Competitive Behaviors And Practices, By Cathy Davidson, And Rent Seeking And The Making Of An Unequal Society Essay

Deresiewicz believes that “The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers.”(1) In his introduction, Deresiewicz compares the ideologies of colleges from the 1920s to today’s thoughts. He concluded that “College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore.”(1) He also believes that there is only one value of education now and that is commercial. The other values are tolerated only when they pertain to commercial value. With the new beliefs in neoliberalism, Deresiewicz determines that “The world is not going to change, so we don’t need young people to imagine how it might.”(3) This leads to education just being about information rather than free thinking. He then goes into discussing how there are others who have come to the realization that not everyone can have high paying jobs as well. Deresiewicz concludes that students only care about the skills needed to start their career not obtaining general knowledge. Colleges teach their students to be leaders for their own benefit not the benefit of others. The neoliberal society, Deresiewicz believes, has begun to give students “a sense of helplessness”(5) so they have no

Modern Americans always appeal for freedom, as it is stated in the national pledge that the U.S. is “one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. Many civilians are chasing freedom for freedom, yet most of them need constraints and guides. In “Rent Seeking and the Marking of an Unequal Society”, Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the inequality created by monopolistic businessmen and suggests that American government need to regulate the economy and trading system. He defines some of those monopolists as rent-seekers who do not create new profits into the society, but take advantage over others to acquire wealth. Tim Wu, the author of “Father and Son”, talks about the monopolies within information world – the competition between Apple and Google. Apple first “opened” personal computing to individuals under the inspiration of Steve Woznaik, but turned into an exclusive company when Steve Jobs introduced “closed” Macintosh. Then Jobs consolidated this enclosure through iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Google, as the “son” who focuses on Web directing, keeps the openness of Internet information by building a “searching” web system. However, Google does not open its searching engine program to the public. Apple and Google are creators and rent-seekers of information world at the same time, because they do not really produce entirely new technology. Instead, they build their companies on the premise of the previous innovations and improve these innovations by adding

“It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention.

Charles Murray’s essay proposes that American colleges are being flooded with individuals who are either unprepared for higher education or who are simply forced into attending college and can’t succeed because of the lack of certain innate abilities. Murray’s essay goes on to take issue with the idea that the pursuit of a traditional college education is somehow strategically creating a separation of the American class system. While Murray makes many salient points with regards to America’s obsession with college education as a standard into a class of the intellectual elite, the essay fails to take into consideration the various motivators that can lead to student success, despite

In the 1997 article, “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals” by David Labaree, Labaree describes three goals that have been at the core of educational conflicts over the years. The first goal mentioned is democratic equality, which is meant to create good citizens and enable educational access to all. The second goal is social efficiency, which creates workers and is viewed by taxpayers and employers as a goal to prepare students for market roles. Lastly is the third goal of social mobility, where individual success for attractive market roles is the main purpose. This primary goal of education has been ever fluctuating. The argument of this essay is that social mobility has now triumphed over democratic equality and social efficiency as the primary goal of education due to parents. This view of social mobility by parents is negative to due its numerous consequences, significantly the growing disparity between the wealthy and the underprivileged, and additionally, the health of children, their behavior, and the degree to which they learn educational material are all affected.

Recently there has been a lot of debate about the importance of college education. Students are asking if it’s worth the debt to attend a four year university or community college. Some are thinking what are the benefits of a degree is in the workforce. With college tuition increasing and state fundings lowering, low income students are struggling to attain a higher education. College institutions should have a role to provide students higher education and equal opportunity to students to increase social mobility yet intergenerational reproduction of privilege has produced inequality in education.

Students when given the opportunity to expand in something that interests them gain a confidence in learning that focuses more on internal aspects rather than on an education that will set a standard on what kind of individual they should be. For instance, Davidson in examination of Inez Davidson’s classroom found that "kids want to learn...as long as there is a payoff, not in what is won or achieved in statistical terms, but what is won and achieved inside, in the sense of self-confidence and competence" (Davidson 67). Students are not as shallow as education deems them to be. When given the opportunity to prove one’s worth it is more than high grades that are gained, it is having a place in the world through the betterment of “the Self” which betters the planet. Despite this, students are still being handed specific knowledge, and predetermined paths that are said to lead students to “success.” In truth, being handed opportunities only lead to a lack of motivation, since individuals will not want have the drive to earn for one’s self and to improve on all their overlooked skills and assets. Karen Ho refers to this as she quotes the undergraduate, Devon Peterson, on how “banking firms provide [undergraduates] with a way to maintain [their] elite status in society by providing avenues to wealth and power that other professions do not” (Ho 179). The recruitment process reflects how institutions, especially ones

On the first day of class, the professor showed a graph to illustrate how much wealth has deviated to the right most part of the curve. A question was then raised: what does it take to be in the top ten percent? Most students rushed to get their answers through, but none of them ever thought about their chances of being on the left side of the graph, a graph that depicts inequality of wealth in America. In “Who Got Rich Off The Student Debt Crisis”, James B. Steele and Lance Williams showed how the elites, like former Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord, used money and lobbying to bring the government and school officials in their favor as they siphoned educational funds and retired like kings, and how it affected millions of lives of small people like Jessie Suren.

The article I found in the LRC this week is “Lost in the Meritocracy” by Walter Kirn. This article was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2005. In this piece, Kirn details his experiences as a minority from a lower socioeconomic background attending an Ivy League institution (Princeton). Kirn distills through personal anecdote how the knowledge and skills of a meritocracy mindset led to his achievement. Perhaps his most profound evaluation of the higher education ‘class’ system he has found himself in is as follows:

America’s education system has been in a state of distress for the past decade, but garnished headlines recently as the student loan debt crisis reached over a trillion dollars. In conjunction with that, tuition is no longer the only obstacle a student faces when considering their future. As generations come and go, universities have slowly, but surely, been angling their education in a way to favor profit over knowledge. Because of the new direction higher education models are taking, Magdalena Kay questions her readers, “is there a problem with students, with teachers, with administrators, or maybe

It’s hard to think that at one point in a America college was but only a myth for the working class. It wasn’t needed. After high it was either the army or you get a job. But this AMerica is a very different one. Women can work, the draft is no longer and college is considered a necessity for survival. But with that said, controversy surrounds it. As the price of college increase and the “need” for it does the same people find more ways and reasons to avoid it. In the article, “Even for Cashiers College Pays Off” from The New York Times, it displays the media’s backlash on the ideology of college. Leonhardt writes, “ Television, newspapers, and blogs are filled with the case that

In his book Why Teach?, Mark Edmundson constructs an argument about the paradoxical consumer culture surrounding education. The Virginian professor takes a stance on the problems that he has both experienced in his own classroom and observed on campuses, and he approaches each problem in turn, making significant claims which are assigned appropriate blames. His essay, “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment,” originally published in 1997, is broken into six sections and begins with his experience at his own university before branching out to all those across the country. Following this is a deduction of student culture as well as professors. He gives hope to the idea of the acceptance and praising of “genius” (as opposed to the alienation students endorse so well) towards the end of his essay, narrowing his argument down to a more specific change that could possibly cause a domino effect from individual students to universities across America. The scale of the situation is much too large to be easily fixed, and it is clear that Edmundson’s purpose in writing this essay is to inform those who are engulfed in the academic world. More specifically, it seems, he targets professors and higher-level students, and even possibly their parents. By singling out these people and making the problem of consumer culture in universities known to those who care exponentially about educating the youth, it is much more likely that Edmundson’s argument will trickle down to said youth in the process

While for-profit institutions of “higher education” continue to close due to falling profits, pressure from accreditors and federal regulators, and the loss of income through federal student financial aid limitations, many observers and commentators are attentive to the consequences for those students that fall prey to these schools. Few investigate or understand those that are or were employed at such institutions. Just as the students of these institutions were deceived, as an employee of a for-profit school, I was also led astray by such machinations. This is not to say that all for-profit institutions are inherently evil, though many would not exist without preying upon student populations of undereducated adult learners of color from a low socioeconomic background. Although I am not proud of my experience of working for such a school, the experience greatly contributed towards transforming my philosophy on power, race, and class in education.

In Pedigree, Lauren A. Rivera outlines the manner by which the elite are able to reproduce their resources and monopolize access to the most prestigious and highest paying jobs in the United States. Rivera’s main argument is that methods by which employers of elite firms characterize credentials and evaluate qualification for top jobs provides more opportunities for candidates who come from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds, while at the same time limiting opportunities for less privileged applicants. She goes on to highlight how every stage of the evaluative process, from initial submission of résumés for evaluation to final selections made by committees, is systematically correlated with parental income and education. This exclusion of talented, qualified applicants from less-advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds creates a cap for students in terms of the prestige of jobs and income levels that they can attain. In the chapter summaries below, I will outline Rivera’s arguments regarding elite reproduction—and the methodology by which this process occurs at each phase of the hiring process.

This article highlights the results of a case study conducted at The College of William and Mary. The study seeks to pin the rising cost of living at college to the rising cost of tuition. That theory is not helpful to my stance, however their stance introduces the concept of “The Collegiate Arms Race” regarding Universities race to have the best living amenities as a way to recruit the best students.