On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
> It will be a wonderful world when college is no longer
> a pre-requisite for a decent human life. It really burns me up when I see
> one of these "ghetto genius goes to college" movies and notice that the
> secondary plot is invariably "if you don't make it into college, you
> deserve to live like a cockroach."
>
> Joanna
>
Don't get me started on this glorification of college. Clinton really pissed me off about this: "Everybody should go to college, and they can live the American dream." The BLS data is obvious here: the highest job growth numbers are in the poverty wage, no college degree required jobs like janitors, childcare workers, and fast food workers. If everybody got college degrees, we'd just have--lots of poor people with shit jobs who have college degrees! I know it might be strange for a college prof to emphasize this, but this whole "we can solve the problem of poverty by expanding educational opportunities for the poor" is complete bullshit. Poverty is an inevitable, structural residue of our supposedly "high-tech" economy.
Miles