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THE RUGGED RAGGED INDIVIDUAL Tapped's newest contributor to my obsolescence, Janna Goodrich, makes a terrific point in her post on college affordability:
The "rugged individual" would naturally just saddle the horse, ride off to college, and work full-time through his or her college (most likely a very long and often interrupted) career but such rugged individuals are few, jobs paying enough for this are even fewer, and the whole setup would cause a lot of these individuals to become rather ragged. Not exactly the best case to guarantee upward mobility.It's worth keeping in mind that our school funding inequities and weak welfare state and so forth don't merely make getting to college harder for low income students, it makes stayin in college trickier too. For some reason, we as a society have decided it a productive outcome to force only some students to work side jobs while they receive their professional education. No end of well-off children get sent off to university with the parental warning to remember that "school is your job now." And no end of less lucky kids have to remember that their job is their job now, and if they can read through Kant in spare moments, all the better. The deck is, in this way as in so many others, stacked against upward mobility for all but the already elevated.--Ezra Klein
