|Back to Black Joanne Black
Pressure for places in top US colleges forces parents and students into crippling debt.
My younger daughter, who attends our local high school, is now on summer vacation. It is so long it feels as though she has quit, but with a promise to re-enrol when school starts back in September, if she remembers.
Research shows this long break most disadvantages children who are already disadvantaged. Isn’t that always the way? They will be the ones who have the least structure to their lives and the least access to books. No one will be reinforcing the knowledge they gained at school and they are most likely to forget what they have learnt. I imagine there will be some who finished school in mid-June intending to return but who will lose their way completely before the new academic year starts.
My daughter will be entering her “senior” or 12th-grade year – the equivalent of Year 13 in New Zealand. The year will be dominated by her peers applying to the colleges [universities] of their choice for the next year.
Mercifully, New Zealand has no equivalent of the US obsession with colleges and college applications. Nor does the cost compare, even before New Zealand’s first-year, feesfree policy was introduced. Here, middle-income parents stretch themselves to financial breaking point to help pay for their kids’ education, and the kids themselves rack up huge debts, requiring them to get lucrative jobs after graduation if they are to have any hope of repaying their loans.
Unless they invent the next YouTube while sitting in their darkened bedrooms, most will get high-paying jobs only by going to college and getting a degree, which they can only do by borrowing. I have never thought that occupations such as childcare, journalism, communications, social work and a host of other roles should require a degree. Cutting good people out of consideration for these jobs because they do not have degrees makes us all poorer. Nor do such jobs usually pay enough to make large student loans worthwhile. The whole thing feels similar to a Ponzi scheme.
To my surprise, I ended up in an argument with friends of friends after President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was denied service at a local restaurant.
What took me aback was that they thought the restaurant owner’s stand was principled. They believe the Trump Administration is breaking down civil society and therefore the people who serve him are getting what they deserve for being complicit. Wha-aat? It was, in a sense, an alltoo-familiar conversation here in the Beltway where, every day, there is a new occurrence that polarises people.
I see a bright line between Huckabee Sanders’ job and her private life. If they thought she should be denied service in a restaurant, I said to my friends’ friends, did they also think she should be denied service by, say, an emergency clinic? And if so, should the person who answers the phone in the White House, or is a driver in the President’s motorcade, also be denied services?
My new acquaintances – intelligent, highly educated people – are genuinely anxious that civil disorder is imminent. The media is partly to blame for this sense that the US is a tinderbox.
I think more people should take a sabbatical from watching and reading the news. Sometimes it seems the only people left in the US with a sense of balance are those with no interest in politics.
Trump’s staff should not be denied service in restaurants. If they are, then some of those who profess to be liberal and tolerant are in danger of becoming the very people they say they despise.
Should Sarah Huckabee Sanders be denied service by, say, an emergency clinic?