Rotten Little Girls

If you notice, there is even a significant disparity between a bachelor’s degree (4 years of college) and an associate’s degree (2 years of college, usually at a community or junior college). These statistics have an obvious conclusion: it’s good to have a college education because you can make more money (and the chances of enjoying your career are higher). However, with the cost of college sky-rocketing with each passing year and the requirements to get into premier colleges becoming more stringent, there is an obvious inequality between who can go to college and who can’t.

Our country is increasingly divided into the “haves” and the “have nots”. On the one hand you have the upper middle class and upper class and on the other hand you have the lower middle class and lower class. The shrinking middle class, in my mind, can go either way, depending on where they live in America and what opportunities are afforded them. The “haves” are able to send their children to private schools or live in affluent neighborhoods with good school systems. They can pay for SAT prep and after-school tutors. They can bring their children to soccer or violin practice (and afford the uniforms, sports equipments, and musical instruments that come with these activities). The “have nots” have less choices. They live in whichever neighborhood they can afford, where the local public school may not get a lot of funding. They work at least one full-time job (sometimes two) and therefore don’t have the time to pick their kids up from school, take them to extracurricular activities, or even just be at home to help them with their homework.

Just getting through elementary and middle school can be a challenge for children from lower income families. They are faced with obstacles that more-affluent families are not. Since I come from one of those lower income families, I have first hand experience with some of these obstacles: schools running out of paper by November, staying at the free after-school program at the local library until my mother came home at dinner time, apathetic teachers who weren’t motivated to teach a bunch of “unruly” children. Of course, these are merely examples, and they aren’t necessarily the experience everyone has had. However, I know that systematically the quality of education children receive in lower income neighborhoods is severely lacking compared to the wealthy neighborhoods. Where I grew up, we were lucky to have some Apple computers donated to our elementary school by the local bank, yet in a wealthy suburb several miles away, the children had plasma screen TVs in their state of the art gymnasium.

Now, I could go into the excesses of consumerism (what do you really need TVs in a school gym for??), but it’s less about what the wealthy schools have but what the poor schools don’t have. They need basic school supplies (like paper, pens, chalk), they need better, newer textbooks, and they need desks that aren’t falling apart. They need vibrant, engaging teachers and arts and music programs for their students.

In my high school economics class, we discussed some solutions to this problem. It’s been a few years, but I remember discussing a voucher system. This idea basically entailed giving poor families “vouchers” to go to a better school in a different neighborhood (where I grew up, school systems are divided into districts and you don’t get a lot of choice in where you send your children). However, this idea seemed ludicrous to me even in high school. Obviously all parents would want to send their kids to the better-funded schools. However, those schools can’t take more children than their facilities allow. This would just mean that the schools in poorer neighborhoods would be overlooked even more! To me, the obvious solution is to pour more funding into public schools that need it. However, in a city, this is more of a problem than in a wealthy suburb, since there is only so much revenue and lots of issues that need attention. Unfortunately, on both the state and national level, education often takes second fiddle to more “important” issues such as taxes and gas prices.

So what does this have to do with the wage disparity between college graduates and high school graduates? Well, if I have painted a grim picture of elementary and middle schools, the state of many of our public high schools is worse. High school should prepare students for college, yet many students fall through the cracks. Their over-worked and under-paid teachers don’t have the patience or time to single out promising teenagers who probably could use some guidance. Also, students attending under-funded schools are aware that they aren’t getting the same education as others. They see that people are not expecting much from them, so they don’t rise to the challenge. There is, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy in the minds of lower income students – society doesn’t care about their quality of education, so why should they?

A common stereotype of public school students

In our society, many students are not prepared for college, nor do they have the tools to even apply. Some of my friends in high school did not have any help from their parents in filling out applications and the guidance counselors were too overwhelmed to be of much help. While my parents had attended college and knew how the system worked, I recall several fellow students’ parents had never attended college and couldn’t even pay for more than 1 or 2 applications (at around $65 a pop, the average lower income family can’t afford for their child to apply to over 2 colleges). Even the process of applying for college is an obstacle for lower income students – let alone the fact that they are competing for limited slots with their wealthy counterparts who have had an above-average education, good SATs scores (thanks to those Kaplan prep courses), play several instruments and have the luxury of volunteering during their summer months rather than working a minimum wage job.

However, even if a student can overcome these obstacles, they still face one more daunting task: paying for college. Many private colleges cost upwards of $30,000-40,000 a year, and state schools are, on average, $6,000-10,000 annually (I got this from College Board and don’t know how scientific these figures are). However, I do know that a ridiculous amount of colleges charge ridiculous fees. I’m fortunate that I got into a respected college that has a large enough endowment to offer me a substantial grant. Even with that financial aid, I’m still taking out thousands of dollars in loans. I, like many other middle class and lower income students, will be paying off debt for many years to come. The only comfort I get is the knowledge that I’ll (hopefully) be making more money in the long run. I’m not gonna lie, when my friend at college mentioned his dad wrote the school a $30,000 dollar check to pay his tuition, I was speechless. That’s a whole way of life I’ve never encountered before, and to be sure, it’s enviable.