For all the times I watched Animal House years ago-- it was very instructive to high-school me-- I never noticed the fraternity crest in this scene and its similarity to the view of the paddler… nice.
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I’ll have to look into that: might be cheaper that tuition.
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Well, why didn’t I think of that! /s
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Seems like this comment needs some Cat and Girl as a reply:
This one has Bad Decision dinosaur (my BFF!):
This one references rappers and phds:
And here is one that talks about graduate school and fetuses:
In the words of Dorothy Gambrell (I’m paraphrasing) I’ve wasted my life!
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The sheer strength of compartmentalization that it takes to vociferously believe in the importance of (and existence of) a meritocratic system (to the extent that aristocratic d-bags feel it necessary to hide the inheritedness of their successes) while simultaneously defending to the death the right of wealthy people to hand their heirs every drop of monetary, social, cultural, and political capital at the expense of everyone else is mind boggling. Although I guess Genetic Superiority is always a helpful explanatory shim for these kinds of tough philosophical awkwardnesses.
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There could not be a better illustration of the mechanism of actual power in the US than this.
The real elite have access to their own private rules,their own route directly to the top. This goes almost unnoticed while there is a huge fight about exactly how the tiny chances for the rest of us are shared out. divide et impera And we keep falling for it.
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Successful people are predisposed to believe that they are the architects of their success and that they deserve it. Unsuccessful people are predisposed to believe that it is all random or the result of being born to the right parents. Usually it is a mix, but one that is primarily the latter with just enough of the former mixed in so that the successful can fool themselves.
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I asked. They said “no.”
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Of course, if they would actually accept that they are the architects of their own success, in the sense that they use their incumbency to multiply effects of whatever fortune they’ve lucked/merited into. Of course, to tamper with that “natural” right to use your power to alter the rules of the game is immediately labelled radioactively “unnatural” “redistribution.” I can’t stop thinking lately about the undercurrent of political discussion that seems to be arguing about the definition of “natural.” Just this morning I was thinking to myself “Man, a huge part of the country and world seems obsessed with the idea that we never should have left the wild savannah system of The Biggest, Meanest, Most Violent Asshole Who Conquers/Extract the Most Wealth by Any Means Necessary is Obviously the Best to Lead the Pride.” But then I’ve been watching too much Planet Earth. I guess that’s the spoils of poisoning the world with Zero-sum anxieties.
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And this is what Stormy Daniels means when she calls me “Tiny”…A measure of all of my qualities
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If Hovvid won’t take your kids for any amount of money, you could try Trump University.
They might need a bit more help along the way:
… All our writers are competent and their qualifications is high. … To see if the content of the paper is original, we use a special plagiary checker.
Generous research grants to some professors can’t hurt.
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That link is glorious…
“Ghost story essay writing is a marvelous way out for students who take their first steps in mastering writing skills!”
It’s just… beautiful…
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Applying to graduate school now. One of my recommenders was like, “You’re going to love graduate school!”
My unspoken reply was, “Why does every grad student seem miserable, then?”
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Dorothy has a Patreon Page! But she’s too proud to link to it on her site, I think because she is perhaps not quite a self aware as she thinks she is…
There is some wisdom in what you say. Yes, far too many employers are stupidly requiring expensive college degrees when there’s really no need whatsoever for them in the job. And yes, there’s a trend in the US especially of thinking that college or university is the only legitimate choice for getting a desirable job (with apprenticeships, internships, and other routes to a skilled profession all being devalued or scorned as lower class), which is causing academic standards to dive ever-lower, especially in schools where the admissions requirements are “has high school diploma and is alive.”
However, as someone who has attended both public colleges with low admission standards and a private university with high admission standards, I must disagree with you. First, there’s a qualitative difference in the critical thinking, research, and analytical skills taught in college or university vs those taught in high school. There’s a huge swath of professions that actually do require high level skills that no high school teaches and that no rote didactic program will ever impart.
Second, the most important things learned in college are learned outside the classroom. In high school, you meet and interact only with people who come from the same community as you (for white kids in the US, sadly all too often you meet and interact only with people the same colour as you, and more and more often, only with people whose families are the same income level as yours). At the bare minimum, at college you meet and interact with people from different communities than yours, from different economic backgrounds, including people who don’t look like you and people from different nations and cultures than yours.
This non-curricular part of a college education is only spoken of in coded terms because most white parents are terrified that their kid will befriend or (gasp) marry someone who isn’t like them. Which is why there are so many bible colleges, where your kids are guaranteed to never encounter an idea that isn’t on the approved list of things your sect is allowed to think about. And why the 1% spend so fucking much money creating exclusive fraternities and other little enclaves inside prestigious universities where their kids can be well insulated from the hoi polloi while still getting the right kind of expensive diploma.
Big institutions like Harvard have to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they need to provide a high quality education, one that ensures that their alumni continue to get admitted to prestigious graduate schools at a higher rate than the alumni of SUNY or Rutgers. Which means ensuring that all their students have the opportunity to get their horizons broadened by meeting other students who are different than they are. On the other hand, they need to be approved of by the wealthy sociopaths who comprise the 1%, who make donations and bequests and so on. So they pave a clear path for donors and children of wealthy alumni to get admitted, and they allow them to create their little all-rich, well-bleached enclaves so their children can avoid contamination from the lower orders. But they also spend a ton of effort recruiting some (not too many) poor kids and brown kids with good grades to attend, so as to create a “diverse” college experience (but not an integrated one, must be careful to keep the number of brown kids and poor kids low enough that the place doesn’t feel unwelcoming to the rich white kids).
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If you WANT to learn, you can do that at many, many secondary institutions in this country. And if you want to skate by, go through the motions and get a degree without learning very much you can also do that at most of them.
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Ummm… that’s entirely incorrect. If you scroll down you’ll see the post about it, and it’s right there on the top of the page, next to her link to her twitter, tumblr, and facebook (listed as Print).
Having met her and swapped a few emails now and again, she’s never come off as anything other than a genuinely nice, but somewhat reserved person. Mr. Chen himself is quite out going and kind as well. They are great folks who make art that I enjoy…
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If they discriminate too obviously, they can lose their $618M/yr of federal funding.
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I’ve never read such a clear comparison of elite universities to pyramid schemes before. Nailed it!
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