Cf, I agree with your post 118.
I’m an introvert. My heart does bleed for girls who try to be friendly and get no takers.
Pizza, I agree with you that the typical CC assumption that rich kids are all hanging out at Yale is ridiculous. First, because many rich kids can’t get admitted. Even mega bucks, absent any other criteria, won’t get the job done. And second, because many of these families don’t want the kid in that kind of college, even if the kid could get admitted. The social circles they travel in don’t put much stock in the top tier private colleges; the emphasis on schoolwork at the expense of the rest of the experience is suspect to them; and in some parts of the country, they are just too far away.
Georgia has done extensive analysis on what happened to their public U’s when they shifted to a merit award model. The answer- professors walking past brand new BMW’s (owned by undergrads) on their way to the faculty parking lots. Wealthy families in the South showed a marked preference for taking the $5K merit award and staying at Georgia vs. heading out of region. And it was so much cheaper to give rich kids the 5K awards vs. having to fully fund a kid with limited means.
Someone showing up at my door with a deck of cards would have made a huge difference. And I do not want to cast aspersions on any of my classmates; they were nothing like the women on this floor. They were nice, they were friendly, whatever problems I had were of my own making.
This is exactly right. But I contrast my situation with the situation of the women on the floor. They were in a new environment without enough knowledge about how to succeed, and they felt powerless to handle it, but we have no reason to believe that they all would fail in most social situations. Having read the book, alh and PG, do you think the isolates would have done better at IU if they’d been on different dorm floors? I do. If they were doomed in any dorm, that’s a different story.
Yes, I think they would have done better on a different dorm. This just seems like an unfortunate luck of the draw clustering than anything else. Kind of like whether you got assigned a benign freshman roommate vs an inconsiderate jerk or an antisocial one. There’s a certain randomness to this as there is in life in general. So therefore it’s hard to call it a failure of the system in general.
So what surprised you about the book, PG?
122
My reading (and I’m prone to an interpretive response) was that they would have been 100% better off with just Whitney out of the picture. She modeled bullying behavior that impacted all the women negatively. I am still in disbelief not one party girl told Whitney to cut it out. If I had been one of the authors, I would have had an extremely difficult time not intervening.
Absolutely they would have done better on other floors, in other dorms. What I can’t help wondering is if that floor and dorm were an aberration or not. I am still thinking about this. I spent one term in a party dorm and one term in a different kind of dorm and I am really thinking hard about this. I honestly don’t think I knew anyone like Whitney in college. I’m not sure I knew anyone that nasty after middle school, but sometimes I live in a bubble and am not particularly observant. I may even call some women and ask them about their memories.
adding: I try to understand how privilege impacts my world view. It may impact memories as well.
I think Residential Life failed those girls. Remember the focus of the Dean of Students. He thinks the greek system is really important. Only 17% (is that correct?) of the campus population participates.
Of course, I want to point out we are taking everything the authors tell us at face value. I meant to say that in one of my first posts.
Me too! Art History or Philosophy might not be obviously career focused, but someone who has an Art History or Philosophy degree has learned, we hope, how to read critically and write cogently. And that’s going to help them in a lot of jobs. I was just reading a blog by a dean at a community college, who was talking about his school talking to local industry leaders about what they’d want in employees. He said what came up over and over again, across swathes of industries, was the ability to write.
But it sounds like Linda was rejected by all - those destined to be socials and those to be isolates. Was it something about Linda? Or had the socials already tainted the pool so to speak?
As in alh’s example, all it would have taken was one or two of the isolates with enough self esteem and/or social skills to band together with the other isolates to create their own group. I don’t see that the socials would have that much power on every floor to keep non-social girls from finding each other. Plus, weren’t some of the isolates reasonably well off? That happens at every single high school in the country. The “less cool” and the “uncool” kids band together to make their own “friend group” as my kids call it. In my experience, the unhappy kids are the ones that wish they looked at the “cooler” groups and tried to get into those groups, rather than being happy with the friends they have.
One mean girl, Whitney in this case, can have an out-sized impact. A silly example, but the Mean Girls movie certainly showed that dynamic.
There are still mean adult women who can be very exclusive. I took one of my kids to a Gymboree class and met women who are still among my closest friends. I took another to the same class but in a different year, and I was excluded (women made plans to meet afterwards at the park in my hearing and did not include me and I am not thin-skinned; it was pretty blatant). Same class, same town, different group, different result. I actually had been sick at the time and probably did not look as put together and perhaps was not as outgoing, but mostly it was a group that did not think I belonged with them.
126^yes,in general I agree with that.
However, in the case of the girls in the book who wanted guaranteed social mobility, nursing and teaching were really good choices, steady jobs with good benefits.
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
In my humble opinion, in this economy, at some schools, not everyone has the luxury to study painting and poetry. But those opportunities may be available to their children if they are successful themselves.
Art History is extremely career focused, especially in the hyper visual world we live in. Someone who can analyze a piece of visual expression and understand the culture from which it came, the literary or religious or scientific influences evident in the work, etc. is well suited to a wide range of careers.
Not for nothing that when Bill Gates was developing the first generation of disruptive technologies at Microsoft that he was recruiting anthropologists, linguists, art historians, and sociologists. He didn’t need them to code (he knew how to hire those kinds of people)- he needed them explain to the technologists how people work and interact in groups, how people relate to the physical world around them, how symbols come to mean something more than the actual visual cue over time and use, etc.
Nobody knows how to write anymore. Agree with you, Cardinal, that it’s a critical skill in short supply!
mom2and: Don’t just accept my take on the book. Frequently I am mistaken. Please read it yourself.
Now I want to bring up the girl that was encouraged by her professors to apply to PhD programs in Classics and was only accepted to her safety school without any funding. The authors suggested she would have been better off in an MA program, which had been her original intent, but I wasn’t clear what they were basing that on. They pointed out this student was competing for a very limited number of spots with students from more prestigious universities.
CF & Blossom: thoughts?
Ah, yes, Valerie. The authors approve that she is planning to go to law school. That struck me as a bad plan.
I assume that the authors didn’t think Valerie should be prepped to plan for the humanities PhD just because she was unlikely to be accepted to a program with funding. But her professors thought she would be accepted, and it’s their business to understand who is likely to get accepted. How is 1220 viewed as a GRE score?
It’s unclear what she would do with a humanities PhD, but then it’s unclear what anyone does with a humanities PhD, so in that respect she’d be no worse off that any other new humanities PhD. And she’d be socializing in a better pond-- which she also would be in law school.
nm
Like you and Blossom, I believe the education gives one an advantage in the job search. The skills acquired with a PhD or a Law degree will transfer to other fields. The trick, to me, seems not to go into debt in this economy acquiring those skills. If I was following correctly, Valerie, with no help from her professors, figured out she could get a full tuition scholarship at the state law school. She gains some skills. She meets some intelligent people. She doesn’t lose ground financially or socially and maybe puts herself in a better position professionally. Anyway - that is my take on it.
I think she got bad advice from her professors about graduate school. Is it correct all these students graduated in the spring of 2008? The following year, after the financial crisis, some schools limited their graduate school admissions dramatically for a few years. I wondered if any of these girls was caught up in that cycle. I heard about students who would have been easily accepted to dental school in years past being crowded out by post-docs let go from science labs. The girl in the book accepted to dental school describes her classmates as older. I wondered about the timing of all this when reading about some of the results in the book. Those were some very rough years for graduates, if I recall correctly.
adding: Bad advising disturbs me. It impacted some of my kids’ friends. My kids had helicopters.
Alh, I agree re Whitney.
The thing most surprising to me was that making it into the university and studying a reasonable amount didn’t guarantee success after graduation. It didn’t provide economic security. Some girls seemed much worse off due to loans. Some had jobs they could have had with no college degree. College didn’t provide them the American dream. That surprised me. What happened? Is that dream now pretty much a myth?
I was hoping Hanna would come back to comment on this.
Maybe Valerie was a great candidate in a difficult year. It’s hard to fault professors if Valerie was the kind of student who would normally have been accepted, but wasn’t accepted that year.
As to Whitney, she may have been the meanest girl on the floor, but mean girls are everywhere. On another party floor, it wouldn’t have been Whitney, but I have trouble believing that it wouldn’t have been some other equally mean girl. We are given no reason to believe that the floor the researchers picked had a uniquely mean set of women on it, and the researchers clearly don’t think it was uniquely mean. My default assumption, faute de mieux, is that it was representative of women’s floors in party dorms. There are a lot more Whitneys than alhs in the world, unfortunately.
Well, if mean girls are ubiquitous in college dorms, then Residential Life has a responsibility to intervene. Someone has to report them and the reports have to be taken seriously. No one should be expected to live in a situation where they are being bullied. And I absolutely agree with you this was too big a situation for the RA to be expected to handle.
I think you are correct there are mean girls everywhere. And they get away with it because we don’t object.
I’m reading Whitney in a different way that you, alh and PG. She was a wannabe-- a whipsmart middle class social climber, strategizing how to move up. But the Cossacks work for the Czar, as they say: she was only doing things that met with the approval of her betters, the queen bees. If they didn’t approve of her bullying, it would stop.
Edited to add: and she got her punishment. Her social climbing only got her so far after college. She’d have been better off to use her brains in the business school, she now realizes, but she got sidetracked by the party scene.