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<p>Whatever “systems” private colleges want to set up to support their students is up to them. And for the love of God, the girls in this article were not “clearly middle class.”</p>
<p>I think that the problem of university students reading their emails isn’t insignificant. Every year in my son’s department, there are a few students that don’t graduate when they’ve met their requirements because they don’t file some form for graduation. This despite the department sending out numerous reminders to fill the form out.</p>
<p>University emails can be blizzard-like too. Emails on every sporting event, club, colloquium, job postings, coffee meetings, etc. can bury the important stuff. That’s where a personal secretary (or helicopter parent if you can’t afford a personal secretary) can help.</p>
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<p>Some where on a windowless floor of a Chicago office tower a mainframe whirls and an untraceable kill order is bounced over a dozen proxies to The Cleaner.</p>
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<p>Agreed. But when you don’t have either…</p>
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Cobrat, you are so smart and interesting (love your posts about history), but Pizzagirl is right. Hasn’t anything happened to you beyond high school? No offense, but your posts on that topic are very outdated and we seem to miss your excellent insight about current experiences that might really be relevant.</p>
<p>This really carries the “American Dream” thing to an absurd extreme.<br>
I’ll agree there is plenty of room to blame some folks’ choices- but we should be embarassed to assume that what was available to us or worked for us reflects the whole reality out there. You really think roughly 3k in take-home can stretch? And that lower incomes should just shred more out of their budgets? That it is truly a simple choice between going to WalMart versus going to a financial advisor to invest spare cash?</p>
<p>$1M in savings and college isn’t affordable? Seriously? </p>
<p>Might not be enough for the Duggars, but the average family should be able to pay college tuition without even touching the principal. </p>
<p>Some of those families who haven’t saved have been spendthrifts on such things as food, and rent/mortgage, clothing, electric bills, etc… Again, I think it’s hard for those who have never experienced serious financial difficulty to imagine what it’s like to get by, let alone to save for college.</p>
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<p>But if they are poor we are supposed to boo hoo for them all day and night instead of telling them they are adults now and should have read their email. My son has a choice of reading his email or not reading it. He needs to choose to read it as I will not be doing it for him and he cannot afford a personal secretary.</p>
<p>PP, you told me they are adults because they turned 18 and grad’d hs, right? I disputed the formula. Are you a completely hands off parent? Completely? </p>
<p>Kid should read their email. The fact that one kid in a NYT article did not- well, aren’t we past that? Why use it as some springboard for poor people’s financial responsibilities and the burden on the wealthy?</p>
<p>Calling something sherpa overstates. Nice image. Wrong reality.</p>
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Maybe, maybe not. Don’t have stats on that. Do you? And if the higher income students who can afford to have a choice leave the state, then this doesnt benefit the state and accomplish the desired goal.</p>
<p>Am guesing you don’t live in GA, skrlvr, but there sure are a lot of rural communities with low income residents whose kids do aspire to go to college, and they heavily rely on the HOPE/Zell Miller to accomplish that goal. So how exactly does this help the wealthy over the less well off? Those who are more well off may choose not to use the HOPE and instead attend college elsewhere. For the mostpart the HOPE/Zell Miller really does help those who would otherwise not be able to attend college. You are misinformed if you think this is the other way around.</p>
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<p>I thought that we agreed upthread that these girl’s issues were self inflicted. </p>
<p>If DeParle wants us To Do Something About It, and clearly he does, the SES data says that we are talking about the middle class. The 2nd quartile has nearly the same statistics as the first so they are in just as much Danger of Falling Behind [tm]. Second quartile is clearly middle class. </p>
<p>So now we are talking about forming yet another dependency that covers 50% of the population. Yeesh. </p>
<p>I’d say that the problem here is that Upward Bound pushed these girls into schools that they were unlikely to succeed at. </p>
<p>If we were to go back in time I think the best thing would have been if Angelica, Melissa, Bianca and whoever else was interested in an education were given school vouchers so they could have gotten out of Ball HS and away from classfulls of uninterested kids. Had they been prepared by an rigorous highschool they would have been better prepared for the schools they went to. Or maybe they should have gone to community college, but that was declasse for Miss G’s goals.</p>
<p>Proudpatriot, do you read the threads here in this forum? There are so many questions from parents trying to figure out how to best help their college students in a variety of situations. If your child is in need of help, why wouldn’t a parent try to help? But some of the SES students don’t have the same level of parental support as the parents who post here can provide. Why shouldn’t the school step in to help? It doesn’t even have to cost them anything as much of the support can come from upper class students on a volunteer basis. It appears that they did try to reach the one student discussed here, but it wouldn’t hurt if there was someone who took notice of the e-mails going without response. How hard would it be to contact this student in a different way?</p>
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<p>I think we agreed that the girls bear SOME responsibility for following up on their financial aid stuff. But we also agreed that Emory did a pretty awful job communicating with the one girl and essentially accusing her family of LYING about their financial situation.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, showing some compassion toward these girls or others who have suffered hard times comes easily to a lot of us. No one is talking about forming new “dependencies.” Please stop trying to turn this into a “makers versus takers”/“47%” conversation or the thread will be shut down.</p>
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I think this is very good advice because it allows students to have someone to ask for assistance about things they might be too embarrassed to ask officially.</p>
<p>My D is a junior in a small, unique major and it does have a mentoring program because its requirements and practices are so unique. It works very well and I don’t think it costs the university a penny. I’m not sure how that would play out on a large scale, though.</p>
<p>My D2 went to an inner-city high school in NYC. The college night was required for all juniors and there were significant incentives to attendance. In addition to picking up report cards that night, the principal used many of the holiday gifts she had received, as well as donations from local businesses, to create raffle tables for which parents received tickets when they arrived toward winning the prizes. People did come and the GC, knowing that most kids were poor, minority, immigrant, first generation, provided a booklet for each kid that spelled out EVERYTHING in minute detail. I do mean everything, nothing was left to chance. The principal was a black woman from the neighborhood and she completely understood the barriers and was determined to provide as much information as possible that was specific to the needs of her population. I must say that school was very successful at the college process.</p>
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<p>What is the right reality?</p>
<p>Emory sent her 17 emails. Emory invited her to a minority student mentoring group but she didnt respond. Emory has a First Year program to get student acclimated to the school, the city and the academics. They have a Second year program where you work on selecting a major (not the one you carry a D in). </p>
<p>I’d like to know what system is being proposed because short of a sherpa per two students I dont see how you fix this. </p>
<p>The real false image here is claiming that what is being done is “sink or swim” or “let them eat bread”. Those are complete canards.</p>
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<p>A lot of people that I work with have paid off their mortgages.</p>
<p>New Hampshire is a relatively high-cost-of-living area as is New England in general. There are no general income or sales taxes though but property taxes are high but you basically can control the amount of state taxes that you pay by choosing your housing. Housing is relatively expensive here which is why there have been migrations from New England (MA in particular) to the Research Triangle and other areas.</p>
<p>But you can choose a lower-priced home or rent in lots of places. You might have to deal with weak school systems or higher rates of crime or lower levels of social services. Our kids went to schools where the median income is $39,000/year. You could rent a newly refurbished two-bedroom apartment for $1,000/month in a not-too-terrible area. I imagine that you could find something for moderately less with more compromises. There are certainly households that do just that. A coworker with household income of about $200K does have a home in that city. They had a bunch of kids and they sent them to private schools for K-12; they could afford the tuition costs because they chose cheap housing for their level of income.</p>
<p>I just did a google search on the number of millionaires in the US - defined as at least one million in assets excluding primary residence. I found an article from November that puts the number at over 5.1 million based on end-of-2011 numbers. The article also has a number of 11 millionaires today from Credit Suisse (maybe they use a different methodology). At any rate, that’s a lot of households and a lot of these people may just look like you or me out on the street.</p>
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<p>Well, a good adviser with a little more reach than an email account can help.</p>
<p>Cheap public universities typically have advisers stretched pretty thinly and a lot of lower-income students go to these kinds of schools. It is sink or swim at these places. Advisers cost money and I think that most public universities would rather serve more students than do a better job serving their students a bit better. I’ve read that small, private LACs do a better job at getting students out in four and that the actual cost can be lower than large, public universities with lower sticker prices.</p>
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<p>I have seen people from poor household situations (from my son’s school) make it work. It may take more than four years or joining ROTC or living in cheap housing but it can work.</p>
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<p>Well, I heard all of that stuff about study hard and college will be free.</p>
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<p>Not if it’s in a money market account. But we can blame Bernanke for that.</p>
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<p>Some have experienced third-world poverty which is different than first-world poverty.</p>
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<p>What would you do if he doesn’t read it and it imperils your significant investment? What did we do before the days of email? I’ve read lots of posts from professors about students that don’t read the syllabus - they don’t know when things are due, what things are due, what the readings are etc. Should a parent get involved if this happens? I have a nephew that did this in college. He’s on the ten-year plan. I haven’t said anything to his parents - I figure that they already know.</p>
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<p>How about having an RA talk to her about why she isn’t responding to her emails. Some actual person-to-person contact?</p>
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<p>What I did was to try to draw a historical parallel using NYC cases like CUNY and Specialized High Schools to point out the flaw and potentially negative implications of jym626’s argument of “Public services should be accessible to all”. </p>
<p>In addition to that, I also pointed out that public services like Medicaid, Federal Pell grants, or admission to academically selective public colleges…including the Service Academies aren’t “accessible to everyone” despite being public services/institutions. </p>
<p>In short, just because a public service is available and funded by taxpayers doesn’t mean such services are necessarily or SHOULD BE accessible to all. </p>
<p>Moreover, if jym626’s argument about public services are taken to its logical conclusion…she’s making the same argument proponents of eliminating selective admission standards for CUNY and the NYC public magnets made back in the '60s and '70s to disastrous results in CUNY’s case from the '70s to the late '90s.</p>
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<p>Amen. I’d venture to say that most posters on this thread come from solidly middle-class or working-class families and have no idea how people who are really poor live. I grew up in a working-class family (my parents were immigrants) and while we weren’t middle class–we had the advantage of an immigrant work and savings ethic. The families in the article didn’t have cultural supports that would encourage them to save for college (it takes a great amount of discipline and delaying expectations to be able to save when you make $30K per year–which is not to say it can’t be done. It just isn’t common like some posters want to think.) And, as the article points out, the kids from these poor families (even though they were very bright) simply hadn’t learned how to be advocates for themselves.</p>
<p>^ Arg- how much do you really know about what this support entails? I work for a major U, frequently do not see the picture that many CC posters see. Doesn’t make my view universal. But it’s a darned bit closer than what comes across in one article or some of the popular links on these threads. </p>
<p>Why say sherpa? What load do you think these schools carry for these kids? Have you seen these functions at work? Often, it simply starts with a sounding board, someone savvier to speak with, someone who can put a hand on a shoulder and clarify. It’s not the blown up, full bore, hand holding. The kids are still expected to bear their responsibilities as individual college kids.</p>
<p>The sink or swim comes directly from one poster, who said they should be magically “able” - that if an elite college offers a grand finaid package, these kids should be expected to be elite students, from day one.</p>
<p>Read the comments the rebuttals rebut and you’ll see how they originate.</p>
<p>*A lot of people that I work with have paid off their mortgages.
- But, don’t you work in the financial arena???</p>
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Not specifically about this thread, but as a general matter. You have so much interesting to say that it’s hard to wade through references to hair band metal fans and Vanilla Ice, which are more than a little outdated.</p>