http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3506179Oh my.
Another one of those things primitives don't like.
Surely the list of things primitives don't like is 1,349 miles long, in size 4 font.
eyepaddle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 02:37 PM
Original message
Who else hates private colleges?
I do truly and deeply loathe private colleges and universities, and I was wondering how much company I had in that view.
Now, I'll get the obligatory bigot's defense out of the way and state that I have many friends who are the product of this private school or that, (one that I am even engaged to!) but my inner marxist still seethes quietly at their mention.
A little bit of background: when I was an undergrad, I attended a state U in a small town which also had a private college. I drove taxi as a part time job, and that was where I met large numbers of St. Mary's students for the first time. Two years of listening to their small talk kinda led me to outright detest them. The impression I got from that experience was that as a rule private college students spend a fair amount of time discussing how glad they are that they don't have to attend a (God forbid!) State school, because: all state school students were unwashed semi-literate rubes, and they were wasting their tuition dollars because the school was so obviously shitty even though the tuition was only 10% what they were paying it wasn't good for anything.
The unspoken, (actually it was kind of spoken) assumption was that since I had such a pitiful menial job as cab driving, I clearly wasn't college material, so I wouldn't identify with the state school, and would probably just be pleased that my social betters would deign to grace me with their presence and occasional conversation--because lord knows, they didn't tip for shit.
Now, in the 15 or so years since I received my geology degree, I've been around most of the world and have crossed paths with dozens or hundreds of geologists who have attended schools from Florida to Washington, and I have never encountered anybody who brought up topics about which I was wholly unaware. In other words, I have yet to have a "whoa, wait a minute, what?" moment because my professors just didn't know enough to mention things.
Zigzagging back to a point I was discussing earlier, it is the implied classism which really irks me deep down. Yeah, for the record I grew up in a trailer park, so I probably have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that too.
Also, I work in higher ed. and I am well aware of how nebulous and often bogus college ranking are, as there are few agreed upon universal metrics, and always something about reputation, which I view as being akin to style-points at a sporting contest--in other words the judge can award themjust because they feel like it. I'm going to go even a bit further and make the blunt assertion that even most of the job placement advantages really boil down to family connections more than educational credentials. Students who graduate from Dartmouth have more than likely got more powerful parents than students who go to NDSU, and were destined to get better jobs regardless of how they did in college.
I dunno.
franksolich of course is a graduate of the University of Nebraska, a public institution. But franksolich also attended Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, private institutions (but only for a year at both places, with no honest intentions of graduating from either).
Despite that Hastings College was full of rich white kids from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey who couldn't make it into "prestige" (quotation marks intentional) colleges back east, I never found much snobbery and elitism at either private institution.
But maybe that was just me.
The current Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate from Nebraska, an earlier failed congressional candidate, graduated from Yale, and taught at Yale. He was offered a cushy faculty position at Yale last year, but turned it down, in favor of teaching at Hastings College here in Nebraska where, according to financial reports required of all candidates for public offices, he earns a salary of.....$30,000 per year.
The Center for the Study of the Great Plains is of course the crown jewel of Yale--there's more Nebraska history in New Haven, Connecticut, than there is in all of Nebraska--and that is this candidate's background and degrees.
I think the oar-in-the-eye primitive is practicing reverse snobbery and elitism.
Anyway. It's a big bonfire, so only the primitives of prominence:
Midlodemocrat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 02:39 PM
Response to Original message
1. I don't. I taught at both and didn't see any meaningful difference in the kids. My kids will go to public schools here in VA because there are some amazing ones and they're already paid for, but if they wanted to go to a private college, I would be okay with that as well.
Cleita Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 02:41 PM
Response to Original message
2. I believe there should be a choice.
However, I don't think the private colleges should get any taxpayers' money to function. They also should meets common standards for accreditation. I think this would eliminate wacko colleges like Bob Jones University.
They do. Hastings College has to meet the same standards for accreditation as does the University of Nebraska. Nationally, Bob Jones University as to meet the same standards for accreditation as does Harvard College.
mike_c Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 03:04 PM
Response to Original message
22. like some others answering in this thread I've taught at both....
I must say that one of the reasons I left a professorship at a private college was because the local state university nearby did as good a job or better in my discipline at a fraction of the cost. I was hard pressed to understand what extra value students at the private college received for their considerably greater cost.
Yup, I've got the same inner Marxist.
The mike_c primitive needs a couch session with a psychiatrist.
The mike_c primitive still has the same inner Kansas boy in him, even though he hatefully denies it.
TahitiNut Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 03:06 PM
Response to Original message
24. I've been schooled at municipal, federal, private, and state educational institutions.
All three. Further, I taught at a private/parochial high school. So, I think I have a happily diverse educational background ... more than most, for sure. It's not the teaching staff or (except trivially) the administration ... it's the character of the "children" as indoctrinated by their parents ... and the alumni. People pay for the "snob value" of the school, whether grade school or college. To SOME degree, that "snob value" is returned by the career networking ... Harvard grads HIRE Harvard grads. The "prestige" is made manifest in the Good Ol' Boy fashion ... a fraternal rather than meritocratic upward mobility in the economic system. Thus, the "prestige" schools are, in effect, Trade Schools.
Let's face it. In a country that would have George W. Bush as President, we're not even close to matching economic rewards to competence and skill. Why the hell should the educational system be any different? After all, why produce something that's not used?
Lydia Leftcoast Donating Member (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-23-08 10:22 PM
Response to Original message
62. I've attended and taught at both
I started at the University of Minnesota. It was inexpensive (in those days, only 100 times the minimum wage per term) and offered a wide variety of courses and a diverse and exciting campus. However, it was also bureaucratic and impersonal in the extreme. My history class had 450 students, and Psychology 101 was taught in Northrup Auditorium. Beginning geology was taught on closed-circuit TV with a TA in the room eating his lunch. As a commuter, I had no campus "home," and when I stayed in Comstock Hall with a friend, I found rooms drabber than the average nursing home and food that was of low quality and poorly cooked.
I transferred to the nearest private college, which is Lutheran but accepts students who are of other religions or no religion. No snobbery there. Many of my classmates were the first in their families to enter college. It was the end of the civil rights era, and the college made a deliberate effort to recruit African-Americans. They were accessible to the disabled long before it was required by law. By the time I left, they were recruiting Native Americans from their neighborhood, which at the time was one of the largest concentrations of urban Native Americans in the country. Later, as the ethnic composition of the Twin Cities changed, they developed programs for Hmong and Somali students. For decades, they have conducted a program in which their own students take classes in basic subjects with prisoners in state prisons. During the 1980s, the faculty voted down an ROTC program, despite the pleas of the president, who was an ex-Marine. In other words, it is a college with a conscience.
It was also an extremely supportive and egalitarian community. It was only later when I went back to teach that I realized how unusual it was. Faculty and support staff actually ate lunch together and socialized together. In the most telling incident, I was once taking part in an informal meeting in a colleague's office, when one of the attendees happened to look out the window and say, "They've got Stanley shoveling snow." "That new manager probably doesn't know that Stanley has a heart condition." Immediately, the man whose office it was picked up the phone and called the maintenance manager to tell him that Stanley had a heart condition and that being retarded, he wouldn't realize that he should refuse to shovel snow.
It was impressive to see faculty members a) knowing that the retarded janitor had a heart condition and b) caring enough to do something about it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that private colleges are niche markets. My alma mater concentrates on non-traditional students and is strong in the sciences and music. For a science student, one of the advantages of going to a private college is that you get to do things in terms of assisting professors that only graduate students are allowed to do at state universities.
Was my private college as academically rigorous as a state school? It depends on which state school you're talking about. My alma mater was not full of high-powered students killing each other for A's, but it offered a lot to students who showed initiative, since all the faculty in every department knew all their majors.
I then went on to a language program at Cornell, which has some private colleges and some state colleges. It's a unique hybrid in that way. I was lucky enough to be in a small program and to be accepted for one of the small, special-purpose living units, but for the typical student, it was one year in a barn of a dorm and then out onto the mercy of Ithaca's greedhead landlords.
The only place I attended or taught at that fit eyepaddle's stereotype was Yale. The snobbery against the students who attended Southern Connectict State U. was ugly. However, even here, there were some wonderful students doing amazing things and finding other wonderful students to do them with. At most colleges, faculty direct all the drama productions and musical groups. At Yale, there were literally dozens of dramatic and musical productions of high quality, all put together by undergraduates. Sure, there are the dumb rich kids in the Ivies, the so-called "legacies," such as a certain illegal occupant of the White House, but here are couple of real-life examples of real stars: a double major in math and Russian who is considered the best piano accompanist on campus, or one a double major in philosophy and music who makes the Olympic team or a theater major who takes graduate-level Japanese courses as an undergraduate, and ends up decades later as producer of a cable TV series that you've all heard of. You get a bunch of students like that together, and you end up with an incredibly stimulating atmosphere.
Associating with students like that was an education in itself. After Yale, I had real trouble with students whose only interests were whatever was current in the pop culture at that time. I taught at both public and private schools. There was little difference in the students, except that the students in the state schools acted as if they felt anonymous. They acted as if they expected me not to remember them, and they cheated more than the students in private colleges.
In general, I guess, state schools are department stores and private colleges are boutiques that serve niche markets. In the Twin Cities, for example, St. Catherine's has reinvented itself from being a traditional Catholic "girls' finishing school" to concentrating on non-traditional women students, especially the older ones. Reed College, in Portland, serves bright, intense people who look as if they just came from Woodstock 1969.
Private colleges that can't find a niche die, and many have over the years. I checked the Wikipedia section on defunct colleges and universities and found that only Wyoming has had no failed colleges. All other states have at least one failed college, and many have several. I'm inferring that you were in Winona, so you probably know that the College of St. Thereas went under in the late 1980s.
I don't think my fellow alum's going to appreciate the disparaging comment about students at Yale.
Anyway, that's all the primitives of prominence at this bonfire.
