The best time is somewhere between dessert and the calculation of the tip. The waiter and/or waitress is measuring your ability to make their day. Light conversation ensues. Making their day is defined as the distance between the rent and the set of college loans due.
And the loans have destroyed all forward motion.
It is not news that the college process in America is totally and in every way broken. Made more so by the industry's (and that's Industry with a capital I) good attempts to rationalize $50,000+ per year.
Cash accounting suggests that Team Recent-Graduate is on their 5-yard line, 3rd and 15: $453, $358, $704, Hike!
It's not funny. We have a generation that cannot do what we did, strapped by loan payments that barely match the hoped-for job and most certainly don't match the accrued reality of May 2013. It's a great country. The student, the parents, the racket and all of us are to blame.
What is striking is not the aspiring actor at $453 large, "My mother helps with the rent." He deserves all he got after a no-math, no-foreign-language four years of Theater Studies including Badminton 201.
Nor should we shed a tear for the $704 Political Science major who changed her major three times and squeezed four years into five. She slipped through with a 2.8 and simply did not bear down. A year in Paris studying Early Jacques Chirac? Pourquoi Pas?
The New Normal is the student who actually worked and did the right thing.
Sure, they passed on Civil Engineering, are sort-of-kind-a-like fluent in Sanskrit and took Light Statistics 104, not Analytical Geometry 312. There are thousands of students who are pretty good, not great, and have no "economy" to jump into. They simply can't get started to a better, smarter, wiser employment that will allow for the loans to be paid.
And now, there is a book to explain this madness.
William J. Bennett, with David Wilezol, has written a jewel.
Is College Worth It? is a 226-page apolitical tour-de-force. Bennett, a liberal arts graduate and lightening rod for some-Republican and all-Democrat hatred, absolutuely nails the demarcations and distinctions of our Higher-Education industry.
Memo: Harvey Mudd College takes it over Barnard College of Columbia University.
Task forces will be formed across all time zones to defend against Is College Worth It?
Unlike the philistines, Bennett defends the value of four years of partying. He just suggests relative value has been lost. Also lost, has been a rigor from another time.
Enough. Read Bennett on our collegiate set of broken promises. Throw Is College Worth It? at your junior in high school. Demand a cover-to-cover read or no Snapchat. There will be a pop-quiz.
And don't forget, there is a good in the study of the liberal arts. You'll just have to go up Route 116 in Massachusetts, past Mt. Holyoke to find real value at Amherst College. Discuss.
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