Welcome, Freshmen. You Don't Deserve to Be Here
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
let me tell you something. The good and cheerful atmosphere at freshman speeches is something you should be proud of. It gives people spirit and a wonderful first experience. The harsh truth will catch up anyways. The speech in this article, how the OP thought it should be, is utter crap and comes from a place of total arrogance and serves only himself.
It doesn't act as an eye-opener, because the students won't listen anyways. They will experience reality soon enough and there's absolutely no need to tell them anything they can't understand at their current position. They are mentally not in the state to receive any "truthful speech". They are in a new chapter of their lives and the only bet is to give it a try. The experience of others is worth close to nothing, because they need to make experiences themselves.
Why am I telling you this? Because I'm German. In Germany, there is not even a freshman speech. What we have can be described as a big "fuck you" from some dean or whatever arrogant professor feels entitled to speak up. "50% of you won't be here in 1 year" is something you get told on first day of university. What is this good for? I haven't seen a single student saying "Oh, this guy's right, I'll unenroll right now". They HAVE to try first, because that's the choice they made for this new chapter in life. It might even be true. 50% unenroll after a while, but it's unclear which 50%.
My girlfriend is becoming a teacher. She studied for 5 years. After university follows a 1.5 traineeship at school, before she can call herself a real teacher. They have a welcome speech for the new trainee-teachers and it went like that:"Welcome, good to see you, but you won't get a job anyways." Again, a big "fuck you" to all these people who spend 5 years in this system, gave their best, are motivated and accept a lousy pay for 1.5 years with ridiculous long hours.
From my limited experience and what people told me who experienced the exact same crap in Germany, I can see this only as some self-righteous bullshit from arrogant frustrated people that serves no purpose at all but only to make THEM feel a tiny little bit better. "I'm here, see, I'm the best." Fuck you!
Be proud that it is a common practice in the US to have motivational speeches that give people a good feeling. There's nothing in the world you can tell freshmen to prepare them for reality. The only thing that counts is how you make them feel in this very moment at the Welcome-freshman-party.
So when, in my 3rd semester review with my technique instructor, he asked me why I came to the school, I was frustrated enough to tell him the truth.
"I couldn't get in to college."
He very nearly spat his water in surprise. This broke the ice and we had one of the most encouraging, pleasant conversations I had while at that school. He told me I was good at this, and I told him that I enjoyed it. We both agreed that even though I wasn't as crazed as the rest of the students and staff, there was no good reason not to take my shot.
So, I stayed at the school and started auditioning not long after. I landed my first off-broadway gig a couple months later, then a film, then I co-founded a theatre company that turned a profit on our first off-off-broadway show. While I am living a different life now, I am so thankful for that small moment of encouragement in the midst of all the angst I was exposed to every day. I genuinely believe that short meeting with my instructor inspired the early risks I took, and it certainly kept me going when I wanted to walk away.
Thanks for writing your counter-point. Reminded me of an important time in my life.
Amazing what a diverse audience ends up at HN, and how much you can learn by reading comments to an article.
Appreciated.
It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students at the World's best universities can have. As these places can be so hard to get into, successful applicants can adopt a defensive "I'm here because I'm the cleverest and deserve it" mentality. For somewhere like Stanford, having a lot of (daddy's) money is, for most students, also a pre-requisite to attending. The Author is exactly right, being born into a family with money does not mean you deserve to be there, even if you did work really hard during grade school and college. The Freshman's are enormously lucky to have been given the chance to study at Stanford and it is up to them to earn their place, retrospectively. Society will be the judge based on their future work.
The message is not so much "don't get comfortable because 50% will be gone by the end of the year" but rather more of "Welcome to Stanford. Understand that you are here though very little of your own merit. You have the opportunity to change that if you work hard and focus on the bigger picture of society and not just furthering your own wealth".
Saying "understand that you are here through very little of your own merit" is a recipe for causing already overly stressed students to do something rash, like jumping out of a building: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ (this list isn't even up to date).
Motivating people to work hard to feel like they've earned their place is a completely different thing than reinforcing the doubts and insecurities almost all of them have anyway.
The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.
MIT alum here. I know what you mean; the pressure can be tough. But also, they've got a lot of resources on campus to help.
I'm going to be on campus tomorrow and Thursday if you're interested in meeting up and talking about the stress. My email address is in my profile.
Maybe a more useful rephrasing is that your presence at the institution is a blessing, a gift, given whether you currently deserve it or not. Enjoy the gift and grow into it.
However, for some students attending Harvard, Stanford, Oxford or Cambridge can be an expectation and a realistic one at that if they have been given every opportunity to increase their chances of entry thanks to their parents influence and wealth. I understood the Author to be addressing these students. Perhaps they're a minority, but looking at the ranks of politicians and World leaders (from wealthy families I might add) coming from these institutions, it looks like more than just coincidence to me.
But who is going to address the underlying sense of entitlement of the guy delivering the "go fuck yourself" speech? Spiteful turtles all the way down?
I'm 20, all of my friends are students. I live right next to the university in my city. I know, meet, or merely converse with lots of students, and one thing that kills me is this pervasiveness of expectation that after 4 years (and for some, more than that) of sliding by, they will walk away with a degree and a nice cushy job, regardless of the degree or the effort put forth.
By no means do they all think this, but I find the number who do a bit alarming. The number of CS students I've met that think they'll land a nice cushy developer job just like mine when they couldn't implement a linked list if their lives depended on it is almost farcical. Then again, with the amount of new developer jobs I see in the area, maybe they will. But what of the students going for a degree in something like Religious Studies where employers aren't exactly tripping over themselves to find folks with such a degree and no real work experience to speak of?
Given the costs associated with a bachelors degree in the US at an in-state university, more people need to start drilling realism into the students' heads. These students cannot afford to waste 4 years and something like 10.000 USD per year, not including living expenses. People need to be more realistic and they need to start doing it sooner than the freshman introductory speech because you are right, they won't listen at that point. It's too little too late.
To suggest otherwise is a core affront to their entire cultural outlook. What, you say that once the King creates me as a Baron, I'm not going to automatically be issued a Barony to rule? How dare you claim otherwise?
To some extent aided and abetted by some HR staffers who also buy into the credentialism / title of nobility outlook on life.
Although its annoyingly self perpetuating and popular, it can be a pretty toxic poison in a business setting.
Most college students comes directly from High School. To them (or at least to me at the time) it was a "natural" continuation. We have been in school for over a decade. That's all we've known was to sit in a class room, jot down some notes, and then take some test.
I totally agree, fast forward 10 years, and you realize how much of a privilege it is to do that. I'm doing very well for myself, but most folks aren't. And its because life takes over. You have kids, relationships, bills to worry about. It take an act of Congress to be able to have 30 mins to yourself a day.
Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that. Perhaps, when I have kids and they grow up, I'll have my kids work for a couple of years, then send them to college. I'm betting that they would appreciate it.
Sometimes you need that break to realize what you want in life.
Maybe they'll be great students and just need a break, in which case I might suggest a backpacking trip and/or internship. Or maybe they'll be unmotivated students barely scraping by in which case I might send them into The Real World to earn money towards their education (and find out why an education is important).
I've thought a _lot_ about why I didn't do very well in college (beyond the obvious procrastination), and what might have helped, and filing those thoughts away for my own kids.
The only problem is that kids want to be with their friends, and if their friends aren't taking a year off then it might be hard to convince them to break away from the pack.
But I went straight into college after high school because a) I was "college bound" and that's what college bound kids did, and b) I would not be eligible for my scholarship if I took time off. I was pretty broke at the time so I needed the scholarship (and couldn't afford a backpacking trip anyways).
I did fine in college but not as good as I could/should have. Like you, I thought a _lot_ about why and in particular I thought about why some people were doing better than me. This is what stood out to me:
When the professors introduced a new data structure these classmates would talk about how they wish they knew about it for a previous project or how it got them thinking about a different way to build something they were working on. The people who were doing better than me had a reason to learn.
I was just learning what the professors told me to learn. If they talked about a new data structure I learned about a new data structure. If they talked about when to use a data structure I learned when to use the data structure.
I was "gifted", "college bound", and all sorts of other labels that presumably light the path to success. But I didn't understand my "gift" and I figure most my early educators didn't either, because they just kept encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing. Which was basically nothing.
Moral of the story is don't let your kids' success blind you to the fact that they really need opportunities to explore themselves and their world. Whether they are "rocking it" or not, you should encourage them to seek these opportunities and help them get to them as much as possible.
I did that. Takes forever. Its called join the .mil in the reserves (ideally while not in an eternal war on multiple fronts, may not work so well in 2013), then get an associates degree basically for free with the GI bill, then get a "real" entry level job with tuition reimbursement, then night school the bachelors, etc. Just keep on upgrading till you're sick of it or lifestyle incompatibility.
It helps to have actual experience in computers / electronics / RF before you take the classes. How weird it must be to first use an oscilloscope in a classroom, or first run a compiler as a school assignment, or first solder something after you're old enough to drink. I never got to experience that, which must be stressful / interesting.
One of my best friends went that route, and when we attended college they were really squared away. As much petty bullshit as professors and graders throw at you, it'll be a drop in a bucket compared with whatever you survived in the service.
Not quite a 1:1 mapping, but the co-op program at the University of Waterloo has students alternate 4-month paid work terms with 4-month school terms over the course of five years.
While I did learn a lot in school, I definitely agree with this sentiment. I'd get a hell of a lot more out of it if I were going now -- ten plus years later -- than I did when I was fresh out of high school.
Of course, it gets a whole lot harder once certain parts of "Real Life" kick in and the ease of dropping everything to spend all of your time learning dissolves in a cloud of uncertainty.
Reading the comments on here I wonder if it's a "tradition" among STEM majors. I honestly thought the pressure, stress, and competition in my program was universal across all fields until I met my current girlfriend. The very idea of a 90% attrition rate or classes that practically required three hours of sleep a night was completely foreign to her. Even the very culture within our programs were radically different. I was subjected to a lot of "Most of you won't get your MDs or PhDs", whereas she had a much more encouraging rather than discouraging environment.
Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start.
(edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)
Isn't that what you'd expect? If the 'easy' stuff was too hard why bother continuing once you know you're out of your depth.
You're a freshman, I take it? If you start giving up on shit as "too hard" now, everything's going to be too hard in the future. Learning only gets harder when you get older. If you need to enroll in a more remedial class first, fine, but don't waste your and your parents' money by avoiding classes that are "too hard" for four years of college. You are what you repeatedly do.
I don't think we came anywhere close to a 1/3rd dropout rate in the classes I took, but then I was LS&A rather than Engineering.
Germany: if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP
U.S.: we don't care too much if you drop out later, as long as you pay your enormous tuition in a timely manner.
That makes sense to me...
if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP
This is your interpretation. Thing is, it doesn't do more than leave people with a bad feeling. My point is: Whatever you say in a welcome-speech doesn't affect the choices of freshmen in the slightest. People will drop out, that's for sure. But not because some smartass Dean or professor holds a self-righteous speech, but because some students find that university (or that particular subject) isn't for them. They'll find out by EXPERIENCE and not by a stupid speech.
For years, I've heard musings among Americans that suggest motivational speeches do more harm than good to those present. I've often wondered how true that is, because the other side of the coin seems just as detrimental--if not more so--to young, impressionable minds. More importantly, though, I think you're absolutely right: It's experience that's the real teacher, not some bloviating figurehead whose speech will be forgotten before the end of the day. If someone's not cut out for it, no amount of (de)motivation will help. Sink or swim.
Cheers, my friend.
Also, the people who are arrogant self-entitled little sods are not going to listen to the negative speech anyway, they will naturally assume it is directed at the other people and think that their parents connections are all the guarantee of finishing with a good grade that they need, and depending on where they are and what they are studying, they may well be right.
The people who are more likely to take something like that to heart is the nervous rather than the untalented or arrogant.
They didn't say that to discourage people or to imply that they had some failure quota but to let people know that they couldn't expect to just show up and slide though any more like a lot of kids do in high school.
I think it is no mistake if one of the most highly regarded commencement speech is that of David Foster Wallace (aka "The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away"): http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...
Also, I have received the "50% attrition" comments (I'm from Belgium). In our computer science class, it was more like 70% attrition. But consider that a big difference is that in our countries, getting in a university is not "achievement". You can litteraly just walk in there and if you can't afford the 1K euros a year it costs, the government will pay for you. This is a good thing -- but it needs no one will tell you that you deserve anything. Neither should it be the case in the US because most of the time, access to these universities are conditioned by factors that are largely out of the student direct control.
Even the comparison with MIT is arguably invalid, as elite tech university admissions are more objective and less discretionary, making the archetypal student less likely both to have an entitled mentality and to have received perks that helped their admission. Perhaps the author wouldn't have objected to the word "deserve" at an MIT convocation, nor at one in Germany.
At least that's how I read it.
1. Half of the class will be below average. Deal with it.
2. Everyone is capable of doing the work with enough effort.
I had a guy in one of my first year grad classes at MIT who literally passed out during the first exam from not having slept due to stress for days. Poor guy. I was already used to failing all the time, but not everyone gets that in university =/
The earlier people have that realisation that its not necessarily about being the best, so much as it is about trying to be the best, the sooner they overcome any sense of impostor syndrome.
Education, like religion, politics, and almost everything else in America, is first and foremost a business. Never lose sight of that.
Sometimes it can be useful to look at the world through cynical glasses, but it shouldn't be the only pair of glasses you use. You might completely miss a lot of beauty in the world around you.
... As long as your parents are rich enough to hire a lawyer to handle the paperwork. I am an Ivy alum, of middle-class parents, and this "help" required me to submit literally hundreds of pages of paperwork. (I counted.) And any mistake, no matter how small, automatically disqualifies you from all help. So every year, there would inevitably be some minor mistake and I would have to lawyer up and threaten to sue the school. I was lucky enough to know one who helped me pro bono. What about everyone else?
Half of Yale's class is from the top 2%. This is not a coincidence.
"There are plenty of great state schools where you can get education basically for free."
... As long as you win the birth lottery, and your parents live in someplace like California. Only a handful of public universities even make the top 100. And even public schools are hardly "free", often costing >$10K/year just for tuition.
"You might completely miss a lot of beauty in the world around you."
Yale, according to their 1099, has a 45% profit margin. 45%. That's higher than Microsoft, Google, and Goldman Sachs. And every year they, and the other Ivies, call up all their alumni and beg for donations to their bulging bank accounts. It's disgusting.
My financial aid grant was approximately 75% of tuition (before considering any federal loans).
I filed a FAFSA, and some direct paperwork required by the University. The paperwork amounted to less than 10 pages each year. I am not including the paper count of tax documents from my family.
There were several financial aid officers, but I worked closely with one. At every step of the process she was available to answer questions. I made several mistakes in my paperwork, even one after submission. My aid officer helped me with each issue.
My father passed away when I was in school. After I reported this to my University through my financial aid officer, they immediately waived all remaining tuition requirements (excluding those covered by federal loan grants). I did not pay a dime after that.
My family made about $60k a year, before my father's passing. $30k after. We own a house. I think we were middle class, but I am not sure how that is defined.
I got my aid officer a cake every year.
They are just practicing price discrimination. They look through all your finances and consider exactly how much you can possibly bear to afford.
All that theater about giving you a 75% discount? It was just theater.
I have been exposed to a similar situation (though not from a US university, I was lucky enough to attend a private school in the UK. The tuition fees are roughly comparable): My best friend's Dad worked as a Vet until he had a heart attack. He lived, but couldn't work for a long time.
The school waived the final year of fees for my friend (~$52,000) - to my knowledge they have never requested it since.
> submit literally hundreds of pages of paperwork. (I counted.)
I recently went through the college admissions process. And I didn't count but there most certainly weren't hundreds of pages required for financial aid. Especially since the vast majority of it can be electronically filed and since there are standardized processes for applying for financial aid across different universities (i.e FAFSA).
> no matter how small, automatically disqualifies you from all help
Seriously exaggerated. Mistakes can be rectified by calling/directly contacting the financial aid office.
> Yale, according to their 1099, has a 45% profit margin
Citation? All I can find is http://finance.yale.edu/sites/default/files/finrep11-12.pdf, which nowhere backs your assertion.
I just finished my PhD at a state school this year. I've gone to state schools through my entire education. In the past decade, every school I've attended has had a professor win a Nobel Prize. I've also averaged less than a thousand dollars a semester in tuition. I'm also not from California. My state has repeatedly ranked in the bottom 10 on SAT scores.
I'm not doubting that going Ivy cost a fortune and was a huge hassle to acquire aid. I'm also not suggesting that you didn't get a fantastic network of connections through your Ivy classmates. Buying a network is expensive. However, if you're looking to get an education, those can still be had for a reasonable price.
There's a lot of annoying paperwork, but it was something I was able to file on my own on a shitty internet connection as a teenager growing up in Bangladesh who with just my dad's 1040s.
All of the Ivys I got into offered to cover 100% of my cost of education. If you're poor and smart, they give you a shot.
Meanwhile, many of my far stupider peers with richer/more benevolent parents have already graduated. The only difference between me and them is access to tens of thousands of dollars in tuition money. Colleges are nothing but a business, and if you think otherwise, you are very lucky to have been in a situation where you have never had to wait out half a decade in poverty because of where and how you were born.
But, what's the alternative from the universities' point of view? If they gave extra financial aid to students disowned by their parents, every parent would claim to hate their child to save on tuition.
I know an english major who graduated still unable to distinguish between "your" and "you're." Who would you rather have in college, her or me?
Well, she apparently needs further education more than you do!
Someone pays for it.
It's a minor but important point. Lets not kid ourselves here.
I don't think anyone is under the illusion that education is free. However, it benefits society as a whole, and not everyone may be able to afford it. So, it is often in the interest of society to make good tuition affordable, regardless the background of a student.
Of course, it is also beneficial for the student. But for that we have the tax man :).
Some fuzzy intuitive probability suggests that for every 20 people in the high school, there should be one testing at or above the 95th percentile nationwide. The emphasis word "entire" suggests that your high school was large. Was it awful? What's the story there?
It was really baffling to me that colleges preferred to take people who got 2s and 3s on their AP tests to someone who scored 5s, so long as they had parents who would fork over thousands of dollars. At a poorly funded rural high school where most people were members of FFA, outscoring my classmates wasn't hard, and there weren't many collegebound to begin with, outside of the people with welloff families. It was frustrating to see them get to go instead of me because I didn't have tens of thousands of dollars for the tuition bill. (I mean, a lot of them were in the low to mid twenties on their ACT scores...)
In the US, higher education, like most everything else, is a business. That's not cynical, that's a fact. With the exception of a small handful of wealthy schools, most universities are looking out for their bottom line. Don't let the glossy brochures and cozy advertising copy confuse you. And you might as well get used to it, because the country is moving further in that direction.
On a more positive note, try to google: scholarships for gay kids
It returns a lot of promising hits.
Good luck.
I had to do the same thing. My parents were only able to afford two years, the rest was on me. I got some partial academic scholarships which helped, but I had to bust my ass to go, and it made it that much more fulfilling. Nothing makes you feel better than being able to tell someone in an interview that you worked and paid your own way through college without the aid of your parents.
There are a ton of options available to smart kids. Also, don't kid yourself that you need to go to an Ivy League school for an education. My roommates all got jobs at large companies and two of them were chosen over Ivy league grads. They both came from a state college engineering program.
If you really want to go, then go. There's SO MANY opportunities out there which weren't around when I was coming out of high school. Two year technical degrees can get you a $50-60K a year job. There's code schools, online colleges, and other avenues you can explore. Hell, maybe you don't want to be a programmer - there's a HUGE deficit of skilled labor right now. I have a brother in law who's a welder who makes a low six figure salary because his job is in such high demand right now.
Don't let life get you down. If you're driven and want to succeed, then go out and do it. There's no many less barriers today then there were 10 years ago.
A four year university in my home state is $20,000/year. Going out of state to almost anywhere is even more expensive (california is up to nearly $40,000/year), and if you do find somewhere cheaper, you need the savings for a move, which is difficult at the poverty level.
Many colleges are completely unaffordable, even working full time jobs:
"The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If a minimum wage worker is employed full-time (forty hours per week for 52 weeks), that worker would earn $15,080 annually."
http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full...
And that's IF you can find full time work, which is difficult in many areas. I had to live off of half that for several years because I couldn't find anything better for a long while. If I went to a community college, they'd only give me $900/quarter in student loans when the cost was more like $1500/quarter for tuition. So, I couldn't afford community college either, for quite a while. It was only once I was working 35-60 hours a week (it was a fulltime job, but weird work schedule) that I was able to afford to both not be homeless and attend community college. As a result, it took about six years to get even my associate's degree (between the waiting and the working).
There are a lot of barriers. I think a lot of people on HN don't realize how rough it is out there for low income people right now.
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/payingforcollege/f/independe...
I guess too many people tried gaming it and they've locked it down. It was a good law exactly for the reason you describe, it sucks that it was abused into a state requiring shuttering.
I sympathize with being shut out by your parents, but I'm despondent over the very rapid change in the apparent expectation that parents are the only way to pay for college. Especially for a brilliant kid, going to college was not an impossible task.
My parents' contribution to my college was ~5k in a savings account and a beater after my first year so I could come home time to time.
I worked 30-40 hrs/wk to offset the loans I needed with a full-time course load. And it was a good school outside my home state, where I got in-state tuition but didn't qualify for a single other grant / scholarship.
For context, this was 2003-2008, I'm not talking about decades ago.
I'm sure the private / federal loan programs have shored up some because of the crisis, but I would be quite surprised if funding and education was really so impossible, or that it was impossible to work for a few years then go when you were 20.
I also had health problems that went untreated as a kid that made it hard to work. No college also meant no healthcare. Of course, I had to work anyway because I'd be homeless if I didn't.
It's hard to pay $20,000/year for college when you can't find more than $7,000/year in work. $7,000 is barely enough to keep you fed and housed as it is.
(Even at age 24, you don't start getting pell grant money until you make under about $10,000, incidentally.)
6 years later I got a full tuition science scholarship at a community college, but that took a ridiiiiiiculously huge effort and it only lasted for a year since I wasn't an 18 year old anymore (meh). I'm still incredibly grateful to my chemistry professor who helped me get it, though.
I think a lot of it is that people don't want to accept that their own college degree was more a factor of luck and money than anything else. Passing classes isn't hard at all, paying for them is.
I hadn't seen the health complication until I read through some of your other comments from the last few days. I think it makes you an exception though and not definitive of the state of education...
tl;dr: The numbers don't line up to suggest college is unavailable to kids whose parents won't pay.
It's going to mean loans. Even with 9 months of a really generously compensated internship (to Midwest standards, at least, I grew up in WI and went to school in MI), I still left college with north of 50k in loans.
Ohio University, cost is ~24k a year, more than 12k of which is room, board, transportation and personal. Ohio State this year is 21k, more than half of which is the room and board. For both, tuition and books is about 11-11.5k.
You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.
4.5k in the stafford loan means, 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost, which is probably 20-40% higher than it was 5 years ago.
4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree. $60 if they take a victory lap.
In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.
So in summary, funding an education is not impossible. Yes, the student will be paying for it for a while. I'm still paying on my loans and I still will be for a few years. But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.
>It's going to mean loans.
Well, no shit.
>It is not that much more expensive.
It is when gas is $4/gallon instead of $2/gallon, and the economy makes it much harder to find a job of any kind. Not to mention tuition itself is increasing at about twice the rate of general inflation.
" On average, tuition tends to increase about 8% per year. An 8% college inflation rate means that the cost of college doubles every nine years."
http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml
>You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.
Hypothetically, sure. In reality, if you don't have 7 days a week of 24/7 availability, you can't get a job in many places.
Most of these low end jobs will have you coming in at 7AM one monday, and closing at 11PM the next. You can't plan your courses around work since there's no regularity.
In the best case scenario, you have a job already and try to change availability, but in that case they'll often slash your hours to barely nothing. Can YOU live on 12 hours a week of minimum wage?
> 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost
>4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree
You cannot get these without a cosigner or guarantor. When I was 18, I tried banks, sallie mae, online options, etc for (roughly) this amount and was completely denied. Hell, I couldn't even get a credit card for any amount, even through my bank.
Even when I later had a better fulltime job making 20K/year, I was again declined for loans. (At that time, I had 3 credit cards and awesome credit.)
>In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.
You have to have access to loans in the first place to get there.
>But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.
Oh, I see what the problem is. You don't live in reality. I'm talking about people who live in the US, FWIW.
It's what I've done now that I have access to independent student level of stafford loans. I got a 35-60 hour/week job for 2 years before I moved which helped too. (Full time jobs are very hard to find due to the economy, where I'm from.)
> I'm gay, so my parents wouldn't pay or help me in any way.
Thats awful - sorry to hear that.
Luckyily I have access to enough loans/savings now as an independent student to move to another state (if I'd been born here, with their $5,000/year tuition, I'd have graduated with an engineering degree by now...), but I really wish people would stop recommending community college for tech people. Some states just see it as another way to waste your time and make more money off you. If you're a transfer student, many colleges won't give you any institutional aid, either, which means you're limited to places you can afford on a $5,000 pell grant (if you can get one) and yearly stafford loan limits.
I loved my cc profs, I just wish the four year colleges couldn't get away with so much snobbery/bs.
Don't lie just because you haven't done your homework. Here are 3 databases if you're too lazy to google LGBT scholarships.
http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/lgbt.phtml http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/scholarship-database http://www.pointfoundation.org/scholarships.html
Immediate Edit: I also googled scholarships for students with disabilities. Turns out there are tons of those, too.
I'm glad that you think that being a sexuality studies major is a noble goal, but I'm interested in tech (which eliminates a great deal of them--most require a sociology major or something similarly specific), and I'd also like to point out that leading a gay youth initiative (as is often required by these scholarships) is hard when:
1. You're the only out person in high school. 2. Your school won't even let you into NHS because you are gay. No teacher was willing to stand up for me because they didn't want to lose their job. Can you imagine the difficulties of getting one to volunteer to sponsor some sort of gay group? It'd never happen. 3. Your parents almost send you to a gay reparation camp because they're fundamentalist christian. 4. You live in a flyover state in the middle of nowhere. (many of the scholarships are for specific states, too.)
It's great that you had the resources to land a glbt scholarship, but they're mostly unavailable to disadvantaged students. You may want to rethink your ally status if you're going to go around bashing gay people for not trying hard enough when there's already usually quite a lot on our plates.
"and I'd also like to point out that leading a gay youth initiative (as is often required by these scholarships" The scholarships that I've run through that talk about leading anything only require leadership skills and experience. No mention of specific gay leadership. And even if they did, your example is exactly what they're looking for, and the exact reason that I received money in the first place. I was from a high school with less than 200 people, no parents in the picture, in the midwest.
I'm not saying that your life has been easy, I'm saying that your arguments seem very poorly thought out, and that you're simply grasping for someone to blame for your place in life right now.
"It's great that you had the resources to land a glbt [sic] scholarship, but they're mostly unavailable to disadvantaged students. You may want to rethink your ally status if you're going to go around bashing gay people for not trying hard enough when there's already usually quite a lot on our plates." I was a disadvantaged youth. Homeless at 16, graduated from a GED program, went to community college and a state school. Now I teach at a university after a decade or so working in sales. I'm not saying that everyone can do it, or that I am even the rule, maybe I am just the exception. What I am saying is that these scholarships are EXPRESSLY designed for disadvantaged youth. That's who they're made for. I'm going to say it one more time - disadvantaged youth are who scholarships, grants and other sources of aid are designed for.
I never bashed gay people. Just you for not doing your homework. I can't believe that you are hiding behind your sexual orientation as an excuse. It's 20and fucking13; the youth of America don't give a shit about who you want to have sex with. Those youth are also the ones you're competing with in the tech industry. Stop using it as a crutch, and start taking responsibility for your own choices. Being an ally means that I support your good choices and am here to help you when times get tough. Being an ally also means that I don't have to put up with bullshit excuses from young people, regardless of sexual orientation.
As for this: "Yes, there are scholarships for people in wheelchairs. I'm not in a wheelchair. My stuff is rare and has no funding behind it."
If you're willing to disclose what the condition is, I am willing to help you find scholarships/aid for sufferers of it. I guarantee there are scholarships or other aid available.
"Deaf Queer Youth Scholarship The Deaf Queer Resource Center sponsors a $500 scholarship for deaf lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer students"
Well, I'm not deaf.
"Gamma Mu Foundation Scholarships The Gamma Mu Foundation awards $19,000 in individual scholarships to gay men"
Nope, not this either.
"Malyon-Smith Scholarship Award The American Psychological Association's Division 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian and Gay Issues) offers this award to support graduate student research into psychological issues "
Not interested in psychology, also, still worrying about undergrad.
"Live Out Loud Annual Scholarship ...the scholarship is open to graduating high school seniors in the tri-state area (NY, CT, NJ)."
Well, shit, I guess that's out too.
"The Messenger-Anderson Journalism Scholarship and Internship Program offers several $10,000 scholarships ($5,000 for the first year and $2,500 for the second and third years) to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students pursuing a degree in journalism and communications "
Not a journalism major.
"NGPA-Education Fund Scholarships for Aviation Students The National Gay Pilots Association (NGPA) Education Fund provides scholarships to members of the gay and lesbian community (including straight allies) who are pursuing an aviation career as a professional pilot."
Not a pilot.
"National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) NLGJA provides several scholarships and awards for "students who demonstrate a commitment to providing fair and accurate coverage of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community."
Not a published journalist.
"NWSA Graduate Scholarships in Lesbian Studies This award provides financial assistance to graduate students doing Master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation research in lesbian studies."
I think I would rather punch myself in the face than go to school for "lesbian studies." Also, not for undergrad.
"Roy Scrivner Research Grants The American Psychological Foundation (APF) sponsors the Roy Scrivner Research Grants for graduate and postdoctoral research concerning the study of lesbian, gay and bisexual family psychology and family therapy."
Not in grad school, not into psych, etc.
"Transgender Scholarship and Education Legacy Fund (TSELF) TSELF awards several scholarships for transgender-identified students in the helping and caring professions, including social services, health care, religious instruction, teaching, and law."
Not going into "helping and caring" professions.
"An Uncommon Legacy Foundation, Inc. The Lesbian Leadership Scholarship program, for both undergraduate and graduate students, provides awards for projects that address lesbian social, cultural and educational needs. Consideration will be given to academic performance, honors, personal or financial hardship and especially service to the lesbian/gay community. Candidates must have a minimum 3.0 GPA, have financial need, and demonstrate a commitment or significant contribution to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."
Didn't have "financial need" on paper from ages 18-24, and it's hard to "demonstrate a significant contribution" when you're trying to survive.
"Point foundation"
Applied for this, didn't get it.
"Queer Foundation Scholarships The Queer Foundation (http://queerfoundation.org) sponsors a high school seniors English essay contest to promote queer studies. Winners receive $1,000 scholarships for study in queer theory or a related field such as queer medical, legal, or social issues."
Not going into "queer studies."
Everything else is regional or athletic, and the one regional one for my area requires: "dedicated time and energy to the GLBT community and toward GLBT and HIV/AIDS issues."
"SOLGA Kenneth W. Payne Student Prize Competition "The American Anthropological Association - Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA) offers this award for a scholarly anthropological paper, written by a student, on a gay or lesbian topic. The prize consists of a $400 cash award and a letter of commendation from the Prize Committee. (The prize is not specifically for tuition, but rather is intended to reward excellent graduate student papers.) The deadline is in mid-June. deadline is July 15."
>The prize consists of a $400 cash award
Oh, I really hope I get this one, everyone knows that $80,000 in undergrad can be paid for with a $400 grant.
It'd also be wise to note how many of the few scholarships that do exist specify that you have to be a high school senior, something I no longer am. I applied for 40+ essay scholarships during the time that I WAS one, though, and it wasn't enough.
I don't really see any reason to disclose my disability to you when you're rude and condescending enough about GLBT things: "It's 20and fucking13; the youth of America don't give a shit about who you want to have sex with."
1. It wasn't 2013 when I went to high school. 2. There are still plenty of asshole homophobes in the youth demographic, which is why the suicide rates are so high. You are an incredibly insensitive person, and I hope for their sake that you don't work with glbt youth.
Is that all it gets? He could also, you know, sell his kidney, or something similar, in order to get into university. What kind of society are we talking about if you need to cheat to get something that you should get in every other civilized society? What other compromises would you be required to make in order to get an education? Join a political party, rob the bank, start working as a prostitute or porn actor?
I know that the price of tuition should increase naturally, as all prices do, but its been doubling the rate of inflation and that's fucked up.
There are good aspects to the education system, but there's also a lot of good reasons to be cynical.
When "help" is defined as hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans that cannot be discharged, I laugh.
My family was in a below-average income bracket, and as the oldest son, my parents didn't have much money for us to go to school.
When I got into MIT and other elite schools, I was elated. Until I found out that "help" meant debt up to my ears. Eventually I realized it was unlikely to carry positive ROI over a full scholarship at any "lesser" university, which I was fortunate enough to earn.
But let's not act like the elite schools are handing out free money to go there. My test scores, GPA, athletic performance, and extracurriculars made me a very desirable choice for most elite schools. The only problem was that my family's unremarkable history and lack of funds wasn't a good match.
It does seem that this is the exception rather than the rule, so I don't usually bring this up. You explicitly mentioned MIT though...
This was 10 years ago though.
My younger sister went to a more expensive school on paper, but got substantially more aid and paid much less than me.
I hate to add any more cynicism to this, but student aid is often higher ed's version of price segmentation. Out of state people pay the top prices, in state pay the middle, and low income pay a bit less (but often more over the long run due to loans). I know many people who will be paying interest on their student debt long after they would have paid back the entire principle. I was lucky and had parents who encouraged me to pace myself and go without much debt, but the system pretty much is stacked to rope in low info 18 year olds and extract as much from them as possible.
They do have a business going, to be sure, but it's not built on gorging people on tuition. Many (most?) don't pay that number. And even it is extremely reasonable if you think about what the market clearing price would be.
Most colleges don't extend financial aid to transfer students (even if they guarantee full need for other students), most take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions (even if they go on and on about making it affordable, apparently this doesn't apply if you're not a college credit virgin), and quite a few elite colleges don't accept transfers at all (and if they do, it's usually 5x more competitive than their normal admissions process).
This phenomenon contributes heavily toward the view that college is more about signaling who you are than that you achieved anything in particular while you were there. Once admitted to University X, "University X" is branded on your soul forever.
That said, on the dual topic of elite colleges accepting transfers & financial aid, the university of california system is set up to take transfer students en masse, and gives an admissions priority to students coming from the highly affordable california community college system. Berkeley and UCLA both accept such transfers. I don't really have an idea of the specifics of UC financial aid, but I do know the system offers a purely merit-based scholarship (Regents). CA is gay-friendly too, for what it's worth.
My actual experience with night school and tuition reimbursement was the opposite for more or less mid-level private uni (real school, 100 years old, not some kind of fly by night loan scam). If you're 18 and a HS senior they want you to jump thru hoops like a trained seal and write essays and take standardized tests and fill out applications and find references and ask for permission to be admitted and hope for weeks you'll be lucky, but 19 as a professional studies night student, "oh, hand me your check and a single page emergency contact / demographic type form, and you're all good" Uh, say what, thats all the hoops you want me to jump thru? Things may have changed a lot in the last decade, but it used to be the school was doing the student a huge favor if the student was 18, but even if you're too young to drink, the instant you applied thru professional studies, you were doing them a huge favor, probably because financially, you were.
Transfer student experience was the same. Oh you attended (insert medium sized name), well fill out a one page form, have them send us a transcript, and hand me a check and its all good. Uh, say what, you make 18 year old HS students jump thru hoops like trained seals but all I have to do to get in is let you know my next of kin in case of medical emergency, and give you a check and a transcript? What?
Now for transfer students a big game is only allowing X credits where X is pretty small, or not permitting certain classes to transfer in at all, which is how I got to take calculus three times, once in HS, and twice, at college and uni. So they may have screwed transfer students over once they admit them, but at least the admittance process was painless.
I also had a hard time getting them to mail anything to New York because the address "wouldn't fit" in their computer system, so after two "lost" transcripts I found out they'd left off chunks of the address and thought this wouldn't be a problem. My suggestion of "write it by hand" was rejected. Very annoying. Of course, I was told "our transcripts always arrive" at the in state college. Well, thanks, I totally want to stay here after the crap your college system has put me through.
I think it's a really great system for people who live in state, though! (or states close to California) I've heard some things about impacted classes, but it sounds like California has their CC -> 4 year transfer system set up much better than a lot of places. The regent scholarship sounds great, but it'd have been a huge gamble to try to move out there for it, since you won't know until you're applying to the four year school if you'll get it or not. There are so many unknowns, when tuition is this high. The CoA for Berkeley for example is $33,000 for in state and over $50,000 for out of state.
Why is paying for college so much harder than getting accepted to one? Ugh.
All colleges extend financial aid to transfer students, they have to. Yes, there are scholarships for straight up freshmen through senior students at the home institution, but there are ALWAYS scholarships specifically designed for transfer students.
They do not take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions, that's illegal. They put together your 'aid' package based on your ability to pay. It, in NO way plays into the admissions process outside of that, and any proof you have of that is grounds for a lawsuit.
Elite colleges do accept transfers, find me one that doesn't. Is it hard to transfer into them? Of course, they're e.l.i.t.e., it's hard to get into them any way.
I don't know why you're spreading this misinformation, I assume it's ignorance. Stop.
After looking through your comment history, I now understand why you're spreading this nonsense. You're a young, pissed-off undergraduate student just finding your place in the world. My advice to you, having lived through this stage: We're not all out to get you. Read more, think more, and talk less.
" Financial Aid from the government is based off of need. Grants are for anyone who qualify."
Key phrase: anyone who qualifies. When I was 18, I qualified for a $4500 stafford loan and nothing else. If I went to a community college, this dropped to about $800-900/quarter, which wasn't enough to even pay tuition.
Incidentally, the best need based grant you can get from the government is a pell grant. This maxes out at about $5000/year, and you can only get it if you make less than about $10,000/year (and your parents have no income, or you are an independent student).
"They do not take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions, that's illegal."
This is only true for public universities. Private can do whatever they want.
"Elite colleges do accept transfers, find me one that doesn't."
Princeton.
"You're a young, pissed-off undergraduate student just finding your place in the world."
I'm not 18 anymore, and haven't been for over half a decade.
False. Pell Grant recipients (which typically earn less than $30k / year) paid on average $5,332 to attend Stanford in the 2010-11 academic year [1]. I would link to the actual Department of Education database with the forms filled out by Stanford showing this, but the government shut down has left us all without access.
[1] http://education.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/p...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_in_the_Un...
What do you base that on?
private schools are an exercise in toadyism and pedigree, despite some truly intelligent people attending them.
is that a bell i hear ringing? i'm already salivating...
It's important to note, for the Americans reading this, that the key emphasis in this comment is "in America", not "a business".
>> When you deserve it, come back to us. Share your service with your peers and your children.
>>Then you'll be part of our family. Then you'll truly belong.
I don't know what it would ever mean to deserve the wealth and privilege that I have now. I want to do everything in my power to make sure that the injustices that have built history are righted.
To the extent that I can participate in righting wrongs rather than making them I can say to myself on my death bed, "I lead a good life", but will I ever deserve what I currently have? How would I ever know that?
I think, basically: Don't be worried about whether or not you deserve the things you've been gifted. Maybe worry instead about whether or not you're using those gifts for some good.
Objective, higher-force kind of good? Or "however I define it" good? Because everyone does the latter, probably even serial killers. "He deserved it," they say.
Think of it like potential energy. You were born with a great deal of it. Now you get to spend that energy, convert it into work and kinetic energy.
Indeed, make this metaphor literal. Imagine that people are all born with actual potential energy. Some people might choose to imbue small objects (like bullets) with kinetic energy. Others may work to move large objects for peaceful purposes (e.g. buses). Still others move only themselves, to a position of greatest amusement. Of course, an important class of potential energy holders use it to seek out ever more potential energy - these are the sorts of people who, finding a magic lamp with a genie in it, would almost certainly wish for infinite wishes.
If you have extra potential energy, more than you need, then there are three basic uses: speed-up other people who deserve it (serve). Slow-down people who don't (fight injustice). And, of course, move at the speed that makes you happiest, no faster, and no slower. Because happiness is the best gift you could give the world (unless your unhappiness would get us all a cure for cancer, in which case go ahead and be unhappy!).
Implying that politicians and capitalists are legal and social Munchkins ;-)?
Perhaps... to be a responsible custodian to what we've inherited, to not abuse it, to be conscious about how immensely fortunate we are, and above all, to share it with others around us.
Personally I operate under the notion that I don't deserve any of this, and that I have it by the grace of luck and those that came before me. It is the ultimate hubris for me to self-determine whether or not I deserve all of this, so I'll leave that determination up to others, and chance. Likewise, I'll do my best to ensure others who I believe are upright and good get what they deserve, do not have, and that I can provide.
I view with great skepticism anyone who believes they are entitled to the immense riches and privileges we enjoy.
"Lavinia has no trials," said Ermengarde, stolidly, "and she is horrid enough."
- A Little Princess (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/146/146-h/146-h.htm). It's a kids book from 1901 about fortune of birth. One of the most interesting things I've ever read.
Why should I listen to an old Dean of Admissions speak condescendingly about what I deserve or not? He lost all respect from me, and reverberated the silly "us older generations are wise and have made a beautiful fairy-tale world for you. We look at you youths and think you're incapable idiots who are going to destroy the world, who don't know how to work".
STFU older generations! We are more capable and morally idealistic than any generation before. We work fucking hard for what's right, and will make the world a better place for our kids. I know when I'm old I'm not going to tell my kids they're worrisome morons who deserve nothing. They will work hard, they will be more capable than me, I will inevitable worry, but I will support them unlike these occasional airheads of my parents generation.
Then I saw a man, may be in 50's was standing right next to my seat. Realizing he was a little aged and might be tired after the day's work, I just got up and offered the man my seat. What happens next? This guy doesn't even offer a 'Thank you', he just goes on and on about bashing the younger generation in general and me about values and stuff for not offering him the seat a little early.
After a while I had it enough, and asked the man to give me my seat back. He put up a puzzled look, I told him he didn't deserve any courtesy from anyone.
Some people just can't stop showing their 'holier than thou' attitude.
I hope you're speaking for yourself because I don't believe that's true for me one bit.
Judging older generations by today's standards isn't really any different then them judging you by their standards.
I'd say Thomas Jefferson was wrong for having slaves. Granted, that was bad. But if he had a time machine, he'd probably point out all kinds of moral blind spots in my generation.
It's possible that in the future, homophobia may become the norm again in developed countries. People in that era will look down on us as permissive degenerates, just like we look at 19th century people as intolerant bigots.
1. "No, I'm better than you!"
2. "No, we are equal."
If you want to establish mutual respect and equality, only one choice has a chance of working.
We are more capable and morally idealistic than any generation before.
Do you really think our generation is better than the 25,000 before it? Do you really think you are making the world a better place? We don't even know what the future will be like so we have no way of determining whether today's choices will be right for our descendants.
You don't even know what your kids will be like. How can you be sure you will support them?
The world will judge our generation once we have lived long lives and done much. Until then, it's incredibly arrogant to claim ourselves to be the best out of countless past lives.
Or in English: yes, that's how I feel a lot of the time too, but such claims are worth nothing if we spout them on the internet and everything only if we realize them. So it's better to claim little and do a lot rather than wasting our effort on empty claims or even justified complaints about our elders. Just get back to work.
...and yet.
On second thought, however, I think the author falls to the other extreme of that which he is criticizing. I'm all for critiquing the vacuous "You're special! you DESERVE to be here!"
But to instead turn around and say "No, you don't deserve to be here! So EARN it!" is to trade a meaningless vague happy feeling for crushing pressure which turns to either arrogance when you succeed or despair when you fail.
Instead of making "earning" / "deserving" something the central point, why not focus on taking that which was given to you at birth and in your upbringing and education (much of which you did not "earn" or "deserve") and making the most of it? Not with the goal of "deserving" something but rather because otherwise the good that was given would go to waste.
Actual accomplishments and the lack of pride (in the sense examined by C. S. Lewis and delightfully summarized at http://squid314.livejournal.com/339814.html) seem to me to be a better measure of a person no matter how lucky that person's birth was.
I wish we had a more equal world, but I don't see why should I believe this to be anything more than a personal preference.
The author seemed to teeter between inspiration and self destructive guilt. I liked the inspirational part.
The first week should be for getting people settled in and making new friends.
The students worked hard to get there, which is just day one of entrance.
Do they deserve to be graduates, no, they get that reward when they graduate after more hard work.
Are they rich peoples children, well yes all Americans are compared to many Somalians or people who lived 500 years ago. No one today deserves anything in that meaningless sense.
You do not deserve to be here. You do not deserve to have to pay $60,000 a year. For those of you who graduate, because at least 20% of you will not, you do not deserve to leave here $240,000 in debt to student loans only to end up taking a job that does not require the degree you will spend the next 4-6 years pursuing. No one deserve to struggle financially for the rest of their lives because of 4 years of bullshit that your parents, educators, and soceity sold you as the only way to "get a good job" or "make a decent living."
Stanford is a private "educational" institution that operates for profit. The notion that you have to "deserve" to be there while going into debt and paying them is ridiculous. That's like saying you don't deserve to eat at Olive Garden; even though you're paying them, even though you worked hard to earn the money to pay them; because eating there is a privilege that you haven't earned yet.
Though you can say "it's all made up" for anything in any argument; Don't know if I agree with it completely but I kinda get what you're trying to say in this case.
"You don't deserve to be here."
"I studied hard, I did extra curricular activities. I'm smart and I suffered for this. I earned it. When I want someone to look into my soul and spout BS about worthiness, I'll find a priest. In the meantime you've just lost any moral credit you had with me by pretending to know me. Good day."
Maybe it's true that other people deserve it more - I don't think too many people hold out with the idea that they're the most deserving people on the face of the planet though and wouldn't imagine that's what they mean by deserve. Indeed it's hard to see how performing community service would make you fulfil the latter definition.
>We have made no mistakes about your admission.
and
>You all deserve to be here!
The first statement is the more important part. Incoming freshmen meet an extremely talented group of people when they arrive on campus. It's easy to be intimidated by what others have accomplished before even getting to college. The point of this speech isn't to comment on the service undertaken by students, but rather to reassure them that they are capable of performing at the level of the peers they're so impressed by.
If I ever do open a school, we will have a succinct version as part of the school creed/honor code.
A lot of this stems from the fact that these freshmen students are 15-18 year-old kids who are facing a really competitive atmosphere, mot to mention being away from home on an extended basis, for the first time. They attend with the hopes and wishes of family, friends and teachers back home and they are fully aware of the financial sacrifices that it took to get them to college. When they get that first 'C' or even a 'D' or 'F' it's very easy to look on yourself as a failure - and suicide looks like an easy way out for some.
These students don't think they deserve to be there, where the opposite is true. That's why these universities try to drill in the positive message. As WA wrote, the real world will make itself known in due time, laying a guilt trip on kids as soon as they arrive is not the way to go. At graduation, sure tell them to give back. But as incoming freshmen, the priority should be helping them succeed.
Luck is also involved, but luck, which is random, is distributed randomly and is thus fair to all people in aggregate, even while it is unavoidably unfair up close.
So, where's the unfairness? There is an inherent unfairness that comes with wealth and privilege in that it throws up barriers to newcomers. An equally qualified newcomer may be excluded from the spoils; for that reason, society is never a place where each person has an opportunity to rise to the limits of their ability.
What's interesting here is that the unfairness is not only cross generational, but can occur within the same generation. Serial entrepreneurship is unfair; it makes it harder for newcomers. Wrath accumulation unfair. Having a large social network is unfair.
Therefore, anyone interested in fairness should also levy a progressive tax on wealth accumulation. At the top end, it should be a lot more than 35%.
Stanford will probably be the most intensive and formative period in your life. However, Stanford can only prepare for the big things that are about to come. The real test comes, once you have your degree in their hands. What will you do with you life after Stanford, will they want to be a pure engineer, work at Facebook or Google, will you try to found the next billion dollar startup, will you cure cancer or become an astronaout?
Stanford might seem big and overwhelming now, however it is still just a nursery and a stepping stone to the challenges to come after Stanford. So don't be overwhelmed, stay humble, stay foolish.
Did people only read the headline and get caught up on the word "deserve"?
Am I crazy in that I found the hypothetical speech to be motivating and very positive overall? These people are young adults, they can handle a fair bit of truth, especially since they are young, smart and at Stanford so the truth is pretty damn great. Why on earth people think this would be demotivating is beyond me.
I haven't been to one of these speeches but I assume they are mostly meaningless platitudes. But this is better than left wing indoctrination where they are berated for their privilege and told to seek out "human things, like ethics and obligation and desire" - code for progressive thinking. There will be plenty of time in Gen Eds for that.
Their genes, in their previous incarnations, were able not only to survive (through the survival and reproduction of their ancestors) but also to accumulate, preserve, and pass down wealth.
Money and social status is the only form of evolution that's left in a society where (almost) everyone is capable of surviving and reproducing.
If you got accepted to Stanford, great, go to Stanford. It's just a school, a place where people go to learn, and it's a rather expensive one. So learn, and focus on bigger things than moral guilt and self-doubt over the opportunity you've been given, like your career and developing yourself. That will put you in a much better position to give back to the world.
"We live in a society increasingly defined by winner-takes-all competition."
I see this sentence cropping up more and more. I do not see a true structural change in society or business. I definitely see more opportunities for winner-take-all business, but only in terms of rapid scale, not long term sustainable positions of true market dominance.
You need more data. Look at graphs of wealth and income distribution by percentile quartile whatever-ile, especially over last couple decades. Then re-analyze the trend of "winner takes all".
I did find this: http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/07/yes-the-middle-class-has-be...
but it seems to fail to account for the fact that overtime, more and more households have become two working person households.
IDK, I just haven't seen a clear and compelling analysis that says that we are heading toward winner takes all.
For Stanford 'computer science', mostly f'get about that; maybe in 50 years it will have some significant content.
The speech was insulting BS.
A lot of HS students work their tails off trying to get into places such as Stanford; sad situation. E.g., they take AP calculus. Total bummer. F'get about AP calculus because the people who wrote that material didn't understand calculus very well. Instead, just get a good college calculus book and dig in, that is, study the material and examples and then work the exercises until understand them and the material well. Work from more than one famous book. There are highly polished college calculus texts going back at least 50 years and no shortages. Working through a good college calculus book is not difficult and great fun. All the angst over AP calculus is just make-work, junk-think, busy-work sadism to hurt high school students by trying to make difficult something that should be fun.
High schools and that Stanford admissions guy just like to beat up on HS students. Bummer.
Me? I never took freshman calculus! Instead, the college where I did my freshman year was not very good and forced me into a math course beneath what I'd done in my relatively good HS. So, a girl in the class told me when the tests were; I showed up for those; and meanwhile I got a good calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year I went to a much better college, started on their relatively good sophomore calculus (same text then used at Harvard), did well, got "Honors in Mathematics" and 800 on my Math GRE. Yup, never took freshman calculus. Well, HS students can do the same: Just get a good, standard, popular, recognized calculus book and dig in. Then f'get about AP calculus and either just skip calculus in college or just show up for the tests and move on to, say, linear algebra (say, one of Noble, Nearing, Hoffman and Kunze, or Strang, and, finally, Halmos), theoretical advanced calculus, applied advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, elementary probability and statistics (race through it and don't take it seriously since will see it all again with much higher quality), measure theory and functional analysis, probability and stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, etc. Pick a real problem, do some research, get a Ph.D. in engineering, then write software for a startup!
seriously.
Go Berkeley!