Life In A Dropout Factory—"It Was Like High School, But I Was Paying For It"
08/27/2010
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Steve Sailer's blog on the dropout factory style of college is below. I saw the Washington Monthly article he was reading, and it included this:
With its tree-lined campus and gleaming new steel and glass convocation center, Chicago State certainly looked impressive. But within his first month there, Nestor wanted to leave. Advisers in the engineering department seemed clueless about guiding him to the right courses, insisting that if he wanted to take programming he first needed to enroll in a computer class that showed students how to turn on a monitor and operate a mouse. (Nestor required no such training.) The library boasted a robot that retrieved books, but Nestor would have preferred that it simply stay open past eight p.m., since class sometimes ended at nine p.m. or later, leaving him without a useful place to study or do research before going home. Trash littered the classrooms and grounds, and during class many of the students would simply carry on conversations among themselves and ignore the instructors—or even talk back to them. Nestor was appalled. “It was like high school, but I was paying for it,” he says.

[College Dropout Factories by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly]

Nestor is "third of six children in an immigrant Mexican family,"—but he's in a college where almost everyone else is black. You could hardly blame him if he didn't want to assimilate.
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