Andrew Simmons in The Atlantic on “The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key to Social Mobility”

Here is the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/the-danger-of-telling-poor-kids-that-college-is-the-key-to-social-mobility/283120/

This is my comment, which explains my view on the essay.  (For some reason The Atlantic rejected this comment for a couple of days, before posting it.)  I think the article itself is good and worth reading.

“The thought behind this essay is so well-meaning that I am loathe to write that there is a much uglier reason to warn poor kids, and all kids for that matter, about the realities of college. I learned those realities from many years of teaching in both an “elite” college and a regional state school. As early as 1980, David Riesman sounded the alarm when he wrote,

“…advantage can…be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..Like any other interest group, the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends…”

(From “On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”)

That was 1980. There has been plenty of time since then for most of the system to have been taken over by marketing and busines ideas which can be used in unscrupulous ways on a (by definition) uneducated “consumer” class – a class once quaintly called “students”.

The effects of this change, from student to consumer, has metatisized through the whole system. Examples of the how this cancer hurts students abound.

Here is just one way that poor students are especially hurt by this lack of integrity in the system.

It is not so unusual for unqualified candidates to get a PhD when their advisor has a “national need” grant to produce PhD’s. Many of these PhD’s go on to teach at regional colleges, where their students suffer from those professors lack of abiity and appropriate education. You can read about what can happen on my post “Professor Alfred Doesn’t Know What is Wrong with the Homework” on my blog inside-higher-ed.com; and you can read about just how unqualified some of these phd’s can be on the post “No Jobs for Ph.D’s? Depends on what you mean by Ph.D.”  (That post, by the way, was based on a post by Jordan Weissmann of this magaizine.)”