Jeffery Hodges

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My college son is now my college graduate son, recently receiving degrees in History and Secondary Ed. (Summa cum laude—I know I shouldn’t brag, but he’s my kid) Since high school, he has known he wanted to teach and coach at that level, although we’ve talked about his going on to grad school in a while.

The reason I bring this up is that he went through school paying his own way, working and obtaining scholarships, and never once asked for any money from us. He knew we had his younger brother and sister to get through high school, and that they were going to a private prep school similar to the one he attended.

So he took care of himself, the hard way, even though he was in “the soft world” in this dichotomy.

We’ve talked about the problems in education, and he realizes that his views on high level achievement are not very popular in the educational community.

But, as Barone and others have noted, the reality of the world comes crashing through the soft bubble we try to create around our youth eventually, and many are left stunned and helpless by the shock of realizing their feelings mean nothing, that results actually do matter, and that being told you’re just not cutting it is not the end of the universe.

Indeed, having someone finally tell you some harsh truths, calmly and brutally, is sometimes as valuable an education as any number of fuzzy seminars on philosophical problems or sociological mysteries.

Respect, both from others and from within oneself, must be earned by the hard currency of diligent effort and honest assessment of results.

Perhaps, on Memorial Day, it is well to remember those whose lot was to give their all early, in their youth, in causes great, or all but forgotten. Most of our lives are not so dramatic, our battles figurative and metaphorical.

The example, however, is always there, and always valid. The inspiration of courage and dedication, even unto death, is that we must try to do our small part each day. And if we teach our children to win their little battles with humility, and be gracious when they lose, as they certainly will on occasion, then we can stand straight when the anthem is played, and sing that this still is the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

First, 4-yr university has changed in the last 30 years. When my parents went to state universities, they paid their tuition by working. Now the costs are not only deferred via loans, but also quite hidden to the student who at 18 has little concept of debt. So I think 30 years ago students of the humanities were more aware of the economic trade-offs and made their decision because they liked the feild, not because it afforded them more free-time.

2nd, the humanities have changed. Looking back, I for one, would have rather have studied finance and economics than engineering, but I could never have studied the humanities: my experiences with liberal humanity teachers & professors from high school on were so negative I just couldn’t stomach it.

3rd, Stanford GPA’s were meaningless. You can take any class an unlimited number of times and their GPA still gets calculated using the highest grade. I think Ivy League schools are similar.

Good talking to you. Where are you at? Fredricksburg?

I didn’t think it was law, but some insurance companies apparently make the distinction (though it may be by way of IRS dependency of a student & not if not). And it may have to do with choices their employers made in choosing health programs.

I think you are right about the two ways, but remember you are talking to someone who was liberal arts, as was my husband, my two older daughters & their husbands. I really believe that liberal arts can be both challenging & useful. I don’t think the world owes us a living, but I do think all of us have and will continue to contribute to the overall good.

That is, of course, another good thing about junior colleges – we offer many terminal degrees and people often graduate with jobs – jobs with higher salaries than the liberal arts people will get with 4-year degrees.

My father went to college in the dustbowl years, the son of blue collar & 1st generation parents. He took the route that seemed the most sensible – engineering. But he didn’t use his engineering degree most of his life. I’m not sure if he would have been happier but I suspect he’d have been a lot more useful to society if he’d gone the liberal arts route. (Well, that’s hard to know; bitterness is at least as much associated with liberal arts as with engineering.)

Yes, Foster, I think that is an important distinction.

I was not surprised to see a few years ago that a student had dishonestly gotten into Stanford by falsifying his background; when this was discovered, his grade average at Stanford was above that at the junior college he had previously attended. I suppose it doesn’t mean much – the kid was probably learning more, given the first class nature of Stanford’s faculty. But clearly such schools have eliminated some of the tension & I suspect competitive drive by grade inflation.

And I haven’t been all that impressed by people who point out that the average student at a good school is like the top at ours – of course, that is true; we seldom see anyone with perfect SATs (advising, I did run across a guy with 800 on math who’d flunked out of his 4-year school but that is rare, of course – & his flunking says he was not the kind of student Stanford would want.)

I thought the whole point of saying someone has a 3.5 at Stanford (emphasizing the Stanford) was that in that challenging environment, next to high level peers, the student was doing well. Of course, the student did better than ours; even those students that turn out to be great have come here to get them up to the speed at which better students were already comfortably coasting. But part of what parents think they are purchasing with that more expensive tuition is a standard much higher than the one we use.

I’ve alway been impressed with Drucker’s point that it is very harmul to judge people on potential rather than performance–and it seems to me that the error is increasingly what higher ed is all about.

regarding the students going to JC for insurance, there weren’t any gov’t regs involved. It’s just that many parents refused to pay the kids car insurance, car payment, etc. if the kid wasn’t going to school, so many kids went to the JC for the sole purpose of being enrolled and having their parents continue to subsidize their lifestyle.

With regard to hard/soft america in Education, I think alot of people are completely missing the real story.

Student bodies at universities today are more or less divided into two groups. I’d say the demarcation is between fields that are objective and those that are subjective.

The first group is composed of students that need and want a relevant job when they leave school. Most of these people are in engineering/CS, (most of the people in engineering/CS, in fact, want and need a job when they are through.) The same can be said for accounting majors. There are also a few from the sciences and from the area of finance/econ/business.

The second are the group that don’t really need jobs or just don’t want to think about it while they are in school. They are generally in the humanities, although alot of them end up in the college of business.

My experience was that people from the first group worked about 3-4X harder during their undergrad than people from the 2nd and unless they had the ability to go into sales, people from the 2nd group were left with only a few employment options, one of which was law school.

That’s a big reason Law School has the reputation of being so hard, because the students have never had to study before and they’ve never been in any competitive classes. Ask any lawyer who had a decent Bachelors in engineering how hard law school was and they’ll tell you it was challenging, but not the worst they’d seen.

I think on a school to school basis this breakdown may vary. At some schools the vast majority of business majors may fall into the first group, at others they fall into the 2nd. There are some liberal arts schools where the humanities are taken very seriously and even at larger schools there will always be a few very bright and hard-working students for who the humanities are a vocation. But by and large, this is the breakdown I saw in higher education.

It’s worth noting that most of the foreign students end up in the first group. It’s also worth noting that with the easy access to student loans, alot of kids that probably don’t belong in higher ed end up at school because it’s a nice alternative to working. All of these end up in the 2nd group.

I suppose this all ties in with the ideas that A) higher ed today is largely vocational training rather than higher ed and B) that americans today are increasingly overschooled and underworked. A good mechanic will make $50k+ a year at the age of 20 with very little debt. A humanities student will make $30k+ with $20k+ debt.

I, too, am an immigrant, decided to start my education anew after having BS in Engineering from Russia, attended my second college in NY, in the 90′s, when I was 30. Only 3 more students in my class were of my age; one dropped out in the 3rd semester after repeatedly playing a race card as an explanation for chronic unpreparedness, the rest graduated with high score and as far as I know, all work successfully in the field. Can’t say that of my younger classmates.
During college I worked full time most of the time – I had a family to support and nobody was helping me. I was in awe of my classmates: with excellent, native English, portfolios developed years in advance, plenty of money to blew on beer parties and more, having no children to raise, and always complaining there is too much work assigned.

Couple of years ago, on a lighting seminar in WI, I met a person who’s story stuck with me for some reason. She was a praised sales rep for a big lighting Co, excellent record and plenty of commissions; in her early 30′s, she said she’s very happy with her present state in life. To get there, though, she went to:
-4yr program of Marine Biology, didn’t graduate
-painted for 5 yrs and lived on what her parents could spare for her
-borrowed money to start an art gallery to sell her own and other’s work; failed
-to pay off her debt, found a job as an office assistant in this lighting Co – the rest was a natural ascent: she found herself. When I talked to her, she was planning to go for an MBA.

I wish I could explain this all to my own son so it would really register…

I’m impressed that you’re teaching Donne in jr college..I wonder how many students get him at Harvard?

And wasn’t it Plato who said no one should be permitted to study philosophy until they were at least 30?

On the other hand, alot of people from my high school continued on to that same JC just so their parents would continue to pay their car insurance.