Kicking. Squealing.
The New York Times notes, in an article discussing the ethnic shift occurring after the city’s university system (CUNY) increased admission standards:
At the university’s five most competitive four-year colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — nearly 12 percent of freshmen entering in 2001 had SAT scores of 1,200 or more. In 2007, for the last prerecession class, the figure was up to 16 percent, and by last fall, it had jumped to 26 percent.
At the same time, black representation among first-time freshmen at those colleges dropped, to 10 percent last fall from 17 percent in 2001. Over the same period, the Hispanic share rose slightly for several years, then fell once the recession began, to 18 percent, while the white portion fell slightly, to 35 percent.
Asians are now entering the top colleges in the greatest numbers, composing 37 percent of those classes, up from 25 percent a decade earlier.
To be expected. Even city and school officials knew this would happen before the standards were increased which is why they opposed the standards increase. Of course, the schools face their own challenges. Admitting students with worse academic records does not better serve the good students. For this reason, affirmative action policies or arbitrary and ill-fitting standards thresholds rarely work in the long term.
But on another note, the entire CUNY system reminds me of one of my pet peeves during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Protesting bank bailouts were one thing, but those “the rent is too damn high” type of arguments were another. Much of the unrest, it seemed, stemmed from young New Yorker’s desire to live in a cultural mecca for pennies on the dollar. Sort of like the characters in Rent or Girls. And that cultural mecca was funded, in part, through dollars created and spent on the very same Street which they were protesting. “Trickle down culture” is what I like to call it.
One of the draws of CUNY schools – besides their proximity and convenience – are their low tuition rates which is mostly funded by State and city taxes. Half of CUNY’s $2.6 billion budget is covered by state taxes (which reach almost 9% for incomes over $500 k); 39% is covered by tuition, and 11% of the budget ($270 million) is covered by city taxes of which the top 10% of New Yorkers pay 71%.
CUNY and its students should send a ‘thank you’ note to Wall Street and all of the other capitalists that help keep the city alive and thriving. But at this point they’re more likely to send a pipe bomb.
I went to Hunter back when it was even more affordable (late 90s) and even then the % of minorities was low. But because it is known for their nursing and education programs the 3:1 female to male ratio was (and I’m guessing still is) fucking great.
In the realms of Diversity is Strength, we find over at Conservative Treehouse that Trayvon Martin had signs of liver damage associated with long-term usage of Lean. We also find another violent black 17 year old who seemed to have no grattitude for being helped.
They say one (especially those of us of a certain age) should never put the date of one’s degree on a resume. Unfortunately, I have always had to do this because I graduated from CCNY in the early 70s and have to prove that I went there while it was still “The Proletarian Harvard” and before it disintegrated completely.
At least I have a graduate degree from a far more respected institution to save my ass.
As a Midwesterner who (I assume) hasn’t spent much time in New York City, you’re confusing several distinct phenomena here.
At its core, CUNY is a system of affordable vocational colleges for working class New Yorkers. As a previous poster pointed out, the CUNYs focus on “pink collar” professions like nursing and teaching, although the flagship schools also have decent STEM programs. (I don’t know the stats but I’d guess that the STEM aspect has increased as the student body becomes more Asian.)
For obvious status reasons, none of the characters on Girls would be caught dead studying at a CUNY.
AFAIK, the left-wing activism that goes on there is mostly black or Hispanic nationalism, which in practice means agitating for more money for ethnic studies programs. There’s a vocal minority of aging Jewish socialists in certain humanities departments, but that’s a dying subculture distinct from affluent young people’s SWPL leftism.
I don’t have hard survey data, of course, but I’d bet that the vast majority of CUNY students are grateful to the system and the taxpayers for giving them an affordable shot at the American Dream.
None of this overlaps much with the Girls world of hipster/SWPL art and media, which is the province of transplants and the children of NYC’s elite. Most of these people arrive in NYC after college, having gotten a libarts degree at a private college or flagship state school. If they were educated in the city, it was probably at one of the expensive private colleges (NYU, Columbia, Pratt), not a CUNY.
For a young SWPL new to the city, the cost of living can be a rude awakening, although if they had bothered to take Econ 101 they would recognize it as a simple case of supply and demand. Every year thousands of recent humanities graduates pour into the city looking for hip, fashionable jobs in media or nonprofits or the arts. There are many more job seekers than there are jobs, so most of them have to make do with unpaid internships and poverty-level freelance wages.
This is the world that Girls is satirizing. Often these people have parents or a trust fund backing them up, but for those that don’t, living in NYC on that kind of money is brutal. They’ve got a semi-legit grievance but haven’t yet realized that they ought to be turning their rage on the colleges that sold them useless degrees in the first place.
Finally, there’s Occupy, a straight-up product of the far left protest subculture. Contrary to the breathless media reports about ordinary Americans raging at the banks, anyone who’s spent time around protesters can recognize that OWS is just another collection of the usual suspects. Some public employee unions got tentatively involved when it looked like it might become a genuine mass movement, but they backed away pretty quickly when they realized that the shots were being called by the usual clique of perpetual grad students and would-be Lenins.
Again, no hard stats, but I suspect that the demographics of Occupy skew a lot more NYU than CUNY — in my anecdotal experience, trust-fund kids are overrepresented in the protest subculture, since ordinary people with bills to pay don’t have the time or energy for six-hour consensus meetings at the vegan bike collective.
Back in the 50s and even the 60s, City College of New York (before its absorption into the NY state system), was one of the most selective colleges in the country, rivaling the Ivies. Tuition and fees were free, and everyone commuted from and to home. The curriculum was rigorous by any standard, and the graduates were superbly capable and superbly educated.
Since then, CUNY was reduced to something less than even SUNY. Its graduates are suspect, and some departments produce illiterates. The Trustees have a long way to go to improve matters, and CUNY will never again reach the levels it had attained 50 years ago. What a waste just for PC feed-good!
Speaking of NYU revolutionaries… this video always cheers me up.
total:
you’re right that my piece conflates distinct issues. i didn’t segue properly. it’s not that CUNY students are complaining about the cost of their education. but one of the reasons that the education is desired there is because it is cheap. which segues us to the discussion (found in Rent and Girls) about rent prices in the city which i believe is at least part of the frustration on the part of many of the occupiers there. there is the sense that young ppl in NYC want to live there even though they can’t afford it. instead of accepting their fate, they complain that “the rent is too damn high”. but at the same time, the reason that they want to live there stems from the reason that the rent is too damn high.
Girls actually mentions this. in the last episode Lena Dunham’s character says that its strange that people want to live in NYC – a city that doesn’t want them and is constantly trying to reject them.
The number of trust fund kids is perpetually greatly exaggerated. By far most of the guys and girls whose parents pay outright for their tuition and living expenses at e.g. Harvard, Princeton or NYU don’t give their kids trust funds. They might help them, esp. girls, for a year or two out of college, but no trust fund.
@chuck
Makes sense. My point is just that the rent issue gets so much play because of the number of high status but low income media jobs that exist in NYC. For people in finance, law or tech, rents are relatively proportionate to salaries, even if the absolute $-per-square-foot numbers are still high compared to anywhere else in the US. (Of course, blue-collar and middle-class wage earners who want to stay in the city they grew up in are getting screwed, but what else is new?)
@doug:
You’re certainly right in terms of the average responsible student. I do think the proportion is higher in “creative” fields and their hipster hangers-on, particularly the fine art world (which has traditionally been a place for wealthy families to hide their black sheep), but that could be confirmation bias on my part — the classmates who stand out in my mind are the ones who are still living a mysteriously comfortable vagabond lifestyle well into their 30s, not the majority who’ve grown up and gotten real jobs.