) were lucky. Now you really have to make a lot of accommodations to get that first job. Both the new people in my office basically moved cross-country.
Karen S.
I took piano lessons as a kid (from age 8 to 18). I was never the best of my former piano teacher’s students, but I was pretty darn good, if I say so myself. I started taking lessons again as an adult and it was fascinating observing the kids. I could tell which kids really wanted to learn piano and which ones were doing it because their parents wanted them to do it. My teacher at that time told me once that she worried about her teen students, especially the girls. She said they never seemed to have any free time. In addition to piano lessons, they all seemed to be involved in multiple extracurricular activities and were in several AP classes. She said some of these students came to their weekly piano lessons and just broke down and cried, apparently from frustration and exhaustion. I just found it puzzling. I have always gotten so much joy from making music, from being able to entertain myself, if no one else. It’s heartbreaking that for some of those kids, learning how to make music had become a joyless endeavor.
Kathleen
@rikyrah: Wow. Just wow.
Kathleen
@Karen S.: Oh, how sad that young people experience creating music that way. While I dabbled in voice and guitar lessons in high school, to me it just felt joyful to sing and play and I loved it.
FourTen
@rikyrah: Bet her folks are on her back now for messing up the simple task of having them killed. /satire
gene108
Depression kicks into gear, when you are in late adolescence / early adulthood, i.e. the age undergrads are at.
I was chronically depressed in undergrad and went undiagnosed.
I became massively depressed, when I graduated from college because the routine was gone to distract me from my most disturbed thoughts.
Luckily we do not own guns, or I’d have put a bullet in myself. Also, I could never figure out a clean way to off myself and leave my body presentable for a funeral.
There are probably people like me, who are not getting diagnosed, when depression hits and the stress of adjusting to college – which is a big step up, in terms of how hard you have to push yourself socially to interact with people from different parts of the state / country – can be overwhelming.
Mom Says I'm Handsome
I went to MIT in the ’80’s, where the pressure to excel is ridiculous. The idea of going from being a big fish in a little pond to being an unremarkable middle-of-the-pack’er was very tough on many undergrads, and every year we’d hear about the spate of suicides of those who couldn’t handle the transition to ordinariness. (After scoring 59% on a calculus exam that should have been a refresher for my scored-a-5-on-the-AP-Calc-test ass, I quickly realized, “I can kill myself to get an A, or I can work hard, have a life, and escape with an honorable B,” which is what I did.)
MIT’s school colors are maroon and gray — or, as we liked to say, blood on concrete.
schrodinger's cat
I am going to play the devil’s advocate for the much maligned Asian tiger moms.
When you are an immigrant, the pressure to succeed is high, because there is literally no back-up if you fail.
As an immigrant you may have some distant cousin somewhere in the continental United States, miles away from where you go to school or a friend of a friend that your parents knew from way back when. You can’t depend on any government safety net either because even though you may pay taxes those services are not for you. Even if you have a green card you are not eligible for many of the services until you at least complete five years as a resident. Plus no one back home can relate to your problems either, they think you have got it made, because you are in the US.
Immigrant parents never quite forget the uncertainty they felt during their struggling days that’s one reason they push their children so hard.
rikyrah
@Tommy:
Peanut is 7, and I try and get her into several activities, but I don’t want her to be overscheduled.
I’ve said it before – the only instructions I got during the summer were:
” You better be in this house when the street lights come on.”
That was it. My parents sent me out after breakfast, and if I came home for lunch, ok.
Karen S.
@Kathleen:
I know what you mean. As I said, I still love playing piano. I bought a piano of my own eight years ago. It’s beautiful and has a great sound. I’m a classically trained pianist and a few years ago I started learning jazz piano. It keeps my fingers and brain lively.
Chris
@Kathleen:
One of the impressive things to come out of this recession is the amount of contempt it’s now okay to display for working people – I think the only jobs that are considered worthy of respect anymore are business owner and uniformed service. Everyone else is dead weight. Worst of all is the number of middle and working class people happily hurling abuse at each other on this (because of course they’re special, but these OTHER working and middle class people are just useless sloths).
Kathleen
@gene108: I hate to sound like a dinosaur, but I do believe social media puts extra pressure on kids today to present themselves as being “perfect” and leading “perfect” lives. And it’s not just kids – adults I think feel that, too (I am prey to Facebook anxiety because sometimes I don’t think me or my life “measure up”. Really. Not proud of it, but that’s the way it is.)
gene108
@Applejinx:
What you describe is classic disturbed / depressed thinking; an all-or-nothing mindset, where it is either total success or total failure, with nothing in between.
A few weeks or months with a competent counselor / therapist can get kids to change their thinking and live happier lives.
In short, if you are thinking in an all-or-nothing mindset you are already expressing some sort of mental illness / disturbed thinking, which can be cured by changing the way you think.
Greater appreciation for mental health services would be the place to start.
Kathleen
@Karen S.: That is so cool, Karen. My problem is I’ve not played my guitar in a long time because I think I totally suck. I think I’m regressing as I get older. But you have inspired me. Thanks.
Jay Noble
I don’t recall any suicides back in my day but quite a few near break-downs among my A+ high school valedictorian friends and dorm mates. The engineering students were hit the worst. Their problem wasn’t that they couldn’t handle the competition but they were being hammered with tests that were designed so that NO ONE was supposed to get better than 70% and no one did. They would come back shaking when they got a 56 – the highest grade but still a 56?. Luckily most of them caught on quickly.
Who thought it would be good to teach this way?
Although I was in advertising, I didn’t catch on to this style of teaching by intimidation. Because we didn’t share our grades, I never knew that as a C+/B student I was one of the top students in class. Completely changed where I went with my life.
Kathleen
@Chris: Exactly. And when you consider how sacred the “work hard and you’ll get ahead even if you start by pushing a broom” message has been throughout our history, you can’t help but wonder the impact of this new belief system is having on an unconscious level. This may sound crazy, but I wonder if all of the anger and hatred from the right wing working class is denied self hatred because at some level they know they are held in contempt because they’re not in a certain class, which feeds their perception that “the others” are having their needs met and are getting respect and attention at their expense.
schrodinger's cat
@Kathleen: This going to make me sound like a hipster, but I don’t do Facebook. Texting and e-mail and what’s app is time suck enough. I don’t need to know the up to the minute happenings of my family spread around the globe.
Jeffro
@rikyrah:
There you go. Gather your buds, head down to the local creek, build a dam, break the dam, lather, rinse, repeat. Good times!
Karen S.
@Kathleen:
You’re welcome. You should get back at it. Sometimes it’s wonderful to just sit down and play because it reminds me that there really is beauty in this messed up world.
Chris
@Kathleen:
Oh, I’m pretty sure there’s something like that at work. I’ve observed before that in my experience the worst, most bitter, petty, asshole conservatives were always the middle class ones, not the rich. And I always figured this ideology was the reason why: they’re told all their lives that if you’re not first, you’re last, and clearly they’re not first, soooo… draw the obvious conclusion. It’s cushioned with the argument that if you just work hard enough, you’ll get your big break eventually, but every passing year that goes by and that doesn’t happen brings more doubt.
The “denied self loathing,” what they tell themselves to remain sane, is that they totally WOULD have hit the jackpot if only the liberals hadn’t screwed up the righteous invisible hand by levying burdensome taxes and using them to feed the leeches and moochers.
Kathleen
@schrodinger’s cat: My use is very limited, actually. But my daughter and grandkids are in Florida and my brother and his wife are in Dallas, plus I’ve connected with some long lost cousins so it is good for that. I just have to be disciplined in using it. But I understand where you’re coming from!
Kathleen
@Karen S.: Thanks, Karen. Excellent advice!
Kathleen
@Chris: Precisely. I totally agree.
? Martin
I work at the center of this problem and the solution is easy: Expand university seats, or expand access through other mechanisms.
The way that higher education works forces it to be a highly inelastic market. It’s highly capital intensive to expand capacity, which means that it long lags demand. Complicating that most seats are at public universities which compound the problem through politicized budgeting fights. Universities maintain a rigid, unnecessarily long and drawn out application/recruitment process that is a high-risk proposition to students as there is no real safety net for students – if you aren’t offered a seat, you land at the community college, and you have to repeat the process 2 years later hoping to get in. Students/parents cannot be faulted for wanting to run far clear ahead of those admissions cutoffs in order to secure a seat, or better yet to have some measure of choice in what university you go to or what you study.
Universities are not particularly motivated to ratchet down the pressure because our entire system is based on the notion of scarcity. Top universities are not considered top because they turn out better students, they are considered top because they deny lots and lots of students. We never actually measure how good the education delivered is. For all we know Harvard does a terrible job educating students. But it’s damn hard to get into, therefore it must be good, amirite? So the way Harvard stays on top is by unceasingly cranking up the pressure on applicants, and then the process repeats by graduate programs and employers. This inelasticity of supply means that the stakes on the demand-side are massive. We’ve doubled the number of students applying to universities in California, but we’ve come nowhere close to doubling the number of seats. Where do the denied students go? You can’t put them all in the community colleges, because there aren’t enough transfer seats at those same universities to absorb that demand either. It’s turned into a high-stakes game for high school students.
And employers don’t help. Google was famous for only hiring out of select universities – mostly ivies, MIT, CMU, etc. Many other tech startups did the same thing. Went to a CalState or ASU? Don’t bother. I worked at an outfit that would shred every resume that didn’t include a degree from USC. That was the first cut.
So, credentialism is probably the very deepest heart of the problem and extends to employer, but which also contributes to the problem of insufficient supply in higher education and the terrible set of incentives that flow from it. School ranking is just a measure of supply/demand. And research money and talent flows invariably to the top ranked schools. It feeds on itself. It’s horrible and it needs to be broken.
? Martin
Oh, and FYWP.
Brachiator
@Chris:
Yes. I was listening to a couple of talk radio hosts go off on the probable negative impact of California cities raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. They kept referring to people who take minimum wage jobs as unskilled and losers, especially McDonalds and other food service workers (who make up a large portion of the minimum wage labor force).
These guys were gleefully considering the idea that business owners might resort to more automation, eliminating jobs entirely. When one host asked what would then happen to displaced workers, the other host seemed to just shrug and say, “unemployment.” He then went on to note that Spain and other “socialist” countries had unemployment rates as high as 25%.
And, BTW, these guys love Trump.
Kathleen
@? Martin: A very interesting perspective which makes a lot of sense. Part of the allure of the “elite” schools is the opportunity to make powerful contacts. Which starts in private high schools (and probably private preschools, truth be known).
Brachiator
@? Martin:
In a word, no.
But this is a side issue. I am intrigued by your main point. How do we increase university seats or access? How do we do this and also ensure some quality of teaching, and a good result for the students?
Also, I am not sure that even in California, students denied four year college seats end up in junior college. I thought that there are still enough places so that students can at least get their second or third choice school. The best junior colleges still feed initially underprepared students to four year schools.
Kathleen
@Brachiator: Ha! That’s rich! My dad worked in radio for 60 years and I hope these bozo’s realize how expendable they are (they obviously are not familiar with Clear Channel’s “voice tracking” and “hub and spoking”, or how automation works in radio). Radio personalities are among the most expendable people on the planet, and most of them don’t know how to do anything else.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
This seems about right. The problem is that we tend to judge the quality of schools by looking at the quality of their graduates- and judging “quality” by metrics of success that favor people with social capital- while ignoring the quality of their matriculating classes. So the best way to make a school “elite” is to allow in only students who were probably going to succeed anyway, either because they’re really smart or because they were born on third base. Harvard and the other ivies and ivy wannabes focus on this approach, often giving preference to kids born on third base because that’s what they’ve always done. A newer class of “elite” schools, like the top state universities and technical schools like MIT and Caltech, focus more on smarts and less on rich parents, but are still following a similar strategy. In either case, the schools that are hard to get into are elite because they’re skimming off the top students, so there generally is a correlation between selectivity and the quality of the graduates.
But it absolutely is difficult to measure educational quality. Not only is there the general problem of defining what a good education is, there’s the additional problem of comparing apples to oranges. How do you compare the results of a school that takes middle of the road students to one that takes in only the smartest students? It’s entirely possible that the smart students are learning more, but that doesn’t mean that the educational approach of the elite school is any better; they may just be able to cram more knowledge in because they’re dealing with students with more space in their heads for knowledge. The school that takes in middling students may still be doing a better job of educating them even if they don’t learn as much in absolute terms.
Richard Mayhew
@Kathleen: Clustering and social networking is definately a part of it. Some of it is awareness of opportunity, some of it is filtering. I have a good story to tell you about college soccer refereeing.
In my referee group, we cover a large area, basically the central city of the region plus roughly a 3.5 hour drive is our service area for D-2/D-3/NAIA/JUCO schools.
There are several thousand working soccer referees in the area. My college group has slightly under 100 officials in it. Most college referees are recruited out of either high school or USSF amateur refereeing ranks. y home recreational soccer club and the recreational club that borders my home town have maybe 1% of the total registered USSF soccer officials in our service area. If college refereeing is a mostly random sample, you would expect zero to three refs to come out of these two soccer clubs.
Assuming a new ref candidate passes her fitness test tonight, these two towns supply 18% of the college referees in the region.
How did this happen?
I was the referee coordinator for my club for several years. During that time, I made sure that any promising young referee was getting frequent mentoring, I was calling other assignors to make sure that a good 17 year old ref was put on better games than the ones I had to give out, I brought a car load of refs to a B-level tournament every year where they were getting noticed, mentored, and assigned to low level semi-pro games. I could tell Jose that he had potential, but really needed to work on X,Y,Z but once he worked on X,Y,Z, I would make sure that the college referee recruiters would see him twice in a playing session. That last one would cost me a beer which I gladly paid. A buddy of mine is doing the same thing for his club the next town over.
We created a developmental pipeline where raw referees were being placed in situations to grow their talents, make money, and more importantly be aware of the possibility of turning a hobby into either a nice second job, a passion or unfortunately an obsession. A fifteen year old who wants to run and wants to improve has plenty of chances to do so, plenty of support to do so, and plenty of role models to develop an expectation that this is a legitimate part time job that sure as hell beats flipping burgers.
The same applies to schools — quasi random initial starting points lead to clustering and reinforcing positive feedback loops.
Applejinx
@gene108:
Er… if I’m not mistaken, we are saying that this is not a matter of thinking at all. The world is taking the shape of ‘all or nothing’ and mental attitude has nothing to do with it, and mentally sound kids facing these situations are assessing reality accurately and making a judgement call we don’t like.
You cannot seriously be claiming that if they hang in there, life will get better for them. They have very serious deadlines for locking in what little control they’ll have, and if they get derailed and knocked down to positions of lower opportunity there is NO way back short of winning various lotteries.
It’s not that millenials are more insane and fragile. That’s a bit offensive, and I’m not prepared to cast judgement on ’em. I’m doing pretty freaking well as I said before, but I get to see this shit up close and so do these kids. They’re correctly assessing the shape of the world. The problem is that they’re assuming it’s always gotta be that way, or in some cases they’re actively supporting the way it is. I could see many of the techie programmer glibertarians suiciding like hara-kiri because they did not conquer all their rivals as their ethos demands. These are not welfare-oriented people. They’re extremely indoctrinated.
Chris
@Kathleen:
The problem there is that most of us are replaceable cogs in the machine, and that the machine would be able to find a new one and keep ticking ifneed be. Including the CEOs at the top. It’s why the interview question “why do you deserve this job more than someone else?” often causes an awkward pause: the honest answer is “there are probably a dozen other applicants who would work out just as well for you.”
Socialism, mass politics, democracy are based on that recognition, that we’re all basically in the same boat, none of us is special enough to make it on our own, so it’s important to stick together and look out for one another. But try getting that through the mind of someone who’s had the importance of being a special snowflake drilled into him since childhood…
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Roger Moore: US News has been doing an infamous College Ranking series for many years now. Washington Monthly has been doing their own for a while, too – see the box in red at the top right of the page. It’s not too difficult to objectively rank colleges these days, if one really wants to.
The story about MIT above reminded me of my time at Chicago – “the city grey”.
I agree with Richard’s point about the importance of learning how to fail, but I would go farther. It’s essential, not something that people “should” learn. There will always be someone smarter, or stronger, or better able to do puzzles, or prettier, or more graceful, or a better singer, or a better investor, or … We all need to learn that we will not succeed at everything, and we will eventually fail at something important to us. Failure is part of being human. We all need to learn, early if possible, what it’s like to be crushed by failure. “Working hard” isn’t enough to always succeed. Being able to understand and address the mental health issues that HS and college students face is vital as well.
For all the horror stories about the pressure for students to succeed in the US, the horror stories out of Japan, South Korea, and China seem even more ghastly. I imagine the pressure in developing countries is just as bad or worse. :-(
As Martin points out, there is too much credentialism in the US. The fastest way to reduce that, and address many other problems, is to get back to full-employment. When companies can demand post-graduate education for office work, or can import workers that are indentured to them for years, etc., because of an overabundance of workers, then universities will be happy to push the meme that education is the answer. Education is important for lots of reasons (being able to think critically, being able to understand how to spend and save, being able to pick leaders, being able to adjust to a changing economy, etc.) – not just for training for a specific job. When employers have to bid against each other to get qualified workers, credentialism will become less important. Sharply reducing the cost of education to the student is important as well – that ultimately means more seats, figuring out how to do remote teaching and instruction well (MOOCs don’t seem to be the answer yet), etc.
College is a tough problem, but we know the answers. We just need the will to implement them.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill
This thread is the single greatest collection of humble brag I’ve ever seen. Kudos to BJ!
Others have touched on it, but the problem of high pressure academics causing terrible outcomes for some students is the result of the loss of well paid blue collar work. There was a time – not all that long ago – where an inability to achieve at college probably meant a career as a union worker. Making a good, middle class living.
Those days are gone. Even a college degree doesn’t guarantee employment or a living wage anymore. Young adults – and their parents – see high academic achievement as the only path to a middle class life.
Kids today are doing an economic high wire act without a net.
Kathleen
@Richard Mayhew: That is awesome! If only corporations could do that level of due diligence.
Kathleen
@Chris: Yes.
? Martin
@Brachiator: The UCs are turning away over 10,000 eligible students per year. That’s mainly a function of state subsidy dollars not existing, but increasingly also a function of campuses outgrowing their host cities. The CSUs are able to pick up those 10,000 but not necessarily in the discipline the student wants. Is Psychology a suitable substitute for a STEM degree? Well, no, if your interest is in science/engineering rather than the social sciences. The CSUs that are open don’t have engineering, nursing, many other in-demand programs.
So, CA does have enough seats so long as you are willing to overlook that a student’s major matters. Why not enough nursing/engineering? Those programs are much more expensive per seat to build out. 50 seats will cost you half a million dollars up front and $200K annually. Granted, 50 engineers will put that money back in your state coffers in nothing flat, but try convincing lawmakers that the economy isn’t zero-sum.
? Martin
@Roger Moore:
Actually, it isn’t really all that hard. It is in an apples-apples sense, but there’s no reason to do that. We don’t need to compare engineers to dancers, we can compare engineers to engineers. And employers aren’t a bad tool for doing that provided you give them metrics that they find valuable. If I can demonstrate that my students can do x, y, z using hard evidence, employers will respond to that both by offering jobs but also by how much they pay. Graduate schools will respond with admissions offers. But we don’t provide any of that evidence. Transcripts and grades are very much a game of ‘trust us, this is a 3.5 student on some arbitrary scale measuring some arbitrary stuff that we won’t disclose to you’. But if we had to disclose a students demonstrated skills, that would be different. Our students can use a laser, but MITs students can build one, and here’s all the evidence – well, that’s a lot clearer.
The problem employers face is that they have no more information than prospective 17 year olds. What does a student with a B.S. in Biology know and are able to do? Who the fuck knows. Hell, we really don’t even know. We know that student passed a bunch of classes that the faculty felt were important, but what can they contribute to your company?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
gene108
@Applejinx:
There are always things that limit what we can do at various points of time in our life. And how you think about things, whether or are rational or irrational and veer into disturbed thinking, is the difference between choosing to live and committing suicide.
Going from “I did not get the job I wanted…I must therefore die by my own hand” is a HUGE step into disturbed thinking.
It is not rational.
This thread is about suicide.
It is not about diminishing opportunities for new college grads or how the work place is more competitive or how the kids these days are wimps for not walking up-hill-both-ways to school in 10 feet of snow, like I did, in the middle of July.
You can feel bad about not seeing any opportunities that will make you better off than your parents and for a lot of us the cold hard reality is we’ll be working harder to stay in the same place our parents did and it can get frustrating.
You may not feel like you can drop-out of the rat race at 22 and spend a year “finding yourself”, like your uncle did, in the 1970’s.
You may feel like you cannot afford to got graduate school, because you cannot afford another $100k in debt.
These are all decisions we make because opportunities are different than they were in the past and demands seem to be more.
But from changing your thinking process from “I cannot go to grad school because I cannot afford it and it sucks” to “Since I cannot afford to go to grad school, I must die by my own hand” is a pretty huge leap from rational to irrational thinking.
How does suicide make things better?
The thread topic is on college kids offing themselves.
By definition, if you are going to college, you are already fairly capable at something. It may not be what you want to be doing at 18-22 years old, but you at least have an above average ability at reading comprehension and mathematics skills compared to most of the 70% of people, who never go to college.
To tell me an 18-22 year old has no other option but to kill themselves because they are out of options is wrong.
The quest for happiness has been a topic of human existence for thousands of years and going back to Buddha and others, it really does start with your outlook on life, independent of what your actual situation is or what opportunities you do or do not have.
Howard Appel
My first quarter of law school, back in 1988, I had two study partners. Studying for finals, one of them insisted that we keep on studying every night until 2 or 3 in the am. I refused, saying my brain stopped working at around 11 pm, that I needed sleep, that anything I was supposed to be studying after that point was effectively, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) and that I would be refreshed and ready to study in the am, having had enough sleep. He adamantly refused and, after the first quarter, I no longer studied with him.
As for the results, I was first in my class the first year and transferred to UC Berkeley (I really attribute my academic success to my fellow students rubbing my ample belly, ala buddha belly rubbing for luck. In this case, I got the good luck).
Keith G
@Chris:
MY point would be that WE are the society that built a religion based on those times and those results. We learned the wrong lessons and are unwilling to find new paradigms.
Bill
@gene108:
In fairness, I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. They have options, it’s just that the options seem so desperately bad to them that they take extreme action. Part of that is because the options truly are bad. Part is because they’ve been told their whole lives that not being “the best” is tantamount to being worthless.
I don’t think anyone is advocating suicide. (I know I’m not.) But it’s possible to recognize that the problem addressed in the original post is caused in no small part by pressures outside the minds of those who see suicide as a viable option.
Kay
@Bill:
There really is an alternative route. My middle son is doing it. He genuinely didn’t belong following a degree track, so he went another route. He’s really proud of what he’s doing.
They need more skills than high school, and there are fewer jobs because they’re not assembling things, they’re operating systems or maintaining the machines that make things but he doesn’t even finish the entry level cert until August and he’s working at it weekends making $24 hour and has been offered jobs out of state. It took him 9 months, 4 days a week at a community college and it was Labor Dept subsidized so it was free to him. He qualified for the program with a high school diploma and by passing a math test. Employers need them. They even gave him a gas card to get back and forth to school :)
Richard mayhew
@Kathleen: yeah it is pretty cool and for me it makes that 3 your drive to nowhere a whole lot easier and more enjoyable. However more more officials from area a precludes officials from area B from being considered. We are not increasing the work available by creating development pipeline we are just increasing the quality officiating. At some point it is near zero sum as the demand for collegiate soccer officials minimally changes over time. As a local economic development strategy skill enhancement is a good idea as a national macroeconomic strategy productivity payoffs a much slower.
jon
@Another Holocene Human: I worked seven years in a prison, but finally got into the public library system. It’s especially hard in Tucson, which has the only graduate program in the area (UCLA, Texas, and… well, let’s just say there were students from Wyoming in my program.) I took a $12K pay cut to get out of prison, and it was worth it.