quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

And this is not snarking on Michigan, I went there as well.

There's also a west coast bias. One of my good friends went to Michigan, (he's from Detroit), and people out here are just "oh, midwest state school," when it's pretty much, as I understand it, the midwest equivalent of UC Berkeley. A lot of the east coast liberal arts schools, people out here haven't heard of.

FWIW, when I did the whole college admissions process I did read Michele Hernandez's book (quoted in the article) and I can't imagine what she would tell you for $14k that she didn't already reveal in the book.

Oh, Max, maybe you can answer a question for me, about something I've always thought but don't know for certain -- part of why I said "east-coasty" up there is that I've always had this sense that for wealthier east-coast kids it's considered somehow, like, shameful or embarrassing to go to school in lots of the rest of the country, like you've been exiled to the Midwest for incompetence or something, even though there are plenty of private schools around offering an education that's pretty comparable to some east-coast private schools. Does that seem right to you? Because I'm pretty sure a whole lot of why parents I knew in Colorado or Michigan or Illinois didn't go nuts about college-application stuff was that, you know, your kid is not applying to Bennington, she will be perfectly fine going to Washington U or Macalester or something. (Or any of a number of state schools, like Michigan, that people have a lot more belief in outside the cluster of old private colleges on the east coast...)

― nabisco, Monday, July 20, 2009 2:56 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is completely 100% true of people of my parents generation (note here that im specifically talking about a certain socioeconomic background)--my mom, who is a very liberal person otherwise, still has trouble adjusting to the idea that the school i went to was a "good" school by most measurements--and still true to certain extent in my generation (again, talking about a certain socioeconomic class here) though not nearly as much as it once was... outside of, basically, stanford, u chicago, maybe oberlin, maybe berkeley, maybe, uh, cmu or something, i dont think my mom rates any schools west of philadelphia at all.

i went to public school so my peer group was probably less wealthy than my parents was, and certainly less wealthy than the surrounding private schools, but even in my school there was a certain amt of education snobbery, and im sure that was true to an even greater extent at lawrenceville and peddie, to name two prep schools w/in 10 miles of me

From all the admissions-related stuff I've read - by admissions officers - they are generally looking for students that stand out in some way -- not necessarily the best grades or test scores -- being devoted to a particular subject or activity, having a unique background/experiences and an interesting perspective on them, etc. But maybe that's just my alma mater.

― well I'm married to a limping, crescent-shaped abortion (sarahel), Monday, July 20, 2009 2:42 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

IME this has led to campuses full of self-consciously "quirky" and "zany" wags. Really fucking annoying.

haha my favorite state-school east-coasters were always the ones around the University of Colorado, a scary amount of whom seemed like the evil preppy guys from 1980s ski movies

xpost - yeah, I honestly think people in the midwest are both, well ... (a) pretty spoiled for great-school options, and (b) possibly a lot more rational and centered in their general ideas of what's a good school to go to. but maybe that's just my Midwest bias on this one.

xpost - haha I almost posted earlier "sending your arty kid to oberlin doesn't count" ... yeah, it's weird, there are like a million pretty solid small private colleges dotted all around the country breezily giving good educations to midwestern kids, no test prep or counseling required, just being reasonably smart at a public school

i almost went to antioch! i think it was a little too bad-ass for me

to be fair to my moms though my understanding is that the landscape of higher education was a lot different in the 60s/70s when she was in school than it is now--i think the quality of colleges across the board has gone up, and i think theres been a certain amount of playing-field-leveling, especially on the undergraduate level

max is a rich kid college student

― chaki

yeah COLLEGE BOY

btw when it came time for my dad to graduate from his east coast prep school he was called into the office of the school college counselor, asked to give his top 2-3 school choices and fill out those applications, and say where his dad and grandfathers had gone to school. the counselor would do this with all the boys in the school, and then call up the deans of admission at harvard, yale, pton, cornell, etc., and say "well weve got 6 boys here who would like to go to harvard" and theyd bargain a little bit and then everyone would get notified.

see, the thing with Oberlin is that it is very populated by kids from the midwest who were the best brightest and weirdest....a handful of richies from the coasts...

and, most significantly, a huge population of kids whose parents are or were professors. that statistic, to me, was an indicator that the school had something going for it. think it also convinced my mom, tho i will say that when she saw how happy i was at oberlin, she started repping the school to people all over.

i almost went to antioch! i think it was a little too bad-ass for me

I think making fun of Antioch for wtf political correctness made Brown students feel better.

i have a friend who went to antioch for 3 days and then said fuck this and hitchhiked to boulder

I guess there are occasional moments where I feel a gap between my midwestern vs. other people's east-coast educations, but they invariably revolve around like Brown kids having learned fresh edgy stuff about critical theory while I was learning less-sexy straight-up material, and to be honest I think I prefer the stuff I got, if only cause it'd kind of suck to have part of your college education go out of fashion

xpost - I have actually thought at times that I'd have turned out way better if I'd known about / tried to go to Oberlin, but I have no idea why I think that

If I'd gone to Michigan I would probably own a house

dodged that bullet!

I had a housemate that had a long distance booty call situation at Antioch.

fwiw my mom was pretty upset when i decided to go to school on the west coast and i was only person that went to a school west of chicago from my graduating class. pretty sure my hs got someone from marin county a place @ dartmouth in exchange

holy crap, antioch college's wikipedia page says that it's closed

There was a story about a "consultant" who claimed to have major connections with Ivy League schools, and offered a money back guarantee if your child didn't get in to one of the Ivy league schools of his/her choice. She was very selective about what students she chose to work with, of course. Turns out she didn't know anyone and didn't do anything on behalf of the kids; if the student got into an Ivy League school she took credit, if they didn't she refunded the money with no problem. Kind of genius, I think.

omg, that's brilliant

I just got an email advertising college counselling services from my regional alumni list ...

that's some classic rain-making

xposts

nabisco are you losing your post-structuralist faith??

mcm's a real department at brown now, you know. its position as a discipline has always been paradoxical - at the first "foundation of semiotics" lecture of the semester, our professor said that the course title was misleading, since semiotics is a "non-foundational discipline" .. we were all like "huh" and that moment of "huh" tells you everything you need to know i guess

after that we drank some blood out of a skull though, so it was all good

they invariably revolve around like Brown kids having learned fresh edgy stuff about critical theory while I was learning less-sexy straight-up material

The English department at Brown wasn't all "edgy" critical theory. The Creative Writing department was a bit more biased towards "edginess" and had somewhat dysfunctional requirements - basically you had to be accepted through a competitive process into classes. I think it might have been the only major like that.

xp tracer: while listening to Phil Rosen's nasal whine?

I was just surprised to learn at some point that lots of Ivy and east-coast kids had actually been taught the kinds of writers it was considered hip for young people to talk about, whereas at my school that was the kind of stuff you read on your own after skimming coursework about utilitarians or reading modernists. Or pretended to read on your own, to look cool. Or anyway didn't get to in classes until tiny senior-year seminars or whatever.

The Creative Writing department was a bit more biased towards "edginess" and had somewhat dysfunctional requirements - basically you had to be accepted through a competitive process into classes. I think it might have been the only major like that.

I don't consider this dysfunctional -- it was the same way at my school! I almost consider this proper due diligence before letting people pin their entire expensive college career on a creative writing major.

As I understand it all colleges north of New Jersey were required by law in the late-90s to allow students to major in Judith Butler

thats why so many ppl from my school went to colgate!

Crit theory's been dead for about 20 years anyway so I'm sure all those Midwestern schools have caught up by now.

I was just surprised to learn at some point that lots of Ivy and east-coast kids had actually been taught the kinds of writers it was considered hip for young people to talk about, whereas at my school that was the kind of stuff you read on your own after skimming coursework about utilitarians or reading modernists. Or pretended to read on your own, to look cool.

Ditto my experience in a midwestern private school, and while I never took creative writing, I did take a bunch of English dept shit and ended up moving to East Coast anyway and being around a bunch of people who spoke in what seemed to me like code.

xp nabisco - I felt it made sense but my housemate who wanted to be a Creative Writing major thought it was dysfunctional. There was a competitive process for film/video classes - but they gave preference to students in the MCM or art/semiotics major and also considered seniority, whereas Creative Writing didn't do this.

xp - I think it depended on what courses one took. I don't think any of my English classes had us reading hip contemporary writers.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/shopping-for-1000-shoes-theres-an-app-for-that/

quiddities & agonies of the foundations of semiotic class, huh

btw I'm not sure if we've touched on this upthread, but I think the NYT is well aware of the number of eye-rolling or outraged clicks they get on particularly rich-peopley Style-section articles, and I don't think they much mind

like the "you cannot imagine what some people will spend money on" articles seem pretty clearly like group gawking

speaking of which -- next message on regional alumni list -- some guy advertising his 7 million dollar custom home for sale.

nabisco, i was *cough* a creative writing major with *cough* a music composition minor at Oberlin...

and it was hard to get into the upper levels of Creative Writing-- as in, one had to apply to every class, and there was no guarantee of admission. though i knew a bunch of people who got fucked this way, it also really separated the wheat from the chaff in a very efficient way.

it is also important to recognize, too, that Oberlin has a load of writers who are considered hot fucking shit in their particular genres, which isn't as true for a lot of other schools. (not to put other schools down).

Meanwhile recipients of federal and state financial aid adjust to life sucking.

Um-hmmm, that's me after one more year.

Though admittedly, I am already doing the job search thing.

well I gotta say the caps on federal loan repayment will be the opposite of life sucking, as far as my accounts are concerned. (especially since, umm, if you took out a few year-by-year loans recently, even small ones, that happened to shift into repayment during recent Troubles, umm, yeah, not the best time to find credit to consolidate them into one manageable bundle, as opposed to paying minimums on several different loans at once, lemme tell you.)

it still sucks if you have private loans.

(I say that in parentheses out of deference to people I knew in grad school who were taking out like a combined $70k a year in federal and private loans, and would probably roll their eyes at my small amounts, although now that I think about it, those were the people who were out drinking and sleeping with one another while I was eating hot dogs off the street outside of work, so we're probably even)

"Oberlin has a load of writers who are considered hot fucking shit in their particular genres, which isn't as true for a lot of other schools. (not to put other schools down)."

I enjoy reading non sports-related smack talk of schools. Please dish!

princeton kids are just not up to snuff on their restoration lit

yale classics is so bad most yalies cant tell the difference between heraclitus and hercules!!

xp nabisco - a lot of my friends went to expensive grad schools and have these huge amounts of debt, and struggle to get by on an annual income that if I was making that much, I could conceivably buy a house.

I can't imagine paying for an MFA/taking out loans for an MFA, isn't that kind of insane?