The Ivy League Was Another Planet
7th April 2013
Read it.
This is pretty amusing, but I was particularly struck by one bit:
I never saw a college rep at Pahrump Valley High, but the military made sure that a stream of alumni flooded back to our school in their uniforms and fresh flattops, urging their old chums to enlist. Those students who did even reasonably well on the ASVAB (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, for readers who went to schools where this test was not so exhaustively administered) were thoroughly hounded by recruiters.
Yeah, that’s about right.
Granted, there’s a good reason top colleges aren’t sending recruiters around the country to woo kids like me and Ryan (who, incidentally, got his B.S. at U.N.R. before going on to earn his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue and now holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship with the National Research Council). The Army needs every qualified candidate it can get, while competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle. But if these colleges are truly committed to diversity, they have to start paying attention to the rural poor.
But of course the ‘diversity’ meme is only a Clever Plastic Disguise for admitting Fashionable Minority Kids who will become stalwart members of the Crust upon graduation. The rural poor are the Bottom Crust, and those we will have always with us.