by kleinbl00

I don't read the New Yorker. I find it tedious and overbearing. I was led to this by a bit in The Week:

Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than 1,300 students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petition asking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.

Okay, that's dumb. But Oberlin is dumb; they did that shit during the Vietnam War so who are you to say that Tamir Rice is less of a big deal? Going through the list of Oberlin alumni I see a long line of people I hate, and a couple who are occasionally brilliant. And the article has no shortage of entitled, spoiled children whingeing about tedious shit. Sticker price on an Oberlin education is, after all, $64k a year.

But $64k a year.

If I were 20 years old and racking up even ten percent of that debt as student loans, I'd feel pretty goddamn entitled, too... particularly when a degree from Oberlin is going to be only marginally effective at earning me a 2-year unpaid internship at Buzzfeed. It's entirely possible that for folks like Cyros Eosphoros, his short tenure at Oberlin will be the first and last time anyone accords him with any power whatsoever:

Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder. (He’d lately been on suicide watch.) He has cut off contact with his mother, and he supports himself with jobs at the library and the development office. He said, “I’m kind of about as much of a diversity checklist as you can get while still technically being a white man.”

And I wonder if perhaps that isn't at least part of the issue: we've created a system where students are clients, and they're paying for an extravagant 4-year vacation that will do precious little, comparatively speaking, to augment their autonomy, earning potential or place in society. They are, in many ways, the benefactors of Yuppie guilt, the vein tapped by the 'boomers to mea culpa for the fact that they're NOT retiring thankyouverymuch because they'd barely recovered from the crash of '99 by the time the crash of '08 wiped them out again so yeah, they'll chip in towards little Megan's college tuition because they can but as soon as she's out of college she's on her own.

This is an article about spoiled children and their effects on college diversity. I don't think, however, that the children should be blamed for their spoilage.

This is how Donald Trump happens, only in reverse.