The Incomparable Blindness of Conservative Parents of High School Seniors
Conservative parents are not simply naïve. They are willfully blind.
The moment that Billy Bob or Jenny Sue gets accepted at some $250,000 ripoff known as Ivy League education, or any of its Midwest and West Coast want-to-be imitators, their parents are in ecstasy. It means the end of the parents' retirement plans, but they don't care. "Ivy League! Ivy League! I'll have bragging rights at the country club!"
That was a wonderful ad. It was a classic example of humor that is based on reality. It was just a slight exaggeration. It was the death knell for that father's retirement plans. What did it recommend? Debt. Lots and lots of debt. That's why it was a great ad. It made people laugh at their own stupidity, and then run down and sign up for massive debt.
It's all about peer pressure. It's all about bragging rights to your friends. You send your kid into a cesspool, but that's all right, it's a prestigious cesspool.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
It would be as if a parent were impressed by the fact that his son just got an internship playing a piano in a house of ill repute. "Why, it's really a music scholarship! After all, they call him 'professor'!"
The difference is this: a young man playing a piano in the house of ill repute is at least getting paid. That will not be true in college. The parents are going to pay for all that action. Use Google to search for this phrase: "friends with benefits." Start here.
"Not our Jenny Sue! Not our Billy Bob!"
Ho, ho, ho.
Then there is what they are going to be taught in the social science and humanities classrooms. It was bad in my day, but nothing like today.
Every parent of a high school student, no later than the second half of the student's junior year, should visit this website weekly: www.thecollegefix.com. This website monitors the insanity that passes for higher education in the United States. Any parent of any high school who thinks that his child should go off to college at parental expense owes it to himself and to his child to read this website weekly. It would be a good idea to save specific articles to Evernote.com.
But parents don't want to confront their kids. Jenny Sue wants to go off to college. So does Billy Bob. They want out from under the parents' control, but they don't want to pay for this themselves. This is a socially mandatory way for kids to get five or six years of subsidies at no cost to themselves to meet friends with benefits.
Here is the attitude of parents.
When I went off to college in the fall of 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was President. Almost nobody outside of Massachusetts had ever heard of John F. Kennedy. Nobody outside of Arizona had heard of Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon was considered a far-Right politician.
In college, I discovered early that most professors in the humanities and social science were supporters of Adlai Stevenson. There were a handful of Republicans, and they supported Nelson Rockefeller. My first college advisor ran against Jerry Brown for Governor of California in 1974, and he lost by about 1%. He was just as liberal as Brown. He just wasn't as flaky. He later said he lost because Nixon had resigned in August. I think he was right. It was a bad year to run as a Republican in California.
In those days, college was a one-way street to the left. But it was a middle-of-the-road highway. As an undergraduate, I never encountered a Marxist professor. The only one I ever encountered was in graduate school, and he was a soft-core Marxist. He was a fair grader. He spoke in English, not Keynesian gibberish. He didn't use formulas. He was coherent. His name was Howard Sherman. There were virtually no Marxist economics professors in the late 1950's in the field of economics. The New Left did not appear until after 1965.
So, liberalism was conventional. Everybody simply assumed it. Anyone who didn't share their beliefs was regarded as something of an eccentric, and since the person was no threat to them, they really didn't put any pressure on them. That was what I found, anyway.
Student dormitories were separated in terms of gender. If the dorm had not been built after 1950, the building was separate. In the case of the University of California, Riverside, the wings were separate. There was no entertaining of the opposite sex in either of the wings. There were salaried middle-aged women who lived in the dorms and who policed the system. It was a different world back then.
Parents who have their children quiz out of the first two years of college by taking CLEP exams for a total payment of about $2,000, which the students can pay for out of part-time earnings at a fast food restaurant, have got the picture. They don't put up a dime for the first two years of college. Then, if the parents are really wise, they have the child enroll as at Thomas Edison State College. College education will cost about $14,000, total, on this basis.
The student does not live in the dorms on a college campus. The student eats better at home. They don't gain 10 pounds in the first year on college dormitory cuisine. The student bears the financial risk. Most important, the student is not subjected to political indoctrination in the classroom. The CLEP exams system is based on something at least resembling verifiable facts. These are common knowledge facts, not ideologically screened facts. That is not true in the classroom.
Parents have the authority to do this. They simply tell the child that they're not going to pay for the child's education for the first two years of college. It's up to the child to get the instruction needed. If the child wants to go to night school or to community college, fine. The parents don't pay for it. That makes the child financially responsible at the age of 17 or 18. That, in and of itself, is a major step for the child into adulthood. Instead, the parents send the child off to college for five years, where 40% of them do not graduate.
Once again, I recommend that every parent of a high school junior or senior return weekly to this site: www.thecollegefix.com. Every parent needs to face up to the reality of the environment into which he is sending his child.