sigh
People are still fixated on the deli anecdote. SMH.
I find it perplexing that Brooks thinks that people that lack a college education are, by their nature, intimidated by things that they are unfamiliar with – in other words, that curiosity is exclusive to the elite.
My folks were definitely not affluent. We never left the state for vacations. Picking up fried chicken to eat at home was a big treat. But, even when I was in grade school, I was fascinated by the unfamiliar. I’d try anything new, just to see what it was like, and I often became enamored just by being exposed to new things through books checked out from the library. Eggrolls, great! Vienna sausages, terrible! Dali’s melted clocks, cool!
So, if in high school, Brooks had taken me to that deli, I’d have thought: Soppressata? What’s that? I want to try!
@Muad_dib
" sigh* People are still fixated on the deli anecdote. SMH."
Because a stupid anecdote cheapens the whole argument, and in this case revealed something interesting about its author: he’s a judgmental snob.
Many California publics do enroll a substantial number of Pell grant recipients (probably approximates bottom half family income), according to http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1ba.aspx?institutionid=110714,110705,110680,110671,445188,110662,110653,110644,110635,123572,122755,122597,122409,115755,110495,366711,110510,110617,110608,409698,110592,110583,110565,110556,110574,110547,110538,441937,110486,110529,110422,111188
66.3% CSULA
62.8% CSUSB
61.6% CSUB
61.5% UCM
60.5% CSUDH
60.1% CSUStan
57.5% UCR
57.0% CSUFresno
53.7% CSUSac
49.7% CSULB
48.8% CSUMB
47.6% CSUEB
46.7% CPP
46.0% UCSC
45.6% CSUCI
45.4% CSUSM
45.4% UCI
Indeed. An older HS alum who had an interesting childhood navigating between her working-class Italian-American immigrant side of her family and her multi-generation middle/later UMC WASP* side of her family was quite amused about the article and cited it as another exhibit in Brook’s cluelessness about how class dynamics actually worked in NYC…much less the rest of the country.
- She recounted how there was much tension between the two sides of her family because of their completely differing worldviews....including the importance of education...especially for girls/women.
The working-class Italian-American side of her family couldn’t understand why her parents were ok with her commuting a long way out of the neighborhood via subway to attend Stuy(graduated in early '80’s) and later on, going out of state to attend an elite LAC(SWAT) on full FA whereas those very attitudes factored into her WASP side of her family strongly disdaining her Italian-American immigrant side of her family and reinforcing their own problematic racial/ethnic prejudices.
She also observed that in contrast to the working-class Jewish neighbors, vast majority of her Italian-American neighbors who were from the same SES background either never went on to college or stayed very local(attending the nearest CC/CUNY in their immediate neighborhood). Her Jewish neighbors were encouraged to get the best education possible even if it meant commuting a long way to one of the public magnets/HCHS and later, to not let geographic proximity be the limiting factor in choosing colleges…and women were just as encouraged in this as their men counterparts.
I think the article was well written. He is trying to make a point. Basically there is social stratification in this country and it is hard to get a good education in this country unless you are part of at least the upper middle class. That is very sad and unacceptable. That’s what this thread should be talking about.
In California most housing projects and cities have affordable housing requirements. I get the sense that many communities around the country don’t have that and as such the income stratification of communities are magnified to a great extent. Income and educational inequality is proceeding non stop at an accelerating pace.
Interestingly in parts of the Silicon Valley they have trouble finding public school teachers.
Unfortunately, the deprivation of state funding in public education, especially at the K-12 levels and some misguided policies in terms of public magnet high schools has gotten to the point many wealthier Californians have been opting to send their kids off to private day/boarding schools to ensure their kids have the requisite amount of academic rigor/challenge for their learning needs.
Similarly, the situation is even worse in states like Hawaii which were key reasons why even many lower-income families such as Obama’s in his childhood resorted to sending their kids to respectable/elite private boarding schools on scholarship or Mississippi where the state of public education is so bad even the local private schools* in my relatives’ rural area didn’t feel the need to compete academically and after wasting a year, both younger cousins ended up getting sent to private schools OOS and one requiring a 2 hour drive each way.
- Former segregation academies whose academic level/rigor was such that one of those younger cousins said it made the academic curriculum/rigor of a mediocre NYC public school seem academically elite in comparison.
In California, private school enrollment has been declining, and was 7.6% in 2013, versus about 9.7% in 2013 in the US overall.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ps/cefprivinstr.asp
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=65
San Francisco does have a high private school percentage at 19.9% in 2014, even though California as a whole is not one the states where private schools are most popular (e.g. Louisiana, Hawaii, Delaware).
https://www.trulia.com/blog/trends/private-vs-public-school/
A large part of the 7.6 per cent are religious schools or alternate education schools like Waldorf. Independent private high schools in California are relatively rare.
Interestingly 35 per cent of the students at Harvard went to private high schools
Okay, you don’t want fixation on the deli anecdote? How about the idea that the upper middle class has ANY opinion, much less the socalled “right” one, about David Foster Wallace? (Or for that matter, has a clue about who he is.) Brooks undermines any sense of argument with vapid, content-free statements like these.
Huh? The upper middle class and the upper class has a vested interested in income and educational and racial disparity. This is nothing new. The problem is it is getting worse day by day. I can point you to lots of research pieces that back Brooks up. His article was just a short op ed piece.
Brooks uses cultural stereotypes in order to avoid structural inequality. It’s a way to handwring without getting at the real issues of our society. The problems ARE getting worse and worse, and he uses deflection to avoid the bigger issues.
And ones which reveals great ignorance considering what he considers “elite”, especially considering it wasn’t that long ago that the Italian/ethnic sandwiches he cites as “elite” were anything but.
And no surprise, he came from a sheltered upper-middle class background* much more similar to that of several older Oberlin classmates from White upper/upper-middle class backgrounds than what most classmates/neighbors during my K-12 years and i experienced…or the older HS alum friend I cited in my previous post who navigated one side of her extended family who were working-class Italian-Americans and who grew up with her immediate family in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood and another side who were multi-generationed WASPs to the point she is eligible for membership in the DAR.
- He spent his childhood attending private schools in NYC and a well-funded public HS in the poshy Philadelphia Main Line area. I would not be surprised if his parents/social circle was such he never got to experience the "real NYC" most of us who were not of his SES background experienced on a daily basis...especially in the early '90s and before.
There’s only so many slots available at the top colleges, by whatever ranking system you want to use. That’s largely a zero sum game. Getting your own kids into a top 20 college means there’s fewer slots available for everyone else.
simba9 the inheritance of intelligence is a proven fact and not something open to opinion. G has been proven to be responsible for roughly 60-80% of a person’s intelligence. Saying you don’t believe that genes strongly influence intelligence is like saying you don’t believe in evolution.
collegedad13 it most certainly is not hard to get a good education for virtually any reasonably intelligent person. But it’s the intelligence part that is the barrier. It’s a simple fact that income is well correlated with intelligence and that most of the children from the lowest income groups lack the IQ to do college level work. The truth is that only about 20% of the students in the USA can perform true college level work and a large number of current college students are largely wasting their time and money going to college. This is basic stuff. Intelligence like almost everything else follows a bell shaped curve and a college degree can only have meaning if it signifies something that can not be obtained by the majority of people. If everyone can complete something then completing that task signifies no achievement and hence is meaningless. America has the most opportunity of any country in the world and any reasonably intelligent person can become successful here with hard work and patience(a bit of luck is also helpful).
^^^ oy… I don’t even know where to start objecting to the above…
How about a list of what you believe is not factual and then show a reference. Everything I stated is supported by reams of peer reviewed studies including multiple longitudinal twin studies that followed people for decades. It just isn’t controversial to people familiar with the data. There are of course many exceptions and statistics tell you nothing about individuals. Most people who object do so because the hard truth is somewhat unpleasant but can not support their objections with facts.
Family income greatly affects a kid’s chance of attending and graduating college, regardless of ability. Using 8th grade test scores as a measure of ability, high scorers from low income families are only as likely as low scorers from high income families to graduate college.
http://www.epi.org/blog/college-graduation-scores-income-levels/ (chart at the bottom)
Rather than assuming each kid’s intelligence based on his/her parents’ income, why not make the playing field more equal so that each kid will attain education (and income) based on his/her own ability, motivation, and desire, rather than mostly inheriting his/her parents’ income level, where low achievers from wealthy parents receive unearned benefits, while high achievers from poor parents have their talents wasted?
Charles Murray is an exceptional scholar whose work has been proven correct and is a far better resource than some partisan blog. I do agree that coming from a strong intact two parent family does effect the chance of a child graduating from college but it is completely beyond the ability of any government program to make up for a poor family life. However your statement in no way invalidates what I posted. Do you dispute that the majority of low income children lack the IQ to graduate from college? The truth is that the majority of all students overall lack the IQ to graduate from college. Surely you are aware that 70% of Americans do not have college degrees?