The difference that I see is that your kid is working to gain experience that will make him better at his future job. He’s there to work and learn. A lot of the young people who work at inner city summer camps and afterschool programs are students who are studying to be teachers and want to get useful experience and also use what they are learning in school. Even thought it’s sweatier work, it’s not particularly different from my kid’s current internship at a national lab - it’s gaining experience in their field of study. With the students working at camps, I would see somebody who wants to study family law working there to get experience with some of the complicated family structures and how that affects kids very differently from somebody who wanted to be able to say that they had worked with the poor when they applied to law school. It’s not bad to gain experience in something different, but it does feel weird to do it specifically for the purpose of applying to school. And all of that is different from kids working primarily because they need to earn money and take whatever job they can get that pays well, which is also fine.
Why is that weird? Any weirder than paying a grad student to help you with a “research project” that gets published in an obscure journal ? Weirder than mommy and daddy doing the legal work to get your lemonade stand or whatnot incorporated into a 501 C-3?
Any lawyer who has had exposure to housing insecurity, the manifold social and legal and medical issues faced by day laborers, has eaten lunch next to someone who gets stale bread from a food pantry, or who understands that a workplace injury can quickly spiral into a catastrophe for an entire family who rely on the worker-- is a better lawyer in my book. I don’t care about the motivation.
Every lawyer in America is going to take the same basic curriculum for much of their legal education. Any kid who got themselves a customized lesson in something not taught in law school- hurrah. Someone who has worked at a sexual assault hotline is going to have a different prosecutorial approach than someone who has fallen into the “he said/she said” line of thinking. Do you really care why they do what they do?
The flip side of this is that
a) there’s been a tendency amongst social scientists to try and elevate their prestige by claiming that their conclusions are based on the same level of “proof” as hard sciences (sometimes falling into the correlation is not causation trap), and
b) more scientists frame their research conclusions in ways that are politically controversial so they can attract attention and funding. And they may try to discredit or even stop research from being carried out that would lead to results that are unpalatable for their social or political views.
Those factors are inevitably going to lead to a loss of respect and a belief that some scientists aren’t interested in seeking the truth.
All of that sounds weird to me. Spouse and I both have PhDs, but we both had grandparents who were small-scale poor farmers or mill workers. We come from intelligent, hardworking, and eventually financially comfortable but not highly educated people. We’ve chosen to live in a semi-rural area that is being swallowed by the nearby city. My kids played rec sports with kids whose families could barely scrape together the money to register at the community park and also kids who go to private school. In our area, it’s not unusual for all of them to play in the same community park as kids. In high school, they knew kids who worked to earn the money to pay team fees and also kids who had a pickleball court and a pool on their family property. They learned early not to talk about expensive things because many people couldn’t afford them. Through youth group at church they sit in classes with kids whose parents are in the recovery program or kids who have come through the foster system, and they’ve come with me to volunteer tutor kids in an afterschool program who, as first graders, did not know how to take turns to play a board game.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think it’s really good to understand that people live differently and to know different types of people. And, however you do it is better than not doing it at all. It’s weird to me to have lived your whole life without it happening more organically. It’s weird to me to care enough about attending an ‘elite’ college to try to game the system. But, I understand that spouse and I have made conscious choices to raise our kids differently. We chose this location specifically because we didn’t want our kids to be in a bubble. As they look at colleges, grad school, and careers they are looking at what they can do to stay within their (comfortable) budget, get experience, and get a job being self-supporting while doing something useful. They figure they’ll find the right match college by doing their thing in high school, whether it be sports, volunteering, academics, etc - and then seeing where it leads them. Neither really understands why one would care about an elite school, although to be fair with their chosen professions (engineer and teacher) there isn’t a lot of advantage.
And, now that I type this out, maybe that’s one of the things leading to social division between ‘elite’ and others. There is a segment of society focused on doing the right things to gain admission into elite programs, whether undergrad, grad, or professional schools. There is a bigger part of society that is just living their lives, and those who are so inclined and have aptitude go to college, grad, or professional schools, often at small schools or State Us. I wonder if, because there are so many hoops to jump through for some programs, people feel like the ‘elite’ are living in a fake world - fake publications, fake competitions, fake friendliness at jobs that take just to say that they did them - and they don’t respect it. It’s very different from the ‘Our valedictorian, who we all know is smart, got into Harvard’ of the 1970s.
Andrew Wakefield?
I don’t understand the criticism of taking a menial job and using that fact in college/grad school admissions. Are they supposed to be doing those jobs out of the goodness of their hearts? Everyone gets something they want out of a job; working only for the paycheck isn’t the only acceptable reason.
And I am with Blossom: the job may have been part of an admissions strategy, but I can almost guarantee the kid will get something valuable out of the experience, especially with regards to how other people live. I still remember, 40 years later, the hospital food service workers who had been on the job for 25 years, and who got ONE WEEK of vacation a year.
I don’t have any criticism of it, but it’s also not something that would ever cross my mind to do. Take a job because I need money? Sure! Take a job because there’s a lot about the world that I don’t understand and undergrad summers are a good time to learn, or experience something different? Sure! Take a job related to my field so that I have some experience? Sure! Take a job because it’s in a part of the country that I’ve never seen? Sure! All of those are things that I might consider when looking for a summer job. Take a job that is unrelated to my work, my interests, or helping me to understand the world better, because I think that doing manual labor would stand out on an application? I wouldn’t think to do that. This job IS likely to be a learning experience, and that is good! And, whatever the motivations, as long as the job is done well then there’s no problem with having it. But, I can’t imagine saying out loud ‘I took this job because manual labor will make me stand out’. I know a couple of kids who spend summers working with landscapers doing physical work, but at State Us that doesn’t seem to be anything unusual and I don’t think that it would make them stand out on an application.
@blossom , @cinnamon1212 and @Clemsondana . I think I agree with parts of what each of you have said, and thank you all for helping me view this differently.
Based probably on the way my kid presented this situation to me, I was viewing it entirely as the kid trying to present as someone less advantaged in life so as to actually gain an advantage. (He lives in a very high income area, where there are likely very few, if any, manual laborers. The kids who attend his high school tend to be fairly homogenous with very little economic diversity.) And that’s what gave me the ick. But looking at it more as a horizon broadening or empathy building opportunity helps and makes it feel better. And yes, if he’s going to be a lawyer someday it’s great for him to be seeing inequities up front and early on. It doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily end up practicing in an area for the underserved, he may end up doing high end IP law or something, but still, it’s good to have knowledge and experience and living where he lives, and attend a school like Wake, I’m guessing working on the excavation crew puts him in with a new crowd.
I totally agree. And med school admissions teams straight up say that to be successful in admissions, an applicant better have spent time serving disadvantaged populations. Is that experience ‘fake’ then? And…why would people think something similar doesn’t carry over to other admissions processes?
But there are lots of things that the elite do to obtain an advantage that regular people wouldn’t understand. It was eye opening when my S18 interned at a famous DC think tank (which he’d just applied to via their website, so he was one of 2 chosen out of 500+ applicants) and found that most of the other interns had got their positions through connections, referrals from famous professors, etc.
You only need to look at the Varsity Blues scandal to see people who in their own minds justified participating (until they were caught) by thinking that their corruption of the admissions process wasn’t that different to what the true “elite” do.
My point (and I apologize for not making it clear) is that EVERY lawyer benefits from understanding people who do not live in their bubble.
A college friend of mine leads the IP practice at a large firm. His firm has a strict pro bono requirement (some firms have a loosey goosey policy- you can teach a seminar on ethics at a local law school and fulfill your requirement that way. His does not- you want to teach? great. But you still need to meet your pro bono requirement).
He is something of a self-taught expert on the death penalty now. He has gone from “people in jail generally did something bad; people on death row have done something heinous” as a result of his volunteering with the Innocence Project. It has nothing to do with his main line of legal work- which is suing a big tech company for allegedly stealing the innovation of another big tech company, someone will get rich in the process including his firm.
But it is a deeply important part of his life right now. It has taken years for him to come to appreciate that bad cops can lose, contaminate, fake evidence. It has taken years for him to appreciate that black men get the death penalty at rates far greater than white men, even when they committed the same crime in the same jurisdiction. It has taken him years to understand that even when presented with bullet proof evidence (uncorrupted DNA for example) that the person on death row was 500 miles away while the crime was being committed, the judicial system does not like admitting that the exonerating evidence has been sitting in a storage facility without being tested because the upper middle class eye witness said- with great emphasis and perfect grammar-- “I saw this guy pull the trigger” while pointing to the defendant.
My friend grew up in a bubble, was educated in a bubble, and were it not for happenstance, would never have seen the things he’s seen. He is a skilled lawyer and well regarded and so he’s had a disproportionate impact on the exoneration cases he’s taken and won.
Wouldn’t it be great if “would be” lawyers could get exposed to “non-bubble” lives BEFORE law school? And even if they aren’t able to help death row inmates- what about the single mom’s with an unlawful eviction, the kid in a wheelchair being denied an education because the elementary school refuses to allow him to use the teachers bathroom which is the only ADA compliant toilet in the entire school, or the immigrant being deported without due process or even a hearing because we have folks in government who don’t know what Habeas Corpus means?
More lived experience. I say it’s a good thing, and don’t care about the motivation.
Concur. Of course, for LS his time woudl be better spent prepping for teh LSAT which is nearly half of the admission factor (uGPA being the other half). (With the exception of Yale, Stanford and perhaps Chicago, EC;s don’t matter to LS.). That said, his time spent with teh crew could become a really good day-in-the-life essay.
Yes. And I’ll broaden @Blossom’s point. EVERY PERSON benefits from understanding people who do not live in their bubble. This is particularly true for people who are advantaged in some respect.
As it is often more of a challenge for different communities to interact with one another than it is for @Clemsondana’s family to do, it’s one of the reasons why I’m not opposed to two compulsory years of national service. Whether that’s AmeriCorps (with whatever funding remains) or military or whatever it happens to be, I think it’s definitely a way to expand people’s familiarity with others’ situations and to be more understanding and empathetic.
I used to be against the compulsory service requirement, but as divided as our country is these days, I have changed my mind. I believe it would be a good thing .
A side note: I spent a summer working in a factory when I was in college. It was 100% because I needed the money but really made me appreciate that I had the opportunity for higher education.
Despite what the test prep industry would like you to believe, a college student or grad with halfway decent reading skills does NOT need to spend every summer, or every waking moment preparing for the LSAT. Law schools (even elite ones) are filled with students who bought a prep book on Amazon and managed to find the time to prep on their own. Why perpetuate the notion that test prep takes so much time that a kid can’t have a summer job at the same time?
Farm, meat packing, construction, and hospitality labor? That may be where the difficult-to-meet labor demand is.
was not suggesting taht anyone take a LSAT prep course, as they are certainly not needed. All prep can be done at home with books borrowed for free from teh library. That said, even a few extra points on the LSAT can turn into big tax-free merit money, so prepping is easiest money law students will ever earn.
My point was that, unlike undergrad, EC’s don’t much matter to law school admissions, so working construction (or whatever) is not the plus factor taht the student hopes it to be. Three hours a day of prep and hanging out at the beach in the afternoon will be more effective for LS admissions if that time spent raises the LSAT a few points.
I got you! I did the same thing - said something that wasn’t clear. I was trying to make the same point as you - even if Future Lawyer doesn’t do work with the underserved in his future career directly, experience with broader facets of society can only be to the good, no matter what. Even if he goes to BigLaw and makes bank and does negligible pro bono work, maybe he’s got a broader mindset that he takes with him in his interactions with shopkeepers, or lawn service guys, or cab drivers or whatever. And maybe he shares that mindset and experience with his own future children, to help them have a broader world view. Then in that case, to bring this whole thing full circle, maybe his pursuit of academic elitism - e.g. a “good” law school - is actually what ends up causing this one guy to reduce some social barriers and divides.
That’s a kind of rosy outlook, but I’ll take it. 
(And as an attorney who started their career working with inner city safety net hospitals and ended my legal work focused on immigration law and immigration court, we’ll just say that these are two areas - of many - that could use more people who are willing to walk in someone else’s shoes. Or construction boots, as the case may be.)
I think you are on to something with this, and may have answered your initial question. If people are making choices such that their lives don’t interact with people in other groups, then by design they are setting themselves apart and creating an ‘elite’ that is divided from much of society. I’m not valorizing us for having our kids exposed to different people - spouse and I didn’t grow up in the education or income bracket that we are in now and various life experiences mean that we are equally at home eating a fried bologna sandwich from the community park concession stand or eating at a nice restaurant. We aren’t trying to give our kids experiences with diverse groups of people - we are just choosing not to live in an isolated community. When we bought our property (a couple of acres on a road where you sometimes have to pull over for oncoming cars to pass), our realtor initially tried to steer us to an area across town, where for a similar cost we could have bought a house in a nice neighborhood. We wanted land for a garden and fruit trees, but we also were concerned that our kids would miss out on finding the bits of the world that they would love if they grew up in a bubble.
It’s not hard to make this choice - within 5 miles of my house, there are several middle-class neighborhoods and an actual mansion (complete with a guest house larger than most homes to house international company CEOs when they come to work with the business owner who lives in the mansion), along with small older houses and some upscale houses. There isn’t a lot of zoning in the county! And, people opt out of it because they don’t want to be near ‘those people’, so it remains the ‘not elite’ part of town despite there being plenty of people here with money and education (although not always both in the same person!). Many people on this side of town send their kids to State U or State Tech, or directional state schools or small colleges, or 2 years of CC and then transfer. The high schools don’t have the guidance counselors and connections putting kids on the path to the prestige colleges, but most aren’t looking to do that anyway. It can feel like, even within the same income brackets, there are 2 very different mindsets and perspectives that play out through a lot of smaller choices.
I agree! I think those things are part of what create the division. A lot of people, including intelligent, well educated, and financially comfortable people are just opting out of it all because the whole thing is too different from the rest of their life. They don’t know how to play the game and think it’s just rigged anyway, or assume that people bought their way to success. So, they come to the (not crazy) conclusion that the elite aren’t really any smarter than they are. It is likely to be different in other places, but in our area it’s not unusual to hear ‘They are rich/a doctor/have a PhD but you’d never know it’ said as a compliment towards people who aren’t arrogant, are kind, and are willing to get their hands dirty volunteering or helping. Those people find themselves in charge of things and respected but aren’t in the category of ‘elite’ that is being discussed here.