Of course not, if she'd been smart enough to figure that out, she might have been smart enough to get invited.

"Elitist," unless used sarcastically, isn't the right word. (And many might not guess that it WAS used sarcastically!)

Reminds me of those situations where angry students say: "I worked as hard as I could - therefore, I deserve an A!" Um, on a math test, even an 80 doesn't get an A. Non-math tests tend to be graded pretty much the same way. Deal with it.

It's possible to graduate from a university without the education you paid for.

If anything, too few discriminate enough. There ought to be a T shirt or a bumper sticker.

My aunt is in the administration of Temple University in Philadelphia. She's sat on boards that adjudicate harassment complaints within the University that involve staff and faculty. By her estimate, perhaps 10%-15% are valid and these seldom involve really egregious behavior.

When I'd asked her what she thought motivates so many bogus complaints, she'd attributed them to a combination of bigotry and opportunism w/ a significant number also being generated by people with psychological problems. The complainants know that certain faculty and staff are vulnerable (e.g. men) and expect that they can leverage charges against them to their advantage, for revenge, status, or some other reward.

Apparently most of these charges just go away once it's clarified that the individual being accused has to have actually done something. A lot of people seem to believe that their subjective impression of someone's attitudes and behavior is what constitutes harassment.

A few years ago at SRS, someone left a hangman's noose tied up in one of the field shelters. Automatically, it was a racist obscenity. The hue and cry was conducted away from my area and on a different schedule; I'd have loved to show up and claim it was against me:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm outraged. My ancestors struggled for thousand years under the yoke of British rule. They strung us up by the thousand - subdued, we were even subject to the practice of primus noctae, where the noblemen took our brides to bed first when we were married.

What? You're not Irish? What are you whining about?"

>>Of course not, if she'd been smart enough to figure that out, she might have been smart enough to get invited.

Robert nails it!

My best friend in the States many years ago married a woman with 3 mixed ethnic kids. He calls them mulattoes. While that is correct, I have always found that weird.

The eldest two were large kids, a male and a female.

They also were great athletes. They were almost instantly basketball stars at the community college. It was understood they were going to play college ball for 4 years, and go pro.

They chose to cocoon with other pigmented students, instead of whites, which they could have done. The militant losers they associated with told them, "You don't need to study. They don't DARE to flunk you, or you can file a discrimination suit."

They didn't study, and they did dare flunk them, and there was no basis for a discrimination lawsuit. Basketball career over, low paying minimum wage jobs forever. Good job, idiots.

That is just one more example of the error in cocooning with only those you think are most like yourself, who egg you on to do stupid things with no negative feedback. (And, this is true for right or left.)

The youngest girl went mainstream, no druggies, no pimps, and ended up marrying a white, an ambitious white who ended up with a good job.

Wow, Irlandes, that's some inspiring story. The youngest benefitted not by studying and doing well for herself but by marrying a white man who got a good job. You go girl!

When I was in school the recycling bins were labeled White Paper and Colored Paper. We changed Colored Paper to Paper of Color, because we were college students and thought we were the most amusing people on the planet. It still makes me laugh.

That selection from article was good.

But the 'Maginot Line' of underwear, the statement that he doesn't know any men younger than him who have encountered women in garters and nylons? He's seriously removed from reality.

Maybe that's what happens when you languish in the arcane recesses of Academia hitting on girls half your age.

Seriously needs to get out more. Twenty first century. Check it out. It's neato.

Part of the problem is that there are far too many liberal arts majors - usually kids going to college because they don't know what else to do with their lives. By majoring in some useless subject, they can put off growing up for another four years, while living off of someone else's dime.

An excerpt from an old article, but still accurate:

"Go to any U.S. university. You will hear lamentation and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Washington has become unfeeling and stupidly refuses to support higher education: don't those idiots on the Potomac know that education is a investment in the future? Don't they know that human resources are our most valuable resources, that public higher education is necessary preparation for a democratic future? That we must invest in the future?

"But now wander about the campus, and look at how our typical university allocates that all-important investment dollar. You will find that the "social science" departments are far larger than the "hard sciences," and indeed have more students than are enrolled in liberal arts. You will find that even in states with tens of thousands of unemployed teachers, the Department of Education is among the very largest departments on campus.

"The social sciences will be large and important departments, with many members of faculty and much classroom space. One wonders what it is that graduates in the social sciences are prepared to do. It must be an important skill; we are spending a large part of our scarce but all-important investment funds to acquire it. Oddly enough, though, we're not training so many engineers and scientists, physicists and mathematicians. Why?"

The summer after high school I sat in on some of my future husband's college courses. I knew, without studying, the answers to every question on the test handed to me. There was no challenge and therefore, no point. I could not fathom spending the thousands of dollars on this "education" that wouldn't have made me any smarter.

And I would assume, Bradley13, that a good majority of our greatest mathematical talents add up the costs of "education" and decide that they can make more money as a union contractor than spend their prime years in a institution that will not teach them any more than they could learn on their own.

Our education system is the best preview I can imagine for what our health care will be like in the future.

>>Wow, Irlandes, that's some inspiring story. The youngest benefitted not by studying and doing well for herself but by marrying a white man who got a good job. You go girl!

I did not say she did not study and do well for herself. My point was, instead of hanging around druggies and pimps, (actually my friend said the term in the local ghetto is not pimp but whoremaster, and since he lived there for 20 years I am guessing he knows) which her two siblings did, she went main stream and stayed clear of the ghetto. And, thus ended up finding a good man who happened to be white, and had some ambition. Make of that what you will.

But, yes, since you say so, a woman probably is smarter if she is going to have kids, to marry someone with a job and a future, no matter the ethnicity. But, her siblings chose to cocoon with the folks from the local ghetto and had no way to go but down.

Clearly, those who cocoon in a certain group, whether political or ethnic, are limited in their marriage choices among other things. In her case, avoiding the ethnic cocoon her siblings insisted on, she had a wider range of options.

>>decide that they can make more money as a union contractor than spend their prime years in a institution

On certain men's boards, they are urging young men to go to heating/cooling school, and work as a self-employed a/c/furnace repair, and bill $80 an hour instead of taking a college course, and walk from door to door begging for a job which is going to a woman no matter how good his grades are.

I have customers who ask me for advice on what their children should do if they want a career in "computers". I tell them "don't."

Unless you are certain that you'll land a gig like mine (where you are the outsourcing for companies too small to justify full-time IT staff) you'll be outsourced either to a major player like IBM or CSC where the pay is shit, or to India. Tech is not where the long-term stability is at the higher end, unless you're Gabe Newell or John Carmack.

Trades are where the cash is. Sure, you're working with your hands and your body, but you've still got to have a brain. And as an electrician
or plumber, you'll set yourself up to be running your own shop in 20 years, and you'll have employees to do the work.

There's going to be no shortage of things that need fixing, so you might as well find a need and fill it.

mrkD sez: "It's possible to graduate from a university without the education you paid for."

One of my grad school profs remarked, as people were about to leave when he was late to class, "College and grad school are the only places people don't mind not getting what they paid for."