Essay on Is College Worth It Walter Williams

Essay on Is College Worth It Walter Williams Essay on Is College Worth It Walter Williams Is College Worth It? Walter E. Williams Wednesday, August 27, 2008 As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it's worth both the money they will spend and their children's time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled "America's Most Over-rated Product: Higher Education ( www.martynemko.com/articles/americas-most-overrated-producthigher-education_id1539 )." The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend eight and a half years in college. That's even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million students who took the ACT college entrance examinations in 2007 were prepared to do college-level study in math, English and science. Even though a majority of students are grossly under-prepared to do college-level work, each year colleges admit hundreds of thousands of such students. While colleges have strong financial motives to admit unsuccessful students, for failing students the experience can be devastating. They often leave with their families, or themselves, having piled up thousands of dollars in debt. There is possibly trauma and poor self-esteem for having failed, and perhaps embarrassment for their families. Dr. Nemko says that worst of all is that few of these former college students, having spent thousands of dollars, wind up in a job that required a college education. It's not uncommon to find them driving a taxi, working at a restaurant or department store, performing some other job that they could have had as a high school graduate or dropout. What about students who are prepared for college? First, only 40 percent of each year's 2 million freshmen graduate in four years; 45 percent never graduate at all. Often, having a college degree does not mean much. According to a 2006 Pew Charitable Trusts study, 50 percent of college seniors failed a test that required them to interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, and compare credit card offers. About 20 percent of college seniors did not have the quantitative skills to estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station. According a recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the percentage of college graduates proficient in prose literacy has declined from 40 percent to 31 percent within the past decade. Employers report that many college graduates lack the basic skills of critical thinking, writing and problem-solving. Colleges are in business. Students are a cost. Research is a profit center. When colleges

Margaret Atwood Essays

Margaret Atwood Essays Margaret Atwood Paper Margaret Atwood Paper Essay Topic: The Handmaids Tale What do you find interesting about the ways in which Margaret Atwood presents relationships between men and women? In The Handmaids Tale, Atwood continually streeses the importance of intimacy, tenderness and love, in its many guises. Considering Atwood is a feminist writer who creates a patriarchal dystopia, one might expect the book to have a rather an aggressive attitude towards men, but In The handmaids Tale Margaret Atwood explores the interaction between men and women, paticularly within heterosexual relationships. The most significant relationship within Offreds life is undoubtedly that with Luke, the central protagonists lover, husband and father to her child. Through the use of flashback, Atwood creates a picture of domestic happiness and the reader is led to believe that the two were very happy together. As the novel progresses, Atwood juxtaposes the present of the novel, a dystopian vision of a modern tyranny and the past, Offreds life in contemporary society. It is her role as mother and wife that offred remembers fondly, evoking mmories of her life with Luke and the loving memories they shared. The contrast clearly emphasises both the loving domesticity in which Luke and offred lived and the loneliness of Life in Gilead where relationships are not permitted for handmaids. During the flashbacks to the past Offred evokes memories of incidents which suggest that Offred and Luke did not have an entirely equal relationship It is the relationship between offred and the commander which is explored in the most depth, as the reader is given access to lots of the dialogue between the two. It is ironic that considering the status of each of the two, we see that Offred is able o gain a lot of the power within the relationship, she even goes as far to reprimand him for trying to touch her during the ceremony and then says herself, we were on quite different terms by now. However, throughout the novel Offreds attitude towards the commander fluctuates, she thinks of him as both a peron for whom she can have affectionate feelings and a figure of authority, of whom she must be wary. The turbulent nature of their realtionship reflects the constant power battle which Atwood suggests is inherrent in heterosexual relationships within sexist cultures. This issue is explicitely raised by Moira when she tells Offred that sex is only an equal even Stephen act within homosexual relationships, this may well be a reference and avocation of the infamous feminist slogan, the personal is political. Offreds relationship with the Commander is contrasted with her relationship with Nick, who is a less powerful figure. Ofrfred develops very strong feelings for nick, at points in the novel it appears that their relationship only consists of sex. In the novel sex is equated with both freedom and power, ffred certainly derives a greater sense of self and strength and from her relationship with Nick. Even in Gilead, where life is regimented and circumscibed, Offred and Nick still find each other and risk their lives to see each other. One of thre sub themes of the novel is that no matter how hard one tries to control or restrict human relationships, people will reach out for each other, just as the women in the Red centre touched fingers. Amongst the terror, brutality and oppression which constitutes the Gileadean regime, Offreds moments of happiness, illustrated all the more poignantly by her haunting first person narrative are those with Nick. He is associated with domestic and homely situations, sitting in his bedroom or washing the car, he and Offreds hunger for each other lies testimony to the power and importance of loving heterosexual relationships. Thus Atwood illustrtes the difficulties, but affirms the power and potential happiness of relationships beween men and women. I think she suggests that political contexts permeate individual relationships, and thus there is hope for even better relations between men and women in a more equal relationship. What do you find interesting about Margaret Atwoods presentation of Gilead the society in which the novel is set? In Gilead, Margaret Atwood creates a futuristic dystopia, characterised by brutality, terror and repression. It is a hierarchical and patriarchal society based on the Old testament story of Jacob, and the quote from Genesis is the opening of the book. Gilead is a fundamental Christian state, in which a ruling elite took power via a coup detat following a terrorist massacre of a democratic government. Gileadian life is supposedly biblically based, however the reader quickly becomes aware that the bible is misquoted and manipulated, Blessed are the silent. Selective use is made of Christian values, FAITH as printed on the cushion is cherished, but HOPE and CHARITY are incongruent with Gileadian ethics and so are ignored. It is not only biblical quotes that are perverted, Gilead is full of familiar slogans, From each according to her ability, to each according to his needs. This is particularly ironic, as Gilead advocates hierarchical, patriarchal structures and the phrase is originally a surmise of Marxism, the two being entirely theoretically opposed. Many societies have manipulated religion to influence people, and Gilead ensures success by prohibiting reading and controlling the media an uneducated population being easier to control. The repetitive nature of the slogans, and the new vocabulary prayvaganza is reminiscent of modern marketing campaigns, the manipulation of profound sentiments as a use of rhetoric conveys a criticism of contemporary marketing and consumerism. This can be seen as a specific critique of American marketing which is often viewed as paicularly ruthless, especially in contrast to Canada, which is where Atwood is from. The reader is told that the regime has not spread as far as Canada, which is significant considering that Canada is a more liberal country. This may be a wider critique of American life suggesting America is full of extremes, which as Gilead proves, can be a very dangerous thing, this provides the undertones of Canadian American dialogue within the novel.

Shaping the foundation of racial independence through social Assignment

Shaping the foundation of racial independence through social revolution - Assignment Example This essay discusses that for hundreds of years, blacks and other minority races were considered as little more than speaking animals to the elite aristocracy, unable to be in the ranks of polite or civilized society, not allowed to seek education, and certainly not allowed to hold important or political offices. The racial inequality in this standardized caste system is such that it hinders social evolution as a whole by accepting as custom that people of a different skin color hold less value than those of white descent. With that said, a close look will be taken into the social revolution that sparked racial equality during the War of Independence between 1808 and 1824 in Spanish America to illustrate the role of minorities and the significant power they attained by refusing to further be defined by the color of their skin. There are at least three leading arguments proposed by George Reid Andrew, John Lynch, and Marixa Lasso that expound upon how the minority races took strides i n shaping the revolutionary efforts for racial equality by abolishing the caste system as well as illustrating how the elite reacted to the activism and consequent construction of the newly defined nation-states. To begin with, George Reid Andrew’s Afro-Latin America entitled â€Å"Our New Citizens, the Blacks: The Politics of Freedom, 1810-1890,† notes that â€Å"at the same time that the slaves were using the openings created by the independence wars to pursue freedom and emancipation, free blacks and mulattoes were capitalizing on wartime conditions to strike down the colonial racial laws.† 1.† Andrew makes an important distinction in his discourse of the minority groups as he defines the separation also felt by the slaves and the free blacks and mulattoes in that even in a minority situation where camaraderie would have ensured political success, still the priorities differed. Even though they shared an ethnicity and were similarly oppressed within the caste system, still they fought the same battle separately. Luckily, this dissention didn’t hinder the social revolution because as â€Å"nineteenth-century jurist Peridigao Malheiro described slavery [was] ‘a volcano†¦a bomb ready to explode with the first spark,’ and slave rebellion was most likely, he noted, during periods when the free population was divided by internal disputes and conflict2.† In this, the minorities held power they might not even have known to exist because the caste system was ready for collapse; it was only a matter of time. Essentially, the caste system in Spanish America was one dictated from birth and based purely upon the color of one’s skin. This meant that no one could ever move above their caste (unless they were a woman and lucky enough to marry a man of lighter skin tone), and that those in the elite levels held ultimate control over society because they were granted certain inalienable assets and power. In pe rhaps the most poignant definition of the inherent impact the caste system held over those in the lower castes, Andrew cites a satirical poem from a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro â€Å"about a planter’s efforts to hire newly freed libertos to work on his plantation3.† In the poem, â€Å"the writer leaves no doubt of the damage done to these former slaves by slavery: the liberto’s crippled condition, his shortness of breath4,† and finally, his refusal to be defined by the color of his skin when being directly referred to as ‘black.’ In comparison, in an excerpt from John Lynch’s The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826 entitled â€Å"Revolution in the Rio de la Plata,† Lynch highlights that, pressed by economic expansion and cracks within the current aristocratic mores, revolutionaries made decisive militant advances and found leadership under Pedro Domingo Murillo and Jose Antonio Medina. The minorities created an official annou ncement that â€Å"now [was] the time to organize a new system of government, founded upon the interests of our country which is