College Matters

Calling all English majors out there! What have you done, or what do you plan to do, with your degree? A student is considering the option and requests advice.

A high school student wrote that she’s confused about choosing classes for college. She’s very stressed out because she hasn’t figured out what courses to take for the following fall. In high school, you’ve solidified the following year’s course schedule by the end of the spring semester, so it’s no wonder the upcoming graduate is stressed. Allow me to emphasize, then, to all of my high school readers: course selection in college can sometimes involve changes up until the first week of classes. If you can avoid making changes following the first day of classes, you’re doing well. Feel free to take all or most of a summer to consider your options.

Check out the latest post, about a senior in high school stuck on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. What do you think? Should he pursue the military, game design, or should he rethink altogether?

My readers have overwhelmingly voted against parental control of major field of study, even when the parents control the finances. I’ve expanded my own perspective in response to reader information. Although I still think that financial control gives significant power and influence to the person holding the financial reins - the parents - I recognize that it is unwise parenting to dictate major regardless. I am planning to have children and plan to finance college education if these future children pursue that path. But I would never force them to pursue one degree plan or another, and I don’t think other parents should, either. My original assessment was based upon my own personal experience-I’ve historically eschewed financial dependence in order to avoid being told what to do!

However, I’m curious to what the readership response will be to another form of control: living arrangements and parameters of relationships. If a student has college financed by the parents, he or she should still get to choose his or her own major. But what about cohabitation? What if a student, like this one - a legal adult, if not a financial one - wants to move in with his or her significant other, and the parents are against such an arrangement? How to handle that? If the parents can’t dictate major, despite financial contributions, I argue that neither should they dictate living arrangements. I expect some of you to disagree…so I’m looking forward to your comments, on this blog entry and the associated advice. What do you think?

I’m currently in Houston, Texas, visiting my grandparents before I move to Maine to work with an AmeriCorps program. As many of you already know, I’m very excited. The particular program is called The Game Loft, and it’s a youth program that utilizes non-electronic gaming (from Risk to historical war games to Dungeons and Dragons and everything in between!). I’m actually a little envious; I would have been really grateful to have this kind of organized gaming community during my especially crazy teenage years - I’m telling you, most people should get a medal for simply surviving adolescence.

During this “grand finale family tour,” as I’m calling it, I’m reminded of the evolving nature of family influence. I’m independent, and have been for many years. Often broke, but not to the point of requiring financial support of family. I’m unwilling to do that, and have been since I turned 18 - which is why I used federal financial aid to get through college (a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20). I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do. And now, in my twenties, my family certainly can’t give me orders, and they know it. If any of them said so much as “Don’t go to Maine” I’d tell them exactly where to put it. I’m exaggerating, I would be nice and reasonable, but pretty direct: “I’m going to Maine. Period. Love you, please come visit, see you soon!”

However, if I relied financially upon anybody, I would definitely have to answer to them. To repeat the above used euphemism, “Period.” End of story. And this is why, at 18, if you go to college with financial support from your parents, you are essentially taking the next step in high school. It doesn’t matter that you’re “legally” an adult. Financially, you’re not - just like this student. So they have a say (rightfully so, too) about where you live, what you spend “your” money on, and yes, even your chosen course of study. That’s not a terrible thing - you probably won’t make the mistake of getting a fine arts degree with an emphasis on the deeper meaning of play-doh while under economic parental supervision.

If you’ve been completely dependent on your parents through high school, especially to such an extent that you’ve received an allowance rather than working part-time, you’re not ready to make your own decisions at 18 anyway. Want to learn to make your own decisions so that you don’t have to adhere to your parents’ directions? Get a 40-hour a week job and move out for at least a year before making the trek to college. Otherwise, they get a say. And parents, listen up: yes, you have a right to tell your kids what to do, regardless of age, if you’re financing the operation.

College has multiple purposes, not the least of which is to expose individuals to new information. This includes meeting different types of people. We tend to identify these differences by ethnicity and religion, but differences in personality, learning styles, and varying disabilities, qualify as part of this learning experience as well.

That’s the best argument I’ve heard that applies to both minority and disability scholarships. College is supposed to broaden our individual horizons. We are thus robbed of an important part of our educational experience if our campuses lack diversity. Minority scholarships arguably contribute to greater cultural understanding and breadth in college, and disability scholarships do the same.

I received an email from a college student with an autistic brother. She doesn’t want her brother to miss out on the college experience because of his mental disability. Autism is unique and still not well-understood by even the medical and educational experts; autistic individuals don’t cope well learning in a traditional special education classroom, alongside other mental disabilities such as Down’s Syndrome, but they lack the intuition necessary to function normally in a normal classroom.

I’ve always wanted to personally get to know someone with autism. I want to ask a person what it’s like and be able to understand, firsthand, the perspective of someone with this condition. So, I’m interested in this girl’s idea, for reasons that go beyond her brother – I think that if he’s academically capable, he might provide his fellow students with more diversity in their educational experience – he embodies the reasons I’m in favor of minority and disability scholarships. I’m interested in everyone else’s thoughts, though, so please comment!

A friend on twitter posed an interesting question in response to the discussion of minority scholarships. Read the original advice, to the white kid that thinks minority scholarships are racist, here. My twitter friend wonders what people like this student think of disability scholarships. That gave me food for some deep thought, and I went back to some writing I did six months ago, which is integrated into this entry.

Disability scholarships are designed with the same thought in mind as minority scholarships: they are all intended to assist some of the underprivileged yet deserving individuals in their quests for higher education. However, in the same way some admissions policies have made a mockery of these efforts by lowering the standards for ethnic minorities, the office of disability services (every campus has something of the sort) has succeeded in assisting with the dumbing-down of American campuses.

Gasp! Politically incorrect, you say? How can I be so calloused and insensitive? Where do I get off? Here’s where, people: I’m an epileptic. I have grand mal seizures if I don’t get enough sleep, don’t take my medication properly, or take any of a number of other substances, like over-the-counter decongestants, alcohol, or any kind of stimulant, legal or otherwise. When I have a seizure, I’m pretty much worthless for an entire day afterward. I can barely speak or move, and everything is really foggy.

So, as a college student, this certainly provided some difficulty not experienced by all students. For one thing, I didn’t know about the decongestant issue until I was about halfway through college, when a campus doctor finally thought it would be a good idea to explain that to me. I’ve never been a big drinker – wine was always allowed in my house growing up and as such alcohol never held any sort of magical allure – but I was the queen of caffeine, a staple for surviving all-night study sessions. And caffeine, my friends, is a stimulant – and my favorite of the caffeinated poison, espresso, is an especially potent stimulant.

Procrastination led to all-nighters; all-nighters led to caffeine; caffeine led to seizures; seizures led to absences. Most professors at my university had absence policies. So, what did I do? The smart thing, avoid procrastination, perhaps? No, of course not. A professor kindly suggested I seek accommodations from the office of disability services in order to get attendance policies waived altogether for me as a student. Wow.

In light of that, I suppose it’s amazing I graduated at all, and in particular with a “B” average. Attendance policies are indeed juvenile, but suddenly having absolutely no requirement to show up to classes was further incentive for procrastination. Truthfully, I learn better from reading and writing than from auditory instruction, anyway – but most people don’t.

My point is, I didn’t really need disability services. I simply needed to grow up and accommodate my own disability by doing a little adult planning. Instead, I received well-intentioned babying – great for students who need to learn responsibility! And now, beyond epilepsy, we have the ADHD and ADD phenomenon. Every parent who has a kid who wants to act like a kid rather than a miniature adult seems to think the “answer” to this “problem” is to drag the kid off to a psychiatrist and dope them up. So they go through school thinking they have an excuse to be idiotic, and they don’t get to have those crucial years of irresponsible kid-dom – involving, goodness, actual playing – so they get to college and don’t know what to do with themselves. They go to disability services, get everything handed to them on silver platters, and, even worse, they have this effect on the kids around them. Entitlement complexes, when fed, breed personal laziness as well as resentment from one’s peers. Resentment furthers poor performance in college.

A commenter who works in admissions on campus supports minority scholarships but doesn’t agree with providing lower standards for minority applicants. I agree, and I would be insulted if I belonged to an ethnic minority and had standards lowered for me. It would make me feel like someone thought I was inferior. And I don’t think disability services should be viewed any differently. It’s there to provide an even platform. EVEN, not greater than.

Maybe as an epileptic I deserved the disability scholarships I got. Certainly some truly physically disabled students deserve them, just as underprivileged minorities deserve special scholarships. But disability services have not worked out as intended. Thanks to pseudo-psychiatry and the American dream (of not having to take responsibility for individual actions!) these services are making a mockery of so-called “higher” education.

It’s springtime, and scholarship deadlines are in the air, which means that resentment and despair prosper as much as hope and idealism. Everyone’s a victim, and everyone thinks they’re more deserving of scholarship money than the next guy. Many students who fill out scholarship applications do so with a misplaced sense of entitlement. They forget that scholarship awards are gifts, and the giver and/or his or her chosen committee have the right to determine the characteristics of the recipient.

A student complained that the scholarship opportunities for minorities, in their abundance, constitute racism against white Americans. There aren’t any scholarships allocated for only white American students, and some white Americans express outrage at this discrepancy. This outrage is at best misguided and at worst willful ignorance.

Consider some statistics in regard to race and poverty in this country. Only 8% of whites live at or below the poverty level. Over 20% of African-Americans live in poverty, with approximately the same percentage of Hispanics. Look at the Native American community and the percentage surpasses 25%.

But, you say, since there is poverty in every ethnic group, shouldn’t scholarships evaluate candidates upon individual circumstances (along with GPA and other criteria)? Poverty, in numbers, can be easily manufactured on federal financial aid forms, especially by the educated. The truly impoverished in this country often lack the education necessary for such manipulation. Public schools in lower-income neighborhoods are underfunded and the teachers are overworked. Children grow up in fatherless homes. These children did not ask to be born into these circumstances and deserve a level playing field. Most of them are American minorities. Minority-specific scholarships offer the steps for gaining access to that playing field.

I didn’t learn the meaning of “spousal accommodation” until I was well into graduate school. For the uninitiated – spousal accommodation is the unspoken yet widely practiced policy of offering a position to both a hiring candidate for a professor position as well as his or her spouse.

At first glance, this policy seems unfair, allowing one person to ride the coattails of another person’s achievement. A student who complained to me about spousal accommodation mentioned that it’s not something that goes on in corporate America. While both observations have merit, the practice is not as black and white as it seems.

First of all, spousal accommodation in academia is not such that a person who is completely unqualified for any given position can be hired just to accommodate his or her spouse. When an accommodation is made, it’s for an individual who has the credentials necessary for a position. If, for example, a PhD in political science is offered a position as a tenure-track professor in the political science department, his or her spouse with only a B.A. will not experience such accommodation.

This makes further sense because the B.A. spouse will actually have less trouble finding a job than the PhD. As I’ve found in my personal quest for job opportunities, the further you go in graduate school, in many fields, the fewer options for employment you have. Political science PhDs don’t have a realistic chance of becoming politicians, for example, because too many people in this country are suspicious of “too much” education. “Regular” jobs such as retail aren’t going to hire a PhD, for fear that the person will be a snob or know-it-all, without having much (if any) relevant experience. A B.A. doesn’t carry such stigmas. A B.A. (or B. of whatever else) says that the person has the drive and tenacity to complete a degree, but is still trainable in any given field.

As I’ve said before, many people meet their spouses in school, and graduate school is an even likelier place for long-term romance, because students are slightly older and nearer to feeling like “settling down.” So, you have two people working on graduate degrees in the same field that happen to fall in love. Each one is likely racking up enormous student loan debt, yet they’d still like to get married and have a family. And both of their job options are limited because of the graduate degrees. So academia steps in, and almost as some sort of “thank you” to students who spend tons of money on graduate degrees, offers spousal accommodation.

Right or wrong? Neither one nor the other, in my opinion. It is certainly a choice to pursue graduate school, but most students don’t go in knowing it will in fact limit their job options, and that is the fault of academia itself. But spousal accommodation arguably does little for improving the quality of teaching at a university. It’s a conundrum.

Okay, so this blog is not really about the drama of junior high and high school, so it’s misleading to use the title of a creepy song about high school by the Police as the entry’s title…but it’s related. While everyone in college is, for the most part, of legal age, romance between professors and students remains a gray area. Some universities actually have enacted policies against such relationships entirely, while others merely disapprove on an unofficial basis. I keep thinking of the line, “Loose talk in the classroom…”

Dark humor and 80’s music aside, this is a very real issue. Most people meet their romantic partners in either the workplace or at school. Student-professor relationships begin with a combination of the two! And is that really any worse than meeting some stranger in a bar?

Well, perhaps not, if the professor does not happen to be in charge of the particular student’s grades. Frankly, if professor and student met in a coffee shop or at a seminar but have absolutely no official academic contact, there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t pursue whatever feels right, at least in my mind.

However, this isn’t usually the case. The connection often begins in the classroom, and herein lies the problem. It is nearly impossible to be completely fair when grading an individual with whom you share a personal connection– whether friend, relative, or worst of all, romantic interest. And even some sort of anomalous saint who does have that capability risks appearances to the contrary. It’s ammunition that can be used to bolster any other student’s claim of unfairness in grading.

Plus, what if the relationship ends on a sour note? Let’s face it, most do, and relationships that are “uneven” like a professor-student liaison are even more likely to end badly. So what happens then? The professor runs the risk of the student complaining to his or her parents as well as the administration, and thus the professor may risk losing his or her tenure (or opportunity to receive tenure).

This is why, when a student with a crush on her professor wrote to me, I told her that if I was advising the professor on the same situation, I would tell him to run, far, far away, as fast as he could go. My advice to her, in a nutshell, was to tread carefully. Check it out and let me know what you think.