2nd Essay- The Working Class College Experience

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I spent a lot of the summer before my freshman year of college watching Gilmore Girls. It wasn’t out of choice, because reruns of the show were filling a daytime TV slot, and I was working a 2pm -10pm shift at Staples. I could only hang out with my girlfriend in the morning hours, and unfortunately she was even less willing to watch Walker: Texas Ranger than I was to watch Gilmore.

I remember Rory’s academic asspirations in stark contrast to my own. Rory, a lowly prep high school student who doesn’t belong, had dreams to attend Harvard, but wound up having to choose between her two fallbacks- Princeton and Yale. At that point in my life, I was still looking for the college that was the closest to my house while “still kind of far away.”

I don’t recall very much about Rory’s academic life- the show kind of lost its thunder for me after she made it into school- but I do remember her bearing witness to arguments about moral relativism as early as her first visit on campus, ordering food from hotdog stands named “Dante’s Inferno,” and getting excited about a set of the Oxford-English Dictionary.

My state university, by and large a working class commuter school, doesn’t have a philosophy department. No one from off campus tries to sell food at our around here. And you can’t find an Oxford-English Dictionary for sale at the bookstore.

I’m proud to have gone to my University, and so are my parents and everyone else. I’m the first person in my family to graduate. I have Aunts and Uncles who did, but neither my Mom or Dad or their grandparents went to college. They’re excited for me about graduating, even more than I am. We talk about it all the time.

“I’m nervous,” I’ll tell me my mom. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get a job.”

“Joe,” she say, “You have your college degree. You’ll be able to get a job.”

But when I’m back on campus, everyone seems to have the same concerns that I do. I’ve met so many students who are training to be educators, or public administrators, or managers. I’ve met a fairly large amount of students who want to go to graduate school and be scholars, too. But, mostly, at my University, I’ve met a lot of teachers.

I wonder how many people graduate with Teaching Certification every year? Are there really that many teaching positions open? What about positions for public administrators? Store managers? In this economy?

My friends and I all come from the same types of families. I’d say most of those among us who aren’t geniuses wouldn’t be able to go to Universities if it weren’t for ones like my own, which stress affordability and cater to students many of whom work full time jobs. My girlfriend’s room mate, for instance, a child of a single parent, works two part time jobs over the weekend- one at night and one during the day. Another friend of mine, a coworker, is a double major but works with on campus and works 20 hours over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights off campus.

No one at my school really has time to sit in the café and talk politics or religion or philosophy or literature or art. I’m about the graduate, and I’m not really sure if any of my friends are interested. Whose fault is that, anyway?

Outside of certain circles, there’s no real strong intellectual interest here. College used to be a place where people who were interested in scholarly things went, and I’m not sure what went wrong about my particular University. I’m sure me and my peers are just as hard working and deserving of a college education as the college students of the past, so what’s different about us? Most likely, they’ll go through the course guideline, get their degree, and apply for some kind of job where they’ll never use the skills they supposedly did in college. That is, except for the ones who actually get those teaching jobs.

So who’s to blame for the overall “dumbing down” of the college experience? One time a professor of mine, an adjunct who does legal work, told me that the college experience was being ruined by democrats and liberals who insisted that a college education become something everyone can afford. In other words, college was becoming less important because the floodgates were open to all the working class- me and my peers, essentially.

I think it’s something deeper than resentment echoing from the elite. I think that maybe, a long time ago, someone decided that the people who belong in scholarly environments are those who can afford to be there. That has never been the case, but as a result, the market competitively moved to cater to more customers. Now that the task has been completed and there’s few people who aren’t going to college, college as-it-is has turned into a less than ideal place everyone needs to go to, but no one really belongs. It’s not just my University: This is the college experience that the working class has inherited.