Yesterday's Op-Ed just made it to the top of the Times' Most E-mailed List. This doesn't make it a better article, but it means it's striking a chord with lots of people, which is awesome to me. I have also gotten surprisingly overwhelmingly positive feedback via email and blog comments (One American Prospect blogger called it "brilliant").
One correspondent described the piece to me as dealing with the "economics of the overeducated," a phrase that sounds a little derisive out of context, but she's right. The school-to-work and labor market systems that we have now, they're not just bad for poor people. They're bad for middle-class people, and even some rich people, and society as a whole.
The second-most-emailed Times story this week is a great counterpoint to mine. It's about the trend of high school dropouts going to college, especially for-profit colleges, which accept them and their federal aid dollars in large numbers without regard for their low chances of success, in the ultimate in social promotion.
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2 comments:
far from brilliant. you neglect the nuances of the unpaid internship question, which have much more to do with race, class and access to resources than you state. unpaid internships are hardly a question for students who have to pay their own way and tuition; those who even consider them tend to be those who assume, as you do, that parents (or grandparents, in your case) will float the rent. in your hyperbolic generalizations, you fail to provide enough rigorous evidence for your hypothesis.
There's room for a lot of nuance in this discussion. I agree with you that race/class/access effects of the unpaid internship are the most serious ones. That's why I talk about "opportunity costs" for students who must borrow and about their anti-meritocratic effects.
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