3 Responses to “College students: Empathy-free?”

1. Sean M. Donahue Says:
   June 11th, 2010 at 7:26 pm

   Dear All,

   You are charing students well over 100K for an undergraduate education and paying faculty, administrator and big 10 coaches 80K, 90K, well over 100K and even over 1million per year. How do you expect the cost of all this lavish consumption to be paid for. You are funding this consumption on the backs of student loans. You are knowingly putting them in a debt ruined economic situation before they even start their first day of work. You are taking food from their mouths and the mouths of their future children. You are telling them that they will need to be responsible and not have children of their own because the money they make will have to go towards the student loans that funded your pre-speakers event dinner, that they weren’t invited to and the post speaker’s cocktail party that they also weren’t invited to and then they are told to respect you and really–really pay homage to you and appreciate how fortunate they are for you to share you knowledge with them because we all know how *** **** earth shattering you scholarly insights are.

   Given the price that you are charging them for their educations, why would you ever expect anything other than a coldhearted attitude of; What’s in it for me? Those of you in academia want everyone else in society to be caring for others, so why aren’t you following your own advice. The way in which employees of higher educational institutions can care for society is to accept pay caps at 30,000 per year and no expense account. Live a lower working class lifestyle and stop spending money on anything that can be deemed a luxury. Make sure that all graduates have a fat wallet. If you don’t do that but you continue to charge well over 100K for an undergraduate degree, then you should expect to be called upon to provide room service in the dorms and Burger King like approach to curriculum, scheduling, grading and anything else the 100K borrowers should happen to decide you will be doing for them that particular semester.

   Remember, it is you university administrators and faculty who have adopted the attitudes of the rich and a sense of elitism and entitlement over the common public. All the students are doing is shoving that hard nosed attitude right back in your faces.

   Think about it. You are telling people to charge 100K and then give the money to you. Then you tell them that they should accept low paying jobs and be grateful for the opportunity to work their way up from the bottom. For the ones that you like, you tell them to become professors and assure them that the generation that follows them can charge 150K and then hand it over to them (which is nothing more than a giant ponzi scheme that is being perpetuated by universities and colleges). Then to meet the requirements of hypocrisy mandated in the academic world, you tell the public that they should be grateful to work for lower wages because life isn’t about money and the purpose of education is to make the world a better place, not a wealthier place. Then when you are told by the government that student loans are beginning to trip over into default or are being forgiven at a rate that is so high that it leaves little money left over to fund additional student loans, you can’t understand why there isn’t any money.

   Then you make public statements intended to put pressure on people with student loans to pay back more money at a faster rate, but you still expect them to do so without becoming fixated on cost reward relationships and to not be coldhearted about it because doing so would be greedy and you didn’t teach them to practice greed in the classroom. You taught them to be compassionate and compassionate means that you should always be kind and receptive to the insights of scholars, you should never tell you congressman to cut funding for academia and no truly kind and compassionate person would ever dare complain about living a lower quality of life than they would have had to live if they never went to college. They are then expected to surrender all their earning to the student loan industry, which in turn continues to extend revolving credit to universities, continues to raise the credit limit for universities from generation to generation and continues to send the bill only to the graduates and always protects the academic institutions from ever having to bare even the slightest bit of the economic risk associated with getting a degree at their institution.

   You really can’t figure out why they don’t give a **** about your opinions or the opinions of others. You think it’s the fault of the media. If the business news didn’t report all that reality about money, then they wouldn’t think in those terms and they would just kindle accept poverty, like the North Koreans do. If they popular media and local media didn’t report all that truth about how horrific and how violent the horrific and violent crimes are, then the students wouldn’t be so meant to each other and they wouldn’t be so viscous towards the opinions of professors and administrators and even the support staff or the guy at the university gate. It has absolutely nothing to do with the widening wealth gap in America and the developed world. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you academicians are living increasingly lavish lives that were unheard of just a mere 5 or 6 decades ago. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are putting them so far in the hole even before they graduate that they can never hope to climb out and will have to consider not having children just to pay off the bill for useless liberal arts distribution requirements that you make mandatory just so you can justify you jobs and paychecks. No, its MTV, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, video games and simulated gun fights on County Music Television. But it’s not their conscious awareness of the cost of education and risk of poverty that you hold over their heads to entice them to borrow money and give it to you that has them so ****** off. No, its those *** **** news reporters and entertainment people. Their the ones who did it. It couldn’t possibly be the universities and their administrations, and certainly not the faculty because their just the greatest!

   SIncerely,
   Sean M. Donahue

2. Sean M. Donahue Says:
   June 11th, 2010 at 7:28 pm

   “…..their …” should be “……they’re…”

   I should charge my educators every time I make this mistake.

3. humbug Says:
   July 21st, 2010 at 4:55 pm

   Sean, students have options. Lots of students graduate, declare bankruptcy so they don’t have to pay the student loans, and go on with their lives. Others have children no matter how much they are in debt. Even more students make sure that they go to accredited colleges that they can afford. Many go to an affordable state college for 2 years then transfer to the one that charges 100K/year.

   So unless you are forced to go to an overpriced Ivy League school, check out your other options. Many times, you can get a degree from a more affordable college that is just as good as the Ivy League one.

   One thing you forgot is that corporations are in on this ‘scam’. More and more businesses now require a B.A. just to work in the mailroom. And a Masters degree to be a supervisor or office manager. So a college degree is no longer optional for most people.

   I have a bigger problem with students taking 6+ years for a 4-year degree. This is because elementary and secondary schools have been failing to teach students the basics for over 10 years. Maybe if high school diplomas proved that students really were able to read and do math at a 12th grade level, this ‘scam’ could be stopped. Until then, I do not see any way to get colleges to reduce their tuitions.

Leave a Reply