David Brooks' column summing up the latest research by Bob Putnam created a quite a commotion this week. Brooks summed up Putnam's findings,
Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.
Rich parents are investing more time and money in their kids than less affluent parents. Less affluent kids are more pessemistic, isolated, and uninvolved than wealthy kids.
Putnam had discussed this study at the Aspen Idea Self Love Festival. Here's a short video of this panel. I would like to read the research itself. Trying to find it.
Helaine Olen rightly points out that Putnam's research confirms the findings of Annette Lareau.
All these unequal childrearing and opportunities for kids have a real impact. (In another minute, I have to go back to figuring out how many rich kids are at Harvard. Answer: lots.) Brooks offers weak suggestion for reform.
Apt. 11d 
Someone (Kevin Drum?) noted that the data doesn’t show that working class parents are doing less than they were 20 or 30 years ago, they’re doing what they’ve always done. The change is that affluent parents are doing much, much more. It’s interesting to contrast Putnam and Brook’s observations with the general scorn of helicopter parents. We think this sort of intensive parenting turns out successful, well-adjusted kids but we also romanticize the freedom that working class children are allowed.
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I wonder too if there is an impact from anti-intellectualism. My husband and I are both college-educated professionals and we both come from working class families where we are the first to go to college. Think big class jumps economically and socially.
Yet growing up, both of our parents (with high school education or less) regularly went to the symphony, the ballet, museums, etc. We all went to the public library weekly to take out books to read.
And they weren’t outliers amongst friends and family who similarly had high school educations at best.
I am curious about whether that has had an impact as well – it’s almost like the arts have become more elitist rather than less over the past 40 or so years.
Finally, you know the dead horse that I flog – that it is just as much the subtle cultural class ways of being that get passed on as much as the tutoring and fancy schooling. And understanding from time zero that your options are A to G rather than only A to B. I believe that’s just as critical as any academic learning.
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“And understanding from time zero that your options are A to G rather than only A to B. I believe that’s just as critical as any academic learning.”
Oh, yes. I remember as a fairly big kid having simply no idea how you get from A to B or from A to G. A complicating factor in my case was that both my parents had graduate degrees but were living basically a blue collar life, so while I certainly expected to go to college, I also expected to come back to the farm. I had no idea what the larger range of options was.
Here’s another story about stuff I didn’t know. When I was in 9th grade (about 13 years old–I skipped 8th grade), my French teacher started talking up a trip to France and Spain that eventually about half a dozen or so of my classmates went on (the doctor’s daughter, the teacher’s daughter, the principal’s daughter, etc.). The teacher said that the cost was fifteen fifty (or something that sounded like that). Now, believe it or not, at the time I seriously believed that it was $15.50, not $1550, because I had no idea at all of how much stuff costs. (It didn’t help that our teacher had us clipping out coupons at French Club for fund-raising purposes–there’s no way that that ever raised more than a few hundred dollars at most.)
It is crucial for kids to have it explained to them early and often how stuff works and how much stuff costs and how we pay for it. While many cute little kids will tell you, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up” or “I want to be a vet” or “I want to be a marine biologist!”, it’s really important for them to know what the timeline is for that, so they know what they need to be doing at any particular stage in their education.
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Someone (Kevin Drum?) noted that the data doesn’t show that working class parents are doing less than they were 20 or 30 years ago. They’re doing what they’ve always done.
From David Brooks:
Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight Moon,” talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly.
and:
Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.
So, the “poor” are doing a little more than they did before, but the “rich” are doing a lot more. And the result is: “Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since.”
While this is depressing, it also seems largely unfixable, outside of giving rich kids stupid pills or something like in “Harrison Bergeron.” You can’t tell rich parents to stop reading their kids four bedtime stories, and it’s ridiculous to tell poorer parents that they are reading to their kids more than they were read to, but if they don’t read longer stories, their kids will become “pessimistic” and “detached.”
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AmyP – Another difference for that kid who wants to be a doctor is that one family will be able to say, “hey, talk to my friend Frieda, she’s a doctor and you can find out all about it”. Or, “Dr. Joe my brother has an opening for a job this summer in his office – want to work with him?”. Or, “I went to ABC School of Medicine, need a letter of recommendation?” Or the parents are already doctors.
Quite a different experience than having to figure it out on your own.
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Just skimming this because I’m in the middle of something else, but the last few days, I’ve noticed a ton of people on FB and my parenting group with kids who are upset about the camps they’re going to. Two of my friends have kids who are refusing to go; my kids are certainly reluctant (they’re at RISD right now). Another friend’s kids both complained last summer that their mom sent them to 3 different camps instead of just one, and could they go to X camp. This summer she enrolled them in X camp all summer, and now they’re complaining.
Anyone else noticing this?
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“Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since.”
Some of this stuff may simply be a reflection of the reality that the children happen to be living in. If you’re living in the sort of neighborhood where your bicycle gets stolen, it’s going to affect your view of your fellow man and what you can expect of him.
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Wendy – what are they upset about? Is it the camp itself, the friends they are with or not with, the length of the camp day?
AmyP – Add in watching your parents laid off a few times and inadequate access to health care and I think we’d all be feeling detached and pessimistic!
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I came from an upper middle class family and married a guy whose parents never went to high school (immigrated from a very poor foreign country). This is one of the MAJOR things we fight about — the amount of money and time I expect to spend on our children vs. his expectations.
He wants to know why the kids aren’t working bagging groceries this summer, as he did — and I can’t understand why he doesn’t want to spend more on music camp.
(This is also one of the reasons why we didn’t ask his mom to provide childcare when our kids were little, like his siblings did. She never read to them. She had them watch lots of TV because “it’s not messy like all that paint and clay that you like.” They took three hour naps — where to begin?) For me, this was a really stark illustration of the ways in which upbringing and social class have longlasting effects on how you view the world and the expectations you set for yourself. However, I can’t imagine a system that would have mandated that she read to her kids — she would have viewed that as a waste of time — nor one that told me to stop. I wonder if this is simply the next stage of socioeconomic development — this widening gap in achievement — or whether there’s really any way to address it or fix it.
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If I’m remembering my Putnam, TV is one of the factors that makes people less social and less engaged with their communities. I expect that the increase in available electronic entertainment has probably had a bigger impact on poor children than on non-poor children, because they are more allowed to self-dose (and we all know how much even upper-middle class kids get).
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This looks like a failure of meritocracy compared to one possible advantage of aristocracy. When everybody is supposed to succeed on their own merits and efforts, of course people who have the ability, knowledge, and finances to give their kids extra advantages will. When aristos acknowledged their advantages, at least some of them believed they had a duty to help the less fortunate.
I think it’s also a failure of the level playing field idea. There is no such thing as a level playing field, and we are neither willing nor able to afford to approach it very closely. Making the playing field level, given what we know about household environment and extracurricular activities, would require too much involvement in private lives and personal choices. Time to give up that idea and try something else to help make more lives better.
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“Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation. ”
I don’t agree with the inflection of this discussion, with the assumption of different child-raising “choices.” I see a widening inequality of child-raising practices being as much about access, economic segregation, and just money as “culture.” My kids are definitely being raised in the intense cultivation mode. Doing it requires a lot of parental effort (not just knowledge, but driving, time, research, scheduling, and money). I see increasing separation, as more affluent parents take their kids out of communal activities (community club sports, drama, local little league/soccer into select teams, with access for the highly talented and for the rich). I see schools offering less, pushing more responsibility for all these activities onto parents.
I think the push towards individual investment and reward is destroying what we had of community (and America was never a very community oriented society).
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I was intrigued by where Harvard was on your Pell grant graph, because it seemed extraordinarily low. A possibility is that Harvard has a funding mechanism that avoids the Pell, but it would be very interesting if Harvard is significantly different from the other elite schools in the number of Pell-income eligible students who attend.
Since Harvard has the resources to support these students (unlike, say, NYU), it would raise the possibility that Harvard is at a particular extreme on the creative cultivation required to produce a Harvard-bound child.
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I’m researching these issues in China and East Asia more generally, and it seems like what’s happening with UMC parents is partly a result of globalization. When you’re kid isn’t mostly guaranteed a shot at Harvard by doing ok in life, but has to compete with not only high-achieving poor kids in the US but also high achieving international students (and I mean Harvard metonymically), the pressure is on.
What’s happening with us has already occurred in Japan and Korea and is taking off in China, where parents are all too well aware that the deck is stacked against them. Koreans spend more on education than any other country in the world, and in China parents spend at minimum one adult salary and often two on a child’s education (usually 4 salaries support a household: parents and paternal grandparents). This is actually making the one child policy moot, because many people don’t even want one kid, much less more than that. A second child is a luxury and not because of government fines, but because no parent could afford to pay for all the enrichment activities kids are expected to do. Japan and Korea have pro-natalist government policies and a pro-family conservative traditional culture and still have some of the lowest birthrates in the world. Even though parents and children are exhausted by all this enrichment and acknowledge it’s crazy, no one wants to be the first to step off the merry-go-round.
There’s also an interesting debate in China right now about eliminating/changing the Gaokao (college entrance exam) and moving more towards US style ‘holistic’ admissions. The problem, as critics of this change point out, is that theoretically any child even in the remotest village can learn math and memorize poetry with little more than an old textbook, but when your kid needs to be a violin virtuoso, fluent in English, and captain of the Math league team, suddenly children without money and access to urban resources are left in the dust. (There’s also a push to change provincial quotas at top universities like Peking University, which is required to accept about half its students from the Beijing area, though this isn’t considered all that politically viable, given the clout of Beijing residents.) Anyways, it’s interesting to see the obvious class advantages of our current system laid out and debated very frankly in a very different, non-American context.
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bj – I agree with your take on the destruction of an accessible community. Add into that the myth of “I made it on my own” that makes invisible all of the many ways that middle and upper class individuals are helped along to be successful. The result is the shaming of anyone who hasn’t “made it”.
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An interesting tidbit about intensive asian child-raising, that might comport with BI’s report that more “holistic” education is being considered, but in the same intense way that was used in the cramming culture.
We went to the Destination Imagination (“creative problem solving” competition) in TN this year, and 11 of the top 45 teams were from China, Korea, or Singapore. That list includes categories like the improvisational challenge (in English), in which a Korean team placed first.
One can raise the concern that the interpretation of the honor-system enforced “non-interference” rule might be different in different cultures (skewing over all results). But, the main point I took home was that Asian cultures can and will apply their intensive training methods to whatever standard is used to judge competition.
The performance was particularly notable to me, because winning DI isn’t a particularly strong credential (for example, unlike Olympic gold medals). DI is internationally accessible though (unlike, say the spelling bee or science fair competitions).
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Historically, the switch to testing-based admissions came about because elite schools were letting in well-connected dullards instead of “new” families with smarter kids.
That pretty much eliminated the idiot children of rich alumni, but then there became the “problem” of too many new kids (mostly Asians and Jews) who just studied a lot without too many extra-curriculars, and then we moved away from test-based to a more “holistic” approach, which advantaged the elites again.
That’s the history of college admissions since 1920, but now there’s three times as many Americans than there were in 1920 for the same number of elite spots, and more applications come from overseas. Applications to Harvard have doubled in the past 20 years. I know my alma mater’s (Penn’s) admissions rate is half of what it was when I was admitted 20 years ago. Could I get in now? I don’t know.
But it’s not even a question of “holistic” versus “high scores,” when you are only accepting a fraction of the percentages you were 100 years ago, you don’t have to choose. Thousands of applicants have both, so at a top tier university, the question becomes moot.
In terms of “Community,” I think it cuts both ways. It sucks when the rich kids and the poor kids don’t interact, but for every type of minority there is now a group of like-minded people around that wasn’t there when there was only one “Community.” A friend was complaining to me the other day that her daughter applied to be in the high school diversity club and got rejected. My high school didn’t have a “diversity club.” There’s a club for the gays and the Christians and the drama geeks and whatever, but for every new group that opens up an opportunity that wasn’t there before, it’s taking away from the “group.” Back when there was only the Community organization, we’d participate, and then eventually get bored because there was no “Level 2” or “Level 3” if we wanted to continue. Now there is, but only for those who want to (and can) pay for it. Is that an improvement or not?
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I’m reading Chris Hayes “twilight of the elites” right now and he addresses this very issue in the first chapter. I don’t know how you correct this problem. Can you create similar programs for disadvantaged kids and do all the legwork to make sure that kids participate? Is that even the right answer? Just acknowledging that the wealthier among us have an advantage is controversial. The belief in meritocracy is really strong. While we’ve certainly done our share of camps and lessons and now, private school, we’ve also been much more laid back than many of our peers. We haven’t pushed our kids into anything, letting them take the lead. This summer is empty of organized enrichment activity, though geeky boy is doing some writing on his own. We didn’t do SAT prep and GB did fine, not Harvard fine, but fine enough. I may regret our lack of intervention at some point, but everyone seems happy, and that’s what I care about more. Of course, if my kids are living in my basement in ten years, you can all say I told you so. 🙂
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“America was never a very community oriented society…”
Robert Putnam would disagree with you. 50 years ago, America was miserable for non-joiners, what with all the Elks and Lions and Rotary and bowling leagues and bridge clubs and VFW and Garden Club and League of Women Voters and PTA and Junior League and Knights of Columbus. If you didn’t do that stuff, you’d look like a total weirdo. And then TV happened, as well as the passing of the WWII generation from their dominant cultural position. The Greatest Generation were freakishly community-oriented, to a degree that used to drive introverts nuts. Our generation has children’s sports and extracurriculars, but it’s child-oriented rather than adult-oriented.
“But, the main point I took home was that Asian cultures can and will apply their intensive training methods to whatever standard is used to judge competition.”
See Amy Chua. By the end of the book (after her daughter rebels against music), Chua is reapplying her Tiger Mom efforts to tennis.
“A friend was complaining to me the other day that her daughter applied to be in the high school diversity club and got rejected.”
That’s hilarious.
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We live near the coast and recently had yet another tragic drowning of a young child. Every summer there are a spate of them, and the conversation in our area has revolved around the fact that every year this happens and well-meaning people would like to prevent it. We have an extensive program for providing youth swim lessons to disadvantaged children in multiple locations, free Y memberships, and yet there are lots of disadvantaged kids who live near the ocean and never learn to swim, making such accidents inevitable. The problem is that even with all kinds of supports in place, you still can’t force overworked families to find the time and energy to take their kids to swim lessons. Short of arranging a service that picks up kids from their houses and drives them to the lessons, or making it mandatory, it’s doubtful the system will ever change. And kids will continue to drown.
I think the parallel with academic enrichment is apt here. Even if tutoring, free summer camps, etc are offered you can’t force people to value what’s on offer or to participate. In our town we have an instrument loan program so that no one ever has to tell their kid ‘you can’t take music lessons in school because we can’t afford it’ and yet the number of families who take advantage are relatively small, and usually it’s because there’s a charismatic teacher who almost compels kids to join. Seems to work on a small scale but how do you replicate it on a larger one?
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“A friend was complaining to me the other day that her daughter applied to be in the high school diversity club and got rejected.”
That’s hilarious.
I know. We keep imagining how the application process worked.
“What diversity do you have?”
“Um, I’m Jewish. And female.”
“We’ve already got a Jewish girl. What else you got?”
“Uh . . . that’s about it.”
“You gay? Fat? Ugly? Disabled?”
“No, no, I don’t think so, and does having an annoying little brother count as a disability?”
“Any relation to Elizabeth Warren? Because then we could give you Native American.”
The problem is that even with all kinds of supports in place, you still can’t force overworked families to find the time and energy to take their kids to swim lessons.
That’s pretty much it right there. I mean, there are over 6 million children who don’t have health insurance not because of any societal coverage gaps, but because their parents haven’t signed them up for Medicaid or SCHIP even though they are eligible for free health insurance. There’s probably a greater number who figured out how to get their kids signed up for free health insurance, but aren’t going to figure out how to get their kids to the Y for free swim lessons. I’m not blaming the parents, who are overworked and are prioritizing the best they know how, but it seems impractical both to get the poor kids to the swim lessons, and to keep the rich kids from participating because the poor parents are too busy.
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Ok, rejection from a diversity club is an idea that needs to be followed up on, not merely repeated as a joke. My guess is that it doesn’t really mean what we’re taking it to mean (i.e. someone was rejected from the club ’cause they weren’t willing to follow the bylaws or make the time commitment).
I think dismissing the idea of an equal playing field is a straw man. Of course we can’t make the playing field flat. But we can make opportunities available and they do equal the playing field over not having those opportunities. Perfection is not the goal; the intent to point in the direction of equal opportunity is.
The goal of free swimming lessons is not to get 100% of kids swimming and to prevent all the accidents. It’s to improve the odds that a poor child will have swimming lessons. Also, the fact that society is unlikely to provide transportation, babysitting, and, more extremely compulsion in support of the free swimming lessons doesn’t mean that you should abandon the lessons themselves.
I see a growing trend of an unfortunate alliance in which people who don’t want to offer the opportunities at all accidentally (or sometimes on purpose) team up with those who try to actually equalize the playing field and we end up with nothing.
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Ok, rejection from a diversity club is an idea that needs to be followed up on, not merely repeated as a joke.
I don’t know. The conversation was about culturally insensitive attitudes in Elementary School (where my oldest is in fifth grade) and an older, wiser friend whose youngest is in fifth grade said that she had gone through the same set of problems years ago, but that things improved a lot the older the kids get. She said, “By high school school, there’s so much interest in cultural sensitivity that my oldest tried to get in to the Diversity Club and was rejected.” “What, not diverse enough?” “Something like that.” That was the extent of the conversation on the topic.
Of course we can’t make the playing field flat. But we can make opportunities available and they do equal the playing field over not having those opportunities.
And I see “expanding opportunity” as the do-nothing option that the “don’t want to offer opportunity” people can get behind because it doesn’t mean anything. Practically every application I fill out for a kids’ event (and definitely the ones that I have run or co-chaired) say something like “This program costs $250 per student. Waivers are available based on financial need.” And we completely mean it, too. If someone wants to join Girl Scouts but her parents couldn’t afford the fee, it would be totally free for them.
How many requests for fee waivers have I received, total, in all my years? One, which was granted, from a kid who signed up and then never showed up. Honestly, in a small community event, if I know you you are probably too embarrassed to identify your financial troubles, and if I don’t know you it’s because you are not involved in community events so you won’t sign your kids up anyway. You raise the price so you can do more “cool” stuff, the higher price knocks out people who don’t want to apply for financial aid, and then the poor kids either don’t hear about or wouldn’t fit in to the “culture” where the rich parents volunteer for everything, and the poor ones see the activity as free babysitting.
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I think there’s also the issue of what we want the end goal to be. Obviously, not everyone can go to Harvard, nor would we want a society where everyone is a doctor or lawyer. We need people in all sorts of jobs. I think the end goal should be to make sure that everyone can have a living wage doing something they have chosen to do. If being a janitor comes with a decent wage, benefits, and pension, there are people who would choose custodial work as their vocation. (Honestly, if lawyering didn’t come with all the perks, how many people would really become lawyers?) Not all Americans strive to be elite, many people just want to be able to live comfortably enough and work a job they don’t feel ashamed to tell their family about. While I think everyone should have the opportunity to excel, I also think the goal should really be to improve life for those who don’t excel.
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“My guess is that it doesn’t really mean what we’re taking it to mean (i.e. someone was rejected from the club ’cause they weren’t willing to follow the bylaws or make the time commitment).”
Or maybe they were really full-up on earnest white girls–too much of that would produce an embarrassing yearbook photo.
(Back in high school, I once approached the teacher who ran the drama club because I was interested and a number of people I had lunch with were involved. She told me they had enough girls and what she needed was “warm male bodies.” So I never did drama. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds, because the teacher might have mentioned that they had backstage roles available.)
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“How many requests for fee waivers have I received, total, in all my years? One, which was granted, from a kid who signed up and then never showed up.”
Ouch.
One of my good friends has kids at the same private school we do and I’ve never been able to persuade her to apply for financial aid, even though they would be a very deserving case (it’s a graduate family where the mom can’t legally work in the US). Fortunately, the grandparents are able to contribute, but if something were to come up, I’d be concerned that my friend would be too proud or embarrassed to explain the situation to the administration (the family is East Asian). I’ve already written the administration once or twice, asking them to keep a lid on the requests for extra money (teacher birthday, teacher appreciation week, Christmas gift for teacher, end of year gift for teacher, various party contributions, costumes for this, costumes for that, etc.), because each straw could be the one that breaks the camel’s back for the less prosperous families at school.
Here’s a post and thread (or similar) that I sent to our school administration.
http://thecommonroomblog.com/2011/02/accidental-burdens.html
“You raise the price so you can do more “cool” stuff, the higher price knocks out people who don’t want to apply for financial aid…”
It would be really ironic if the higher price were set partly in order to allow for financial aid (a mini-version of how private colleges work), but then that discouraged the people you wanted to help from applying.
“Honestly, if lawyering didn’t come with all the perks, how many people would really become lawyers?”
Even with the money, there are so many ex-lawyers and unhappy lawyers floating around.
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Even with the money, there are so many ex-lawyers and unhappy lawyers floating around.
Many probable unhappy with the law, but a larger number probably unhappy that they can no longer be a lawyer, and are spinning it to their advantage.
As a Law School graduate who has seen many successful and failed co-graduates, this WSJ article was still a real shock to me.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html
Nine months after graduation, only about half of law school grads are in full-time jobs that require a law degree. (They used to only ask how many were “employed,” without focusing on what kind of job it was.)
While the article focused on the extremes (Whittier College, 17% vs. Virginia at 95%), what really shocked me was the largely undifferentiated middle. I had though of Villanova (52%) as an “above average” law school, and Rutgers-Camden (58%) as “below average) — based admittedly solely on bar passage rates — but for the huge middle, between a third and a half are not fully employed as a lawyer. That’s a huge number of potentially disgruntled lawyers.
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“Many probable unhappy with the law, but a larger number probably unhappy that they can no longer be a lawyer, and are spinning it to their advantage.”
Depends on vintage, probably. We know an Ivy-educated lawyer with a corporate job and two little kids who kind of hates her job, but the family has gotten used to the lifestyle her job affords, so she’s stuck in her gilded cage.
Admittedly, these days that’s a nice problem to have.
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“How many requests for fee waivers have I received, total, in all my years? One, which was granted, from a kid who signed up and then never showed up.”
That’s why more of these opportunities actually have to be low fee or free, and not just available based on fee waivers. That’s why the high tuition high aid model doesn’t actually work to provide what I’m calling opportunity. It means libraries that are truly free and community centers that provide classes at nominal costs (and waivers, too, for those who can’t pay even those costs), for subsidies to those organizations.
Mind you, that inevitably means some well off people will benefit, too. But that’s the cost of making the service available to the disadvantaged.
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“We need people in all sorts of jobs. I think the end goal should be to make sure that everyone can have a living wage doing something they have chosen to do.” (and, I’ll add, that they have the skills to do).
Yes, this has to be part the equality paradigm, not just giving everyone the opportunity to be a lawyer but to treat all jobs with respect. I think the alternative where we start with unequal playing fields and produce unequal outcomes, with very unequal outcomes (and some of those outcomes being fairly unpleasant) is not the kind of society I want.
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“That’s why the high tuition high aid model doesn’t actually work to provide what I’m calling opportunity.”
It doesn’t work that badly for private colleges, but I agree that it’s problematic for local clubs and classes.
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Northern Virginia also did pretty well at making classes available at nominal costs through the community centers — but what happened was a shortage. There weren’t enough slots for the subsidized gymnastics, swimming, etc. so ALL the slots ended up going to people who had the time and energy to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to spend 3 hours hitting the refresh button to log into the page to sign up for the classes. Most of them were not single moms but rather sahm’s who had the energy to fight for the slots.
I’m thinking this is also similar to things like establishing magnet schools in the inner city that operate on a lottery system. Here, too, it seems like wealthy families learn how to game the system while the disadvantaged end up deciding it’s too complicated and probably not worth the effort to enter the fight for the limited resources.
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That’s why more of these opportunities actually have to be low fee or free, and not just available based on fee waivers. . . Mind you, that inevitably means some well off people will benefit, too. But that’s the cost of making the service available to the disadvantaged.
The problem isn’t that well-off people benefit, it is that they are benefiting at the expense of less well-off people who don’t want to swim, but still have to pay the higher taxes so that both the poor and the rich can take a free class. Arguing that you need to pay higher taxes so the poor can get stuff gets you traction sometimes. Arguing that you need to pay higher taxes so that the rich can get stuff and the poor won’t need to fill out a form does not actually get you the higher taxes you want.
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May I question Brooks’ premise? Why assume parental investment is an unalloyed good? I think there’s some confusion on Brooks’ part between the sort of activities upper class youth select for college admissions competition, and the sort of childhood which creates a productive adult. In my opinion, these are not the same things.
As a matter of fact, in this summer-spent-visiting-colleges, I have a new theory. The more hotly elite DC/NYC parents desire a college, the stranger the tour group. There are some kids who are really hurting in this process. They’re the team captains WITH the SAT tutors AND foreign community service trips.
Receipt of luxury doesn’t render a teen a new, improved human. I’ll give you good odds on 1) entitled brat or 2) parent-dependent waif.
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