Obstacles to higher ed--and the middle class

This op-ed of mine appeared in yesterday's Charleston Gazette-Mail:

I first started attending Marshall University a while back, sometime between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the most recent ice age. It really was a different world.

At the time, I was working part-time as a janitor at a local public library (writing being a fairly recent innovation at the time). I found it to be a congenial calling I pursued with something less than perfect diligence, although it vastly contributed to my appreciation for the poetry of Langston Hughes and the like.

Imagine this: After a couple of part-time paychecks, I had enough money to pay for tuition.

Like I said, it was a different world.

Since then, inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the eve of the Great Depression, college costs have risen astronomically as the federal and state governments shifted priorities, student debt has exploded and hardships have mounted for students from low-income families.

Just how many hardships students face was documented in an interesting research project in Wisconsin. A team of researchers led by Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of the new book “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream,” studied 3,000 students who received Pell Grants while attending the state’s public colleges and universities.

They started out full of hope and enthusiasm but, six years later, fewer than half had graduated and 90 percent of those who did had debt.

In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Goldrick-Rab summarized the finding of her research:

 Federal student aid gets it wrong, by overestimating what families can pay and underestimating the cost of education.

 Contrary to stereotypes of families supporting children, “low-income children are supporting their parents, grandparents, and even siblings, all while being unable to buy their books.”

 Many are going without adequate food and, sometimes, shelter.

 While there’s nothing new about students working, many low-income students today are either looking for jobs they can’t find or holding down as many as three to get by.

 Debt, and its shadow, impact education, as well: “Feeling forced into borrowing is contributing to stress during college. To make money through work and minimize their loan exposure, students sacrifice participation in the sorts of academic and social activities that build networks and learning, the kinds of activities than increase the economic returns of their degrees.”

The real kicker is that the evidence suggests that academic success comes down to money: “Price, not intellect or effort, is the primary sorting mechanism in today’s colleges ... . Time after time, the failure to complete college does not reflect intellectual inability but rather an inability to pay.”

I’ve often had conversations with West Virginians who were stranded, unable to graduate and saddled with debt they had trouble paying on low wages and no benefits, which, in turn, made more education that could lead to a better job more inaccessible.

There’s something messed up about a situation where CEOs and corporations have an easier time dodging promised benefits to workers and retirees than ordinary people do dealing with debt for higher education.

If we’re going to move forward as a nation — let alone as a state that ranks at the bottom in educational attainment — we need to address issue of affordability. But we also need to work together to ensure that those who are trying to move forward can meet the basic needs for food, shelter and safety that make learning possible.

Three for the road

An interesting study from Ohio State suggests that the decline of union strength is a major driver of inequality. Meanwhile, here are some suggestions from the SEIU health care union about how to counter that. Finally, this item suggests that the interests of low income and middle class people are lining up. Would that it were so. And that we could get somewhere.

Three for the road

My word-horde, to use the language of Beowulf, is running a little low at the moment. Fortunately, that is not the case with everyone.

THE ZIMMERMAN VERDICT. Here's a response from the New Yorker.

GROWING FROM THE MIDDLE. President Obama made the case this week for growing the middle class-and thereby growing the economy. Aristotle would probably agree. So would several economists discussed here.

MORE FUN AND GAMES WITH THE WV AG discussed here.

Good weekend wishes to one and all (mostly).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

It's always something

In an earlier post, I complained that one of the downsides of attending my grandson's little league football games was getting a cheer stuck in my head the same way irritating songs often do. The cheer in question is discussed here and involves apples, bananas, the state of Alabama, lies and truth.

This week, however, there was a different problem. The team lost big time, as usual, but the cheerleaders held their own...but they did it without using the cheer even once. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I kind of missed the it.

It was like being at a Men Without Hats concert and finding that the band refused to play Safety Dance.

It really is always something.

WHAT'S UP FOR WORKERS. Here's a look at the latest State of Working West Virginia report.

REBUILDING THE MIDDLE CLASS. Here are some ideas.

CHILD WELFARE. West Virginia's Department of Health and Human Resources isn't in compliance with federal foster care standards--and these mistakes mean fewer federal dollars coming to the state.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Unspectacular and always human

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."--W. H. Auden

GET BUSY. Here's a "Move the Money" toolkit from AFSC about how to get involved in working for a sane federal budget

CLASS WARFARE? Elizabeth Warren rather forcefully whacks that notion here.

ONE TO WATCH. Here's a new website that aims to be a resource for state and national acting to promote shared prosperity. The name of the site says it all: buildingthemiddleclass.org.

FOR ADULTS ONLY. Wild (but probably not very hot) squid sex is discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

We are not amused

A while back I listened to an interesting series of lectures from The Modern Scholar series on literary journalism, or what used to be called "the new journalism." Some of the names associated with it are people like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese et al.

I decided to give Thompson's famous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream a try. It was interesting in the same way that one has trouble not looking at a car wreck, only much creepier.

It mostly consisted of two grown men acting worse than nightmare teenagers, doing such charming things as operating motor vehicles on public roads while under the influence of every imaginable drug, trashing things, and terrorizing waitresses and hotel maids.

I don't get it. Maybe I missed something. But if one of the themes of the book involves wondering what became of the American dream, maybe narcissistic and self indulgent behavior like that had something to do with it.

SIDELINED. Here's a look at long term unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession.

ONE TO WATCH, METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING. NPR is beginning a new series this week on the state of the American middle class.

MORE JOBS, LESS WAR is an approach to the economy recommended here.

ANNALS OF COMPASSION. It looks like Neanderthals had it before we did.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

For this relief much thanks

A vote in the US House yesterday means good news for tens of thousands of teachers and other workers who would otherwise have faced layoffs as states continue to struggle with the recession. The US House approved the measure 247-161. The bill will provide $26 billion in aid to states, which are still reeling from the recession while much of the money from the Recovery Act has been spent.

This is something many groups and individuals have been trying to get done all summer. It's not enough to really kickstart the economy but it's a step in the right direction.

ARISTOTLE WOULD PROBABLY AGREE with this article on the importance of the middle class and not letting it die.

DON'T GET MAD, GET MOVING. Exercise may help moderate anger. I knew that.

URGENT ANCIENT SEA MONSTER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A DELICATE SITUATION

Frederick Leighton's painting of Nausicaa, princess of the Phaeacians and rescuer of Odysseus, courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer and what it has to offer today continues. If you like classics, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find news and comments about current events.

Imagine that you're a middle aged man who has been shipwrecked and lost at sea for days and that you've washed up on the shore of a strange place. You look and feel like hell and you have to introduce yourself to a beautiful young girl and gain her help without scaring the daylights out of her.

One other thing: you're totally naked.

That would be a job for someone known for strategy and cunning (Greek metis). Somebody like Odysseus.

After he left Calypso's island, everything goes OK...for a while. But then the grudge-holding sea god Poseidon gets wind that his old enemy is at afloat again and destroys his raft. (In one of his more famous adventures, Odysseus blinded the cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon's son.) He finally makes it to the island of Scheria more dead than alive. When he returns to consciousness he asks himself

"Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now?
What are they here--violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?..."

Nudged by Athena, the beautiful Nausicaa and her maids are washing clothes near the shore. She is about 14 years old--ripe for marriage by ancient Greek standards. He grabs a tree branch to cover his private parts and approaches the girls. All run but Nausicaa.

This is a dangerous moment for everyone. She is no doubt wary of sexual assault, just as he is wary of provoking the islanders whose help he needs. He comes up with a pretty good trick:

When in doubt, ask a woman if she is a goddess.

Keeping a respectful distance, he says

"Here I am at your mercy, princess--
are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods
who rule the skies up there, you're Artemis to the life,
the daughter of mighty Zeus--I see her now--just look
at your build, your bearing, your lithe flowing grace...
But if you're one of the mortals living here on earth,
three times blest are your father, your queenly mother,
three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts
must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances--
such a bloom of beauty..."

You gotta admit it, he's pretty slick. Comparing her to Artemis was an especially reassuring touch since that powerful goddess was a perpetual virgin whom no mortal man would dare to pursue.

His words did the trick. He gained the help of Nausicaa. She will introduce him to her parents, who will offer excellent hospitality (xenia) and send him home to Ithaca at last.

More to come.

THE SENSIBLE CENTER. A poll by the Drum Major Institute of self-identified middle class Americans finds strong bi-partisan support for universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act, paid sick days, and more.

DOING WITHOUT HEALTH CARE is a reality for many working families as costs rise.

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE. Here's an amusing item on things women do to make themselves attractive to men. I'm eagerly awaiting the other side of the story.

BLOGGING AND HEALTH. From the Boston Globe, here's an article about how blogging has become part of the treatment for some cancer patients.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOW TO BREAK UP WITH A GODDESS

The god Hermes gives Calypso the bad news. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the Odyssey of Homer, but you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like that kind of thing, please click on earlier posts. The series started Aug. 4.

Odysseus doesn't really enter the story in his own right until Book 5 of the epic and he's in a strange situation. Imagine having everything most people think they want--and still being miserable.

For seven years, Odysseus, having lost all his 600+ men on the way from Troy, has been marooned on the island of the beautiful goddess Calypso. It's sun, sea, sand, sex with a beautiful partner and good food and wine every day. One other thing--she's even willing to give him immortality and freedom from further aging so he can keep doing that forever.

I know lots of people who would kill for a gig like that...

In spite of all that, Odysseus stands at the edge of the sea every day, weeping for his home. Thanks to the intervention of the goddess Athena, Zeus sends the messenger god Hermes to Calypso to tell her she needs to let him go. She doesn't take it very well:

..."Hard hearted
you are, you gods! You unrivaled lords of jealousy--
scandalized when goddesses sleep with mortals...
So now at last you train your spite on me
for keeping a mortal man beside me. The man I saved,
riding astride his keel-board, all alone, when Zeus
with one hurl of a white-hot bolt had crushed
his racing warship down the wine-dark sea...
And I welcomed him warmly, cherished him, even vowed
to make the man immortal, ageless, all his days...
But since there is no way for another god to thwart
the will of storming Zeus and make it come to nothing,
let the man go--if the Almighty insists, commands--
and destroy himself on the barren salt sea!"

But even with Zeus on your side, it's dangerous to hook up with an immortal--and even more dangerous to break up with one. When she tells Odysseus that she's willing to help him leave if he really wants to, he is characteristically cautious, making her swear by the River Styx that she isn't tricking him.

Then he has the delicate task of letting her down easily. One thing you don't want to say to a goddess is "You're OK but I like another woman better"--even if she's your wife. In a masterpiece of tact, he explains

"Ah great goddess,"
worldly Odysseus answered, "don't be angry with me,
please. All that you say is true, how well I know.
Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you,
your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all
and you, you never age or die...
Nevertheless I long--I pine, all my days--
to travel home and see the dawn of my return,
And if a god wreck me yet again on the wine-dark sea,
I can bear that too, with a spirit to endure.
Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total--
bring the trial on!"

He may have been the inventor of the classic "It's not you, it's me" line. At any rate, she helps him on his way.

More tomorrow.

THE BIG ECONOMIC SQUEEZE is working its way up the income chain.

WATER, WATER (NOT) EVERYWHERE. Here's an item on the links between global water and food problems.

ONE GENDER GAP that is closing is the math gap between boys and girls.

MEDICAID. West Virginia's redesigned version of Medicaid took another hit in a study by Families USA.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope this week is violence, structural and interpersonal. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, does a masterful job of looking at the subject at many levels. Much of his career was spent working with violent inmates of prisons and mental hospitals. He draws extensively on his clinical experience but also takes a wide view of related issues, such as the global violence of poverty.

I'm particularly grateful to his work for highlighting the massive scale of economic violence, which is all too little noted across the political spectrum.
"Conservative" politicians sometimes try to cash in politically with promises to get tough on crime and "progressives" may protest wars, but the much larger carnage caused by economic disparities--what Joseph Conrad called "the merry dance of death and trade"--goes largely unnoticed.

Allow me to quote from Gilligan:

...every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a thermonuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world.

Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence--structural or behavioral--is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other as cause to effect.

Note: Gilligan's estimation of the death toll from economic disparities is 12 years old, but probably not far off the mark. In January 2008, UNICEF estimates nearly 10 million poverty related deaths per year for children under age five.

MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. Public policies helped create the American middle class. Public neglect has put the squeeze on it. Here's an excerpt from (Not) Keeping up with our Parents.

STIMULUS REVISITED. Here's the Economic Policy Institute on the need for a targeted stimulus package that includes investments in infrastructure, extending unemployment and food stamps, and fiscal aid to states.

YOU'RE NOT JUST GETTING OLDER, you may be getting wiser.

FORGET THE BEATLES. Here's something about a real walrus.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JINGLES AND BELLS

Caption: From a 1513 woodcut by Albrecht Duerer. Ride, boldly ride, if you seek El Dorado.

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. In addition to comments and links about current events, it's all Poe all the time this week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned yesterday, Ralph Waldo Emerson once referred to Poe as "the jingle-man." He had a point. Poe's poems were kind of obsessed with meter and can have an effect somewhere between hypnotic and irritating.

While some, like say The Conqueror Worm, are just kind of weird and gross, others hold up pretty well.

Here's El Cabrero's selection of Poe's Greatest Poetic Hits:

*The Raven. A perennial favorite. Here's the first stanza for old time's sake:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

Once, when I was bored at a meeting, I wrote a parody of it with a little help from a friend (you know who you are, E.D.) as it might have been performed by Snoop Dogg. Alas, the manuscript has been lost. As a consolation prize, here's a cool interactive Raven website.

*Eldorado. This poem about a knight so bold was published in 1849 and was probably inspired by the California gold rush. I still like these lines:

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

*Annabel Lee. Poe had a major thing for beautiful dead women. This one goes out to anyone who has ever loved with a love that was more than love.

*The Bells. This is the jingle man at his most jingly. The late folk singer Phil Ochs did a really good musical version of this if you can find it.

And here's a bonus feature. In 1846, Poe wrote an essay titled "The Philosophy of Composition," which was really about how he wrote The Raven. It's unintentionally funny since he attempts to present the poem as the work of simple deductive reasoning. As he explained it, melancholy and death are the ideal subjects for poetic beauty and nothing could be more melancholy than the death of a beautiful and beloved woman. QED.

Everybody got that?

THE RACE IS ON between wages and inflation, but it looks like inflation is coming out ahead, according to the latest Economic Policy Institute snapshot.

MORE ON THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE from Demos.

THAT'S A RELIEF...Rush Limbaugh, international science expert, says there's nothing to climate change.

NEW NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

PERSONALS. SS, thanks for the Poe action figure! RC from Milton, thanks for the raven--Poe forever!--and watch out for Mean the Shark!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED