Maggie Coleman's comment that her student's come from upper-middle class,
if not wealthy, families, is telling. When people talk about student
apathy today, they're generally comparing the Harvard's and Yale's of the
sixties to the Harvards and Yales of the nineties. Students at
community colleges and state colleges were never terribly engaged
in protests, since they were likely to work --even 30 years ago.
So what's changed at the Ivies and other private liberal arts type schools?
Well, the real cost of attending these places has soared; needs-blind
admission policies have been curtailed or eliminated. So the proifle of
the student body is increasingly upper-crust. The Harvards and Wellesleys
and Princetons and Penns, after a brief (and disastrous)flirtation with
meriticratic admissions in the 1960s, have reverted to their original
function -- to educate the children of the ruling class to rule the
capitalist economy.
When I taught at Wellesley College, I was explaining the term
"discouraged worker" and a student asked me how the BLS counts
people who recieve money from a corporation but don't actually
work for it. "You mean like a shareholder?" I asked. "Well, yeah, I guess
so," she says. "Would they be considered unemployed?"
Ellen Frank
