universities be like: Ha ha yes, we totally c$are abou$t you$r Educa$tion!! our $tudent’s learning is our numb$er one pri$ority :$)

the fact that community colleges are seen as less valid and for “stupid” people is a result of classism and in this essay I will-

ppl in the tags saying that it’s “genuinely a lesser tier of education because people go there for trades and nursing and thats about it” are just proving that its classism. bc a) no thats absolutely not correct. a good chunk of people that go to community colleges do so to knock out their gen eds at a lower price than they’d be if they went to a four year, then transfer to a four year. and more importantly b) trade professions are not lesser than other professions that take higher degrees. people who go into things that take associates degrees are not “stupid”.

if you think ppl who are too poor to attend a four year university for all four years, or that ppl who are too poor to/don’t want to get their bachelor’s/master’s/doctorate are “stupid” then i have news for you:

thats classism, babe

psa to fellow college instructors: it costs exactly $0 to be understanding when students are stressed as fuck at midterm time instead of saying “lol they knew it was coming tho”

I lied, this actually cost me $31 today because I bought a fuckton of coffee for all my students but you should’ve seen their faces it was like I’d given them the holy grail, the fountain of youth, and the second season of firefly all in one

i made a college vine compilation b/c Suffering™️

(warning for loud noise in some of them)

“You plagiarized a sentence in an essay? Expelled & we’ll make it hard for you to enroll into another school ever again.”

“You raped and assaulted a student on campus? You can come back to school.”

fuck the education system

I will never NOT reblog this.

These are nine of the most prestigious universities in the world, in many cases the cream of their nation and better than most U.S. institutions. And when you compare their prices to the top U.S. schools, you’ll wonder why anyone goes to college in America in the first place.

#srsly if a higher education is mandatory for success why is okay to deny the entire next generation that success by practically putting them 6ft under before they even get to the start line?

What if colleges only made you pay the percentage of tuition that you failed, so if you got an average of 86 for the year you’d only have to pay 14% of the tuition, but if you got a 94 then it’d only be 6%. That way we’d be rewarding the success and even if you flunked the semester, you still wouldn’t have to pay for ALL of the tuition

You are the future. 

#but that will never happen   #because people be money grubbing bitches   #but we can hope and dream  

This is summertime at Brock University.

Oh, hey, it’s the school where I went for four years of my life and then stuck around for another year (it’s insane how much time you can spend at a university even when you’re not studying there) and I will most likely be spending another year kicking around it’s edges before going off on an out-of-Ontario-academic-theatre adventure. Yay.

WHERE WOULD THE UNIVERSITY BE WITHOUT YOU?!?

via racialicious: (full text of the article below, figured it was THAT good)

To (All) the White Girls Who Didn’t Get Into the College of Their Dreams,

I’m not gonna lie. When I applied to Brown University back in 2005, I was positive that I was getting in. I didn’t care what my college counselor was telling me. “Reach” my ass.

I was a legacy. An African-American legacy. An African-American legacy applying from a New England boarding school where I was also a legacy. My academic record wasn’t perfect, but I arrogantly told myself that “not perfect” at boarding school basically equated to public-school excellence. I had fantastic SAT scores, and I had great extracurriculars. In addition to varsity sports and stage crew, I was a Black competitive figure skater!

As far as I was concerned at the naive age of 17, I was a freakin’ unicorn.

As far as Brown was concerned, I wasn’t even worth the wait list.

I ended up choosing between Pitzer and Oberlin and, like many other Brown University rejects, I chose Oberlin. And that was that. Brown didn’t want me, but I’d done all that I could, and I just had to accept that.

On the flip side, I remember hearing about a girl from my first high school who also graduated in my year (’06). She didn’t get into the Ivy League school of her choice but, instead of going to one of the other schools that accepted her, she walked around high school collecting signatures on a petition to prove to the college that their admissions department had made a mistake and that she deserved to be there. To be fair, it worked; the college let her in after receiving her petition. But I remember rolling my eyes and saying something about that being some “white people’s foolishness,” to my friends, because who does that?

Over the past few months the answer has become clear: White girls do that.

And it’s moved beyond petitions. Y’all are in the Supreme Court now. I’m looking at you, Abigail Fischer, claiming that Affirmative Action and the need to meet federal quotas took your rightful spot at the University of Texas. Never mind the fact that you had an average GPA of 3.59, below average SAT scores of 1180, and weren’t in the top 10 percentile of your class. There’s nothing wrong with any of those numbers I just mentioned– plenty of people with those scores and grades are going to go onto college and very successful futures. They just may not be going to the University of Texas.

And then there’s Suzy Lee Weiss who claims a 4.5 GPA, a 2120 SAT score, and spot as a US Senate Page. She got into college, but not into any of the Ivy League schools that had been her first choices. Her Wall Street Journal editorial, “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me,” claims that colleges lied to her because just being herself wasn’t enough.

Suzy’s desire for a “Tiger mom” so that she could be one of, “those kids who by age 14 got their doctorate, cured a disease, or discovered a guilt-free brownie recipe” is equally laughable once you wrap your head around her belief of the stereotype. First of all, I don’t think someone who whines as much as Suzy could’ve handled growing up under my parents, much less the full Amy Chua parenting doctrine. A child of color often has to live under a completely different set of rules than their white counterparts. We work twice as hard to go half as far and still have to deal with a persistent academic achievement gap. The helicopter-parent approach isn’t used to produce60 Minutes-worthy results; it’s just what’s necessary to survive public school (and life) in America as a child of color.

Suzy Lee Weiss on the Today show. (NBC / Getty)

In an ill-advised appearance on The Today Show, Suzy argues that the necessity of diversity means that colleges are judging applicants using factors (read: race) that the applicants have no control over. “Anyone can relate to this,” she says.

Actually, Suzy, no, they can’t. I mean, we could start with fact that most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to cry over our failings publicly in a nationally published papers where our sisters just so happened to work once upon a time. Plus, in singling out diversity as your issue, you’re eliminating half the college applying population from your debate. By your logic, if a white girl with your background doesn’t get into an Ivy League college, it’s because there weren’t enough spots for white students that year. But, if a non-white girl with an identical profile is rejected, who do they blame? No one. They don’t have the excuse; they simply weren’t good enough. We don’t get to make ourselves feel better by engaging in a smear campaign against the fictional Cherokee girl that took our Ivy League slot.

We’re not privileged enough to get to use a convenient excuse to shift the blame, and using it only makes all of you look like you’re grasping at straws. Let’s consider The Today Show’s example: Princeton received 26,000 applications last year and accepted just 7% of those. That’s around 1820 students. This is a good time for everyone to sit back for a minute and remember that college admissions are, in essence, a competition, and rejection is part of that process. I’m not saying it’s always a fair competition (that’s another post entirely)–even for you white girls–but that doesn’t make this any less true. The majority of applicants to Ivy League schools have GPAs of 4.0 or higher,  a veritable scroll of extracurriculars, and stellar SAT scores. Admissions officers expect that. It’s what a student can put on top of that that makes them stand out from the pile.

Take a moment to look at it from an admissions officer’s point of view. Do they always want that kid with the 4.5 GPA? Should they? How many applicants leave them with a poor impression during their interviews, despite that 4.0+ GPA, high IQ scores, and three-pages worth of charity work? It’s all well and good to be smartest person in your class, but why would anyone want to admit a student who comes off as entitled, smarmy, ignorant, and racist? Suzy, you might want to ask yourself how you presented yourself in your interviews and applications, because if I were admissions officer reading your WSJ “satire” and I’d rejected you? I wouldn’t be regretting my decision.

There’s an arrogance in high school students that manifests during the college-application process, but it’s an arrogance that correlates with already existing racial and class privilege. Coming from my school environment, with my background, I expected to get into an Ivy League college –a “name-brand school.” I kind of understand where Suzy’s coming from (though I’m guessing that when you add a dash of white privilege on top of that, the unfamiliar feeling of rejection and not getting your way is multiplied to extremes that I can’t possibly fathom). She’s young–you’re all young–and disappointment is hard at that age. It’s hard to understand that despite working hard for four years, you may not get into your first choice of school. It’s easy to look for someone to blame, and it’s easier still to want to place that blame on groups of people who can so easily be scapegoats for your problems…and historically always have.

To paraphrase Mad Men: “Not every little girl gets to do what they want. The world could not support that many ballerinas…or Ivy League graduates.” My advice to Suzy, Abigail, and every other white girl who didn’t get into their first choice of college this year is to keep your rejection out of the public eye and do what every other kid does when they go off to school in the Fall: give it the ol’ college try. Seriously, make the most of the environment around you, and if you really don’t like it? Again, keep the Wall Street Journal out of it; have an amazing first year, and apply for transfer. And do it while understanding that the group of Black, Native, and Asian, and Latina first-year students hanging out on a Harvard quad had nothing to do with you not getting in in the first place.

That was your own comparative mediocrity.

–Kendra James (My Third Choice College, ’10)

This is perfect. Entitlement of any kind frustrates me.