College, Getting a Job, and the American Dream in the 21st Century (This is Blog 10)

When I was in high school, I fell in love with Plato.

In retrospect it was probably because many of the other students in my intro to Philosophy class didn't like him, and I used to have this obsession with trying to "be different," but in my defense I've always been interested in politics and philosophy. And though I'm not politically savvy now and was even less so then, it was really no mystery to the eighteen year old me that we live in a muddled mess, and I found Plato's mystic alternative to be fascinating, to say the least.

I didn't care at all about school before my senior year of high school, and initially rejected my parents wishes for me to go away to a university. But my father, a truck driver, and my mother, who works in special needs, and my growing fascination with Plato ultimately convinced me that college was the right thing to do. So I went.

Though I was leaving behind a year-long high school relationship, a rock band, and all of my friends, college seemed like a pretty good place. There'd be people reading Shakespeare under the trees, or arguing about relativism at the lunch table. I'd be part of a new, unique "voice of the future," representing the first generation of working class people going to college, as my alma mater's president liked to say.

Unfortunately, when I finally moved in freshman year, I discovered that there wasn't a whole lot of that going on. Though there was plenty of people around, most couldn't be bothered to talk about deep questions. I did wind up joining a few politically based groups, but attendance was low. It seemed like everyone on campus was busy actually working between their classes. Where they doing? What else could be more important that scholastics?

A couple years in, and I'd resigned myself to the fact that that's just how college is. The humanities, I told myself, aren't important as they once were. It was evident by all of my peers, who showed little interest in academics, and where preparing to teach middle school or manage business.

I stayed firm with the scholastics, though. I gave all my projects 100 percent, and tried to learn about new things whenever I could. I borrowed books from the dusty old library, and made it a point to connect through the mist with the few dim lights of the other students like myself.

I told myself that people where the problem. People don't care! I thought. But I do. That's what makes me different. What makes me special.

Still, I was frustrated. I noticed other professors seemed frustrated, too, about the direction the administration was taking. I, who originally considered majoring in philosophy, and several of my professors where at a loss for words we when learned that the school's administration would be cutting the department. How can you have a university without a philosophy department? I remembered what my University's president had said about us being the "future" of college.

"Look around," he said once, at a special staff gathering (I worked as a Resident Assistant I the dorms) "What you see here is the future. In ten or twenty years, almost every university in the state is going to be like us."

Me and my peers, he reminded us, where some of the first in our families to go to college.

I couldn't be so optimistic, though. Something about the lack of interest in making college anything more than a degree factory bothered me. Then, one day, I met the alternative.

Because the administration was do determined at branching out and offering more courses than ever, I wound up having a lot of adjuncts and un-tenured professors, even in my 3000 and 4000 level classes.

One professor, and adjunct who also did legal work, told me and a few classmates after class that most of the students at my school "didn't belong to be in college."

"We just let everyone in, and as a result college has been dumbed down." he said.

I remember asking him if he was trying to tell me that I shouldn't be in college, but he denied that.

"You should be somewhere else, Joe." he said. "Why don't you apply at Rutgers, or somewhere out of state? Go Ivy league."

But he was wrong. I tried to explain to him that though my parents weren't poor, they could afford to pay the bill for my school, but any University that would've been a significant step up as a place of scholarship would be much more expensive. He never seemed to hear that, but before the course of the semester was over he made it a point to reiterate the same message to me, over and over again.

"You belong somewhere else."

Me and my peers are the first to go to college in our families. I don't know if we'll get jobs when we leave here. It just seems like there's so many of us. How could we possibly all be teachers next year? I've been lucky, because I never viewed my education as something strictly and have had a number of wonderful professors who've pointed me in various direction for my graduate studies.

But my university president is right. Around the nation, places like this are the first of their kind. Children of the world's remaining working class families can train for white-collar jobs, and join a class of living that's reserved for attorneys and accountants and other people who've snaked their way through letting the system work for them. But my adjunct professor is also right. Somehow, in making school and university something that everyone can do, the whole thing has changed. The process has "dumbed" down in a weird way, and now college is the new high school, grad school is the new college, etc. This is something everyone knows.

Who's fault is it that some people get to go to universities, and other people get degree factories called Universities? Is it the University, for having what would traditionally be considered low standards? Or is it the people in the beginning, who decided that monetary wealth should be the decided factor on who gets to go to college and who gets to work?