rm | "scarce" resources, college and sexism

Well, sorta. I mean, people say that, but in my experience it's less true than people want you to think. I see grad programs taking people from all over, because most undergraduate programs in most subjects are bad, because nobody cares about undergraduate education. And who knows what they want to go to grad school in when they start?

Of course, grad school admission is a whole other thing, and is wildly different from field to field and even department to department. It's both hideously and arbitrarily competitive. I have no idea why I got in some places and not others, and there's no way to reconstruct the decision. For all anyone knows it was my star sign.

There is a huge distinction between the four schools you mentioned. I just wish that they wouldn't try to describe the schools as if they existed on a hierarchy when they all have very different missions, history, character, and students.

There's some numerical data you can use to describe the school in a ranked fashion, what scores are required to get in, what percentage of applicants it admits, what their demographics are, how many graduates go on to get a PhD, what their incomes are like, etc. The problem is that people don't know how to read a chart so they're just going to look at who's number 13 and who's number 22 out of 50. Oh, that must mean Oberlin's better than Kenyon but not as good as Brown.

Except people from Oberlin have a notoriously hard time getting along with the general population (I'm one of them... its true) while the CIA recruits heavily from Brown. I think that's a little more important than who rejects more kids.

So I understand why admissions officers are going to try to sell each college on its own merits, but these are things you can't place on a graph.

me too! :)

College is a time in your life when you have the time to make friends who have common interests & meet people. I know people who have graduated and moved to a new city... and suddenly they have no social life. They work 8 hours or more & commute at least an hour or two. And I'm still a dating service/Internet dating skeptic.

That said, it's not where I met *my* husband. Although, through an odd string of things, I wouldn't have met him if I hadn't gone to the college I did.

My wife recently said, regarding a certain teenage relative of mine who is stunningly deficient in practical-life skills (thanks to the bubble of privilege and overprotectiveness that she was raised in), that she had better get an m.r.s. degree from whatever college she goes to, because four years of college is not going to give her adequate preparation for a career.

So, umm, what small private college is this? :-/

Mm. Having talked to people involved in grad school admissions, college affects (though doesn't determine) how my department looks at applicants. This might differ from program to program, though.

It's also really not arbitrary, but I think it is a lot more subjective than undergrad admissions, because "fit" becomes extremely important. There's this thing about who in the department likes you...

it was either st.olaf or gustavus adolphus here in minnesota.

It's as if my first comment never happened.

How can we preserve one form of letting people in with diminished expectations for them, while attack another form of letting people in with diminished expectations for them?

It surely looks like a pickle.

It's only a pickle if you're dumb. People who aren't dumb know that the two examples are not congruent and the way you have phrased the question is tendentious.

One involves a group that is, speaking generally, systematically advantaged by the prevailing culture. The other involves a group that is systematically disadvantaged by the prevailing culture. To give a 'leg up' to a group that has been tripped is not strange; to give a leg up to a group that is already standing on a ladder is bizarre.

Or, put another way, the idea that 'qualifications' are the sorts of things that are meaningful measures when abstracted from individual and group history is false. It's to imagine scoring a road race without accounting for the handicaps.

Let me say one other thing. The way you have cagily tried to bait a p.c. liberal in this conversation, by steadily refusing to commit yourself to your actual position, which, when stated baldly, is neither fair nor intuitively appealing, is a transparent, lazy rhetorical trick that deserves nothing but contempt.

If you look at the discussion above, you will see someone actually advocating an end to any consideration except those based on merit - in other words, no weighing other factors in at all. I didn't see anyone immediately jumping on them - even though it would have meant no more affirmative action on race.

I may be stupid, but it seems like the women making this complaint sound an awful lot like the white people who resent affirmative action for groups other than their own. Some people claim that feminism went off the rails when it became all about allowing rich, well-educated, and privileged white women to feel like noble victims. But those people are probably dumb too.

About that 'tipping point' thing, hell, a campus that was 60% elite, awesome women would have drawn me like a moth to the flame, enough to overcome my usual distaste for private liberal arts education and the accompanying student loan debt (which I watched destroy the nobler ambitions of my generation). But then I was the only guy in my Gender and Empire class, which I loved, so take my protestations with that in mind.

Well, they didn't get flamed, but they certainly got disagreed-with. Perhaps that is a function of their tone - yours has been to advance loaded questions in the hopes of getting someone to overcommit, which is the kind of shabby gambit that draws fire. But that's as may be - I'm not the right person to ask about what other people said or didn't say, because I'm not those other people. (Relatedly - I'm not calling you dumb per se. I'm saying you're playing dumb, carefully avoiding saying what you really think, advancing fallacious questions and couching your own replies in weasel words, which is to say, conversing in bad faith.)

Regarding your second paragraph, I'm afraid the point you're making is not clear to me.

I guess I'll have to live with that.

Perhaps arbitrary isn't the right word - but 'fit' is at least as much about them as about you. It's idiosyncratic at best.

I heard it in Chicago, and er, Hello Mormons! boys return from missions, buy a ring and enroll at BYU according to friend who was there.

Well, yes, but that's a whole different culture in terms of the dating to marriage time-line.

True, but it's still rigorous (they claim) admissions in order to find a spouse, just on both genders.

Oh, absolutely.
And it can be how much you figure out about what they want to hear, too.

Apropos of sexism but not of colleges, I'm guessing you're at least passingly aware of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl (and I liked it)"?

If not, the quick summary is "I like boys really, but I wanted to try kissing a girl, but it doesn't mean anything really, and now let me make a video with girls in lingerie having a pillow fight!" The premise is potentially touching, but the presentation is nauseating.

Here's a cover of the same damn song that almost makes me cry. It's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skAMmX-D41Q

Agreed. My preferred option is the singular they, since it has a long history in English and has the great virtue of not being either confusing (like sie & hir) or starting with a z.

Wow/shudder, I thought this had faded away decades ago.

The interesting case for me isn't medicine (which from what I've read is still fairly gender balanced, with the imbalances showing up in specialties - most surgeons are men, and almost all oby/gyn specialists are women), but in law, where the percentage of women going to law school passed 50% a decade or so ago and continues to increase. Given that this is one of the high status professions, as well as one of the major stepping stones to political office, it will be fascinating to see what happens. I'm hoping the result will be more women in US politics.

The more women go to college and the fewer men do, the less relevance college education will have in our society. Even if we eliminated male favoritism, that would be the case.

I disagree, unless by "male favoritism" you mean something different than I think (possible).

What I see (speaking as the mother of two girls, one in college and one in middle school) is boys actively avoiding situations where they might compete with girls and lose. Academic fields in general (with a few exceptions, mostly engineering and the "hardest" sciences) have become areas where girls can excel if they work hard, so boys refuse to work.

The problem is masculinity; so why is the "solution" to make things harder for women?

Quite a few girls and guys have significant others back home, but I don't think I know a single person carrying out a relationship started online like that, oddly enough. Everyone is quite focused on finding someone who goes to this school and whom they can see everyday/regularly, which makes sense, I suppose.

"scarce" resources, college and sexism

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