Paying for the party
In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it," the authors assess the state of American higher education. They provide a powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, and explain in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it. Mapping different pathways available to students at a flagship Midwestern public university, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a "party pathway" anchored in the Greek system, facilitated by the administration--and with serious disadvantages for the majority of students.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
18mentions
7people
2015–2022years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Humanities degrees are mostly people paying for the party (also a great little book), not future Creators Of Great Art.
- Paying for the Party is a good book about this issue of STEM degrees being flat and money being pumped in by students doing marketing, PR, communications, and business management degrees.
- > I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs
There's a pretty good book that explores that phenomenon and what happens when people don't "get the memo": Paying For The Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong (https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequa...).
- $250,000 per year administrators, $30 million dollar buildings and "lazy rivers". If we had a statistic for what percentage of your buildings were for academic usage, you'd find the amount is low.
"Paying for the Party" is a neat book here based on real life information from colleges.
- If you want a book that will further erode sympathy towards colleges, try Paying For the Party https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...
- That 37% of people really needs to be understood as bifurcated though. There is the (smaller) group that do the degrees that lead to high skills and gainful employment (medecine, engineering, finance), and the other (larger) group that are enrolled in mostly cotton-candy degrees (Communications, Business, Media) that lead just to debt.
Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.
