quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

yeah COLLEGE BOY

btw when it came time for my dad to graduate from his east coast prep school he was called into the office of the school college counselor, asked to give his top 2-3 school choices and fill out those applications, and say where his dad and grandfathers had gone to school. the counselor would do this with all the boys in the school, and then call up the deans of admission at harvard, yale, pton, cornell, etc., and say "well weve got 6 boys here who would like to go to harvard" and theyd bargain a little bit and then everyone would get notified.

see, the thing with Oberlin is that it is very populated by kids from the midwest who were the best brightest and weirdest....a handful of richies from the coasts...

and, most significantly, a huge population of kids whose parents are or were professors. that statistic, to me, was an indicator that the school had something going for it. think it also convinced my mom, tho i will say that when she saw how happy i was at oberlin, she started repping the school to people all over.

i almost went to antioch! i think it was a little too bad-ass for me

I think making fun of Antioch for wtf political correctness made Brown students feel better.

i have a friend who went to antioch for 3 days and then said fuck this and hitchhiked to boulder

I guess there are occasional moments where I feel a gap between my midwestern vs. other people's east-coast educations, but they invariably revolve around like Brown kids having learned fresh edgy stuff about critical theory while I was learning less-sexy straight-up material, and to be honest I think I prefer the stuff I got, if only cause it'd kind of suck to have part of your college education go out of fashion

xpost - I have actually thought at times that I'd have turned out way better if I'd known about / tried to go to Oberlin, but I have no idea why I think that

If I'd gone to Michigan I would probably own a house

dodged that bullet!

I had a housemate that had a long distance booty call situation at Antioch.

fwiw my mom was pretty upset when i decided to go to school on the west coast and i was only person that went to a school west of chicago from my graduating class. pretty sure my hs got someone from marin county a place @ dartmouth in exchange

holy crap, antioch college's wikipedia page says that it's closed

There was a story about a "consultant" who claimed to have major connections with Ivy League schools, and offered a money back guarantee if your child didn't get in to one of the Ivy league schools of his/her choice. She was very selective about what students she chose to work with, of course. Turns out she didn't know anyone and didn't do anything on behalf of the kids; if the student got into an Ivy League school she took credit, if they didn't she refunded the money with no problem. Kind of genius, I think.

omg, that's brilliant

I just got an email advertising college counselling services from my regional alumni list ...

that's some classic rain-making

xposts

nabisco are you losing your post-structuralist faith??

mcm's a real department at brown now, you know. its position as a discipline has always been paradoxical - at the first "foundation of semiotics" lecture of the semester, our professor said that the course title was misleading, since semiotics is a "non-foundational discipline" .. we were all like "huh" and that moment of "huh" tells you everything you need to know i guess

after that we drank some blood out of a skull though, so it was all good

they invariably revolve around like Brown kids having learned fresh edgy stuff about critical theory while I was learning less-sexy straight-up material

The English department at Brown wasn't all "edgy" critical theory. The Creative Writing department was a bit more biased towards "edginess" and had somewhat dysfunctional requirements - basically you had to be accepted through a competitive process into classes. I think it might have been the only major like that.

xp tracer: while listening to Phil Rosen's nasal whine?

I was just surprised to learn at some point that lots of Ivy and east-coast kids had actually been taught the kinds of writers it was considered hip for young people to talk about, whereas at my school that was the kind of stuff you read on your own after skimming coursework about utilitarians or reading modernists. Or pretended to read on your own, to look cool. Or anyway didn't get to in classes until tiny senior-year seminars or whatever.

The Creative Writing department was a bit more biased towards "edginess" and had somewhat dysfunctional requirements - basically you had to be accepted through a competitive process into classes. I think it might have been the only major like that.

I don't consider this dysfunctional -- it was the same way at my school! I almost consider this proper due diligence before letting people pin their entire expensive college career on a creative writing major.

As I understand it all colleges north of New Jersey were required by law in the late-90s to allow students to major in Judith Butler

thats why so many ppl from my school went to colgate!

Crit theory's been dead for about 20 years anyway so I'm sure all those Midwestern schools have caught up by now.

I was just surprised to learn at some point that lots of Ivy and east-coast kids had actually been taught the kinds of writers it was considered hip for young people to talk about, whereas at my school that was the kind of stuff you read on your own after skimming coursework about utilitarians or reading modernists. Or pretended to read on your own, to look cool.

Ditto my experience in a midwestern private school, and while I never took creative writing, I did take a bunch of English dept shit and ended up moving to East Coast anyway and being around a bunch of people who spoke in what seemed to me like code.

xp nabisco - I felt it made sense but my housemate who wanted to be a Creative Writing major thought it was dysfunctional. There was a competitive process for film/video classes - but they gave preference to students in the MCM or art/semiotics major and also considered seniority, whereas Creative Writing didn't do this.

xp - I think it depended on what courses one took. I don't think any of my English classes had us reading hip contemporary writers.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/shopping-for-1000-shoes-theres-an-app-for-that/

quiddities & agonies of the foundations of semiotic class, huh

btw I'm not sure if we've touched on this upthread, but I think the NYT is well aware of the number of eye-rolling or outraged clicks they get on particularly rich-peopley Style-section articles, and I don't think they much mind

like the "you cannot imagine what some people will spend money on" articles seem pretty clearly like group gawking

speaking of which -- next message on regional alumni list -- some guy advertising his 7 million dollar custom home for sale.

nabisco, i was *cough* a creative writing major with *cough* a music composition minor at Oberlin...

and it was hard to get into the upper levels of Creative Writing-- as in, one had to apply to every class, and there was no guarantee of admission. though i knew a bunch of people who got fucked this way, it also really separated the wheat from the chaff in a very efficient way.

it is also important to recognize, too, that Oberlin has a load of writers who are considered hot fucking shit in their particular genres, which isn't as true for a lot of other schools. (not to put other schools down).

Meanwhile recipients of federal and state financial aid adjust to life sucking.

Um-hmmm, that's me after one more year.

Though admittedly, I am already doing the job search thing.

well I gotta say the caps on federal loan repayment will be the opposite of life sucking, as far as my accounts are concerned. (especially since, umm, if you took out a few year-by-year loans recently, even small ones, that happened to shift into repayment during recent Troubles, umm, yeah, not the best time to find credit to consolidate them into one manageable bundle, as opposed to paying minimums on several different loans at once, lemme tell you.)

it still sucks if you have private loans.

(I say that in parentheses out of deference to people I knew in grad school who were taking out like a combined $70k a year in federal and private loans, and would probably roll their eyes at my small amounts, although now that I think about it, those were the people who were out drinking and sleeping with one another while I was eating hot dogs off the street outside of work, so we're probably even)

"Oberlin has a load of writers who are considered hot fucking shit in their particular genres, which isn't as true for a lot of other schools. (not to put other schools down)."

I enjoy reading non sports-related smack talk of schools. Please dish!

princeton kids are just not up to snuff on their restoration lit

yale classics is so bad most yalies cant tell the difference between heraclitus and hercules!!

xp nabisco - a lot of my friends went to expensive grad schools and have these huge amounts of debt, and struggle to get by on an annual income that if I was making that much, I could conceivably buy a house.

I can't imagine paying for an MFA/taking out loans for an MFA, isn't that kind of insane?

(big, 70K loans i mean)

You'd be surprised. (Sez the guy at UCI.)

i think UCI is fully funded, though?

(i'm talking strictly the creative writing program here)

After the state budget travails currently hitting us I have *NO* idea what would be funded now, frankly.

xp Que: almost everyone I know who has gotten an MFA (in creative writing, visual art, etc.) or a Master's in Music in the past 5-10 years took out huge loans. Partially because the most prominent schools around here are all private and tuition is something like $30k/year.

that is total insanity

yeah, Que, I gotta admit, I wouldn't have done that and marveled a bit at those who did. just to be clear, though, the people borrowing like $70k were usually putting about half of that just toward living in Manhattan without jobs.

xpost - keeping in the mind the caveat about loans for living (cause a $10k stipend or whatever sounds great but isn't exactly a year's cost-of-living), you can very much get an MFA in a lot of places without having to take out ridiculous loans

nabisco did you have a job while you were in the mfa program?