Good point, $100,000 is wealthy? Sure, if it’s monthly not annually!
I think the article just highlights the world’s income inequality problem which is getting worse every year. Half the world’s wealth is now owned by 1% of our population. 80 people have as much money as the poorest 3.6 billion people.
It’s not the the people who earn 108k, or even 200-300k a year who contribute to this mess. It’s those big businesses that make billions yet continue to evade taxes, while cutting their workers’ wages.
I don’t remember the exact figures but Verizon hasn’t paid anything in taxes for the past few years. However, the amount of money they owe per year is enough to single-handedly fund the UK’s entire public health system for one year. That’s just one corporation and yet the positive affect it could have on public services is MASSIVE. Imagine what would happen if all them started paying their taxes and raising wages.
Anyway, my point is if we want an education system that serves everyone equally then we need wealth to be more equally distributed. Income inequality = Education and Health Inequality. Since wealth only trickles up now, whether or not you will be rich or poor depends a very great deal on whether or not you were born rich or poor. Sure, there’s a bit of social mobility. My dad literally went from rags to riches himself, but it’s not enough to say that the system isn’t rigged.
Thank you and goodnight.
This might not be a very popular opinion, but is some of the problem that no one sits down with poorer students and explains to them that they need to approach college differently than their more wealthy peers?
If I were giving a smart but poor kid advice, it would be to major in something useful (accounting, engineering, finance), leaving the ‘fun’ majors to those who can afford to have Mom and Dad help out with living expenses and loan payments if there isn’t a good job waiting upon graduation. If you want to study Chaucer, take elective classes to study Chaucer. Aping the rich will not make you rich, and the rich are able to afford the luxury of spending college to ‘learn to think.’ Their peers with well-connected parents can afford to spend college drunk and partying.
I am NOT saying that the poor are deserving of not finishing college, but I do think that our culture and our college counseling (both pre-college and once in college) do a deplorable job of helping kids to understand their limitations and the limitations of being enrolled in college.
“Paying for the Party”, the book, makes that point. The girls (the study was of female students only) with wealthy parents can party, and major in interior design, or whatever, because they have the cushion their parents provide (and the connections to succeed in certain jobs). They are in college to make connections (Greek life is a popular way in the study), meet potential husbands (not to marry IN college but later), and get a degree, it doesn’t matter much in what.
The poorer girls in the study had to work much harder, party much less, choose different “more practical” majors and still many didn’t finish.
^ Could be partly the fact that if some of the girls were entering with weaker academic background (didn’t have access to tutors in high school etc.) and then chose harder majors like accounting, engineering etc. that they couldn’t finish in time. Some scholarships only last for four years, and some of the girls may have had to pull out of school after they realized they weren’t going to graduate on time and they knew their families couldn’t pay for an extra semester for them to finish.
Almost happened to my mom and dad, and they both came from humble households. My dad said that was basically the only thing he knew going into college - he had to finish in 4 years or he wouldn’t finish at all.
Some did, some didn’t. They split them into groups, some were high achievers coming in to college, some were not.
No one chose engineering as I recall. It wasn’t a matter of not graduating in 4 years, it was dropping out or switching to a commuter branch campus.
Economic status affected many areas I hadn’t thought about, even likelihood of being treated respectfully by high-status boys, for example. (They saw greater risk in taking advantage of wealthy girls who moved in their circle than they did poorer ones who had low status and whose parents their parents wouldn’t know and so on).
This is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578
Related, I like this letter from the pres of Questbridge to the student QB applicants with his advice about succeeding as a low income (but high achieving in HS) college student: http://www.questbridge.org/for-students/introduction-letter
…he then goes on to tell QB kids how to find mentors and how to approach college and life after without the safety net of family wealth. It’s a good read, IMO.
I read the letter and I agree that its good advice for everyone. Not just lower income students.
Sounds like a common sense article with proven statistics to me.
As a low-income student myself, I’m not too surprised by the ratio.
In my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I slacked off and ended up with poor grades. I did, however, improve in my junior and currently senior year. I do know that our financial situation was around 90% of the cause for my poor grades in school.
Was I capable of studying and finding enough hours in a day to do homework? Of course. However, my situation has been and still is much different (and probably worse) than some of the remarkable QB students.
I think some fixes to the low graduation rates would be drilling those who have kids and receive government assistance about education beyond high school. It wouldn’t get through to everyone, but it would definitely reach some parents and open their eyes to the fact that the chances of escaping from poverty without a college degree is marginal.
I have no clue why I’ve been so inclined to work hard in my junior and senior year to get into a decent college. Perhaps I’m one of the lucky few in the poverty pool.