Paranoid Rant Thread

[hoarpumpkin]

College admissions has really got me thinkin
y'all know my Colgate ordeal (and if you don't, go look). It's come down to money.
Harvard university had over 23000 applicants vying for a little over 2000 spots. over 3000 of those applicants are valedictorians
(If you suck at math, realize that means not even all the kids who are first in their class who applied COULD get a spot)
And next year's class is only going to be bigger.
And the year after that, even bigger, and so on and so on.

Pretty soon, "need-blind" will be completely abandoned. When there are so many qualified students, how else are you going to choose between them, really?

It's really scary when you start to think about it:
1. Only the rich will be able to afford college
2. Today's college degree means what a highschool diploma used to mean, like in my parents' day.

Most of you girls are younger than me: if you're planning on going to college, you should think about this. it's only going to get more competative as the years go by. This year saw a major jump at most competative universities, just from last year! And my town's 8th grade class is *twice* the size of my town's current *9th* grade class.

What about when we have kids? When the job market is even more competative too? When colleges don't even bother with you if you can't pay the bill?


I think something has GOT to change, or we will see a massive social gap that is nearly impossible to bridge.

[gopher]

Ok, now you've got me really scared.

[hoarpumpkin]

I don't think it's really as bad as I wrote... I think there's like a mini baby boom that we're part of, so the competition should get lower in several years
but the population is still growing... I think maybe it'll just take longer to occur than how I made it seem

[MariposaRota]

I know exactly what you're going through. Especially about the high school diploma thing. I watched my parents argue, fuss and fight over money my entire life and I swore that I would go to college and have not just a good job, but a career I loved. Neither one of them went beyond high school (well, my dad did, but he got kicked out b/c he partied too much) and I think that that was part of the problem. My dad is now disabled and my mom works a dead end job that I would starve before having.
On the population note, it is scary. There were 230 something people in my graduating class. And over 400 new freshman came in this year. That's almost twice as many as there were of us. It was so bad. My cousin said that they have to have six lunch periods instead of four now because of all the freshman, not to mention new kids and foreign exchange students. So lunch occurs from 11:30 to like almost 2:00 now. That's just...whoa.
Don't they have some sort of population control in Asia? I was thinking that if they don't now, then they did in the past. That may sound sort of...Communist but seriously, our economy is going to have to do triple or quadruple work if people keep having kids like rabbits.
I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I'm just expressing my opinion. Thank you.

[hoarpumpkin]

I believe china still has population limits in place; I dunno about anywhere else in asia

I agree with you though. I don't know if population control is the answer to our problems, but as I said, something has to happen, has to change. Right now, we're just about riding the peak of a mini-baby boom, so classes will start to lower again in a few years, but even so, that only delays the problem. And probably not enough for society to adjust properly.

And the ironic part is that the educated people tend to delay childbearing and have fewer children while the less educated, usually poorer, segments of society bear children younger and bear more children.... *sigh*
I'm just glad I'm not in the class of 2009 or something