Tag: education

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor… says she ordinarily charges families “in the range of” $15,000 for guidance about the application process.
[…]
While the going national rate for such work is about $185 an hour, a counselor in Vermont and another in New York City are among those who charge some families more than $40,000. Their packages might begin when a child is in eighth grade.

Someone please tell me this isn’t real.
Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

“Shop Class surveys an economic landscape where everyone must go to college or else be viewed as suspect, stupid, and/or unemployable. The massification of higher education has also created a new vocational pitfall: I’ve got a degree; therefore, I should be doing smart, clean, fun, and well-paid work. Except for clean, these adjectives can be scarce in cubicle alley.

Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft. – review by Michael Agger – Slate Magazine. Looks like another one for the reading list.

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

A worthy bit from The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:

The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Dave Barry on college:

After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.