Comments on: “eeeewwww, poor people!”

By: mudphudder

mudphudder — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:01:13 +0000

iar- first of all, we don’t have Denny’s around here either so i feel your pain. and i have to specifically pick vacation destinations where will be Denny’s.

moving on, why i disagree with your rationale is that everything you said “could” happen has already happened. go to any top-end university (more prevalent at the college level) and you’ll notice an unexpectedly large number of people who should be there. moreover, rejecting people based on a financial basis is measurable and regulate-able offense. however, when you let people in and then underhandedly dissuade them from going, it is a lot harder to quantify that because an equally possible reason for having only rich kids enroll–despite a good socioeconomic mix of accepted students–is because the tuition is high. it’s this kind of underhanded maneuvering, which cannot be measured or regulated, that is most dangerous.

finally, i think it is a completely valid possibility that students who go to NYU despite phone calls may be treated as second class citizens. i’ve seen it happen to people before who didn’t get phone calls and there’s no reason why it is not likely to happen to kids who do receive phone calls from institutions trying to convince them to go elsewhere. school is hard enough, who needs that kind of negative attention. and yes there are a lot of private outside funds but i had a very hard time finding many of the scholarships i know of now before my financial aid office told me about them or told me where to look. and believe it or not, i have been occasionally described as “industrious”.

however, mostly i am described as smelly–like right now, having just come home from the gym. time for a shower.

By: iar

iar — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:23:27 +0000

you know, mentioning denny’s to someone who lived in the south and has a strong appreciation of the place, but now is stuck in manhattan with no denny’s in sight, is just mean. MEAN, i tell you.
while i think both situations are shitty for college students, i lean towards it’s-worse-not-to-get-college-admission-because-you/your family-is-poor than to actually get in and have a financial aid office employee try to deter you from going to their college. those people don’t do their jobs too well, they’re not going to deter prospective students very successfully either.
i think it’s difficult enough for students of a lower socioeconomic status to want & to get higher education as it is, and if they are going to be screened based on their parents’ incomes to gain admission to college then they might quickly become shit-out-of-luck. in general a college education in the US costs a lot, and i think that deters enough students from applying to pricey schools, and if we have the schools discriminate against students then we will have a continuously perpetuating cycle where the educated/well-off people and their offspring get a quality education and maintain their socioeconomic status, and those who do not have the financial means remain in that situation for generations. i realize that it’s only happened at a few schools so it doesn’t have too great of an impact, but if this financial discrimination by schools were to take place on a large scale it would revert our society to a situation similar to the middle ages where only the wealthy could afford books and to be educated.
if there is discrimination at the admissions level a lot of quality but poor students might end up at community college while a student not as intelligent but from a wealthier background ends up in a university-is that kosher? the GW Bush example of wealth and lack of intelligence comes to mind-we already have enough of that happening with the ivy’s and other private schools, don’t you think?
i also have to mention that there are a lot of private outside funds that students can find through their high schools offices or even by themselves on the internets. so an industrious student could ease their loan-load. a student discriminated against, can’t do much short of telling lies about their financial situation.

By: mudphudder

mudphudder — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:34:03 +0000

I don’t know iar. I’d rather not get in at all than get in and be intimidated into not going. My suspicion is that the low-income students who ignore the phone calls and go to NYU anyway will be treated as second-class citizens when they deal with the administration, so they might as well not have gotten in. You know what I mean? It’s like getting into an expensive restaurant and getting treated like crap. Wouldn’t you rather go to Denny’s, get a big-ass Grandslam breakfast for dinner and at least have a waitress who calls you “hon”? Hells yeah you would. At least I would. And I’d get an extra side of sausage too.

By: iar

iar — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:50:01 +0000

dun dun dun. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html this is to say that there is much worse than what nyu is doing, because at least they accepted students with financial aid needs.