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June 23, 2006
Cobb on the Real World vs. College...
Cobb is back. Mostly. Here is a great post from him about how college isn't like the real world...
- The thing that no student or graduate wants to hear, I'm about to say. Brains are a cheap commodity in the US. Universities are suppliers of moderately priced labor, just as Mexico is a supplier of cheap labor. There isn't a university on this planet which is as well organized and disciplined as a sharp corporation or a halfway decent army, and that's the thing you don't learn until you've spent a couple decades out in the world of work, where people aren't protected like students and faculty are. The beefs with Affirmative Action pale in significance to the ranches of conflict out here where people with tens of millions of dollars compete with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. But that's nothing you can learn while colleges are teaching what they teach. Perhaps the only people who actually do learn that from the brainy side of the equation are those guys who figure out how to build a better medical treatment in school and cash in by building a company around it.
So when it comes down to a black thing, getting into university is just the first step into the American middle class, and quite frankly it doesn't pay as well as learning construction. I wish somebody would have told me when I was in college that I could get 500k in revenue just making and selling plastic water tanks, like the neighbor of an associate of mine is doing. Oh, excuse me. 500k in revenue per month in a 5 person company. I would have avoided white collar, upscale corporate life like the plague.
The real hardball problem is that Affirmative Action's benefits and detractions don't amount to a hill of beans in the big old world. But there are still at least a couple million people who don't much care about the big old world and are just focused on the Affirmative Action world, where SAT scores, skin color and grade point averages make all the difference. I never thought Grutter and Hopwood were worthy of the Supreme Court, so I don't get my briefs in a bunch like our old pal at Discriminations. And I suspect that LaShawn Barber's lack of concern for the veneration so many blackfolks have for those two hallowed words is why she gets verbally dissed. I don't give much of a rat's any longer. Then again, living on the nice side of the six figure glass ceiling for a decade does give this black man a bit of perspective.
Malcolm X was never impressed by Affirmative Action, and as loathe as I am to compare his vision to what we can see 40 years later, he's a good reference point for those still running the OS of Black Nationalism 1.0 on their brain pan. Malcolm could see right through the honeydripping for what it was. A job. A job you get because you symbolically represent 400 years of something irresistable to white liberal guilt. Yeah well, I suppose people get what they deserve.
Meanwhile, I'm perfectly content to see undergrads get whatever Affirmative Action the polity can stomach. Undergrads don't change much. They still get entry level jobs at big employers, and none of them have the brains, experience or guts to get much more. Fine. But I say make the graduates, specifically the professionally certified graduate programs get colorblind. The last thing we need are our experts racially codified.
Yea. He's right.
Posted by rakhier at June 23, 2006 11:38 AM