A lovely lass told me she was working toward her B.A. in dental hygiene at Mt. Ida College.
A B.A. in what?
What would you need a B.A. for, in dental hygiene when in 6-12 months you can likely get trained as a dental hygienist and your prospects for employment are working in a dental office, period.
Your salary with a BA will be exactly what it is without that BA and you will be earning it three years earlier and advancing in seniority 3 years earlier.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love my dental hygienist. She has changed my life. She has done my mouth a real service. But would I wish on her 4 years of going to school for something she could learn in 6 months and the debt that goes with it?
I asked my friend, a former college president about this and he said, "Well, maybe you'll need a B.A. to get into administration. Like nursing."
Administration? In DENTAL HYGIENE?
Got me thinking about the "medical assistants" in our offices. These ladies take blood pressures, a brief why-are-you-here history from the patients, get them into exam rooms, pull up laboratories and organize information to streamline the information flow for the doctors.
Community colleges, but most especially commercial colleges, now advertise courses to "certify" medical assistants. They make these women take a year's course which includes "anatomy and physiology" at the Great Bay Community College.
My medical assistants showed me the exams from this course:
Sample question:
Select the answers which are true:
a/The nephron secretes glucose in the proximal tubule and reabsorbs it in the distal tubule
b/ The beta cell of the pancreas secretes insulin as a dimer connected by a connecting peptide
c/ Hepatic cells convert amino acids into glucose.
A and C
All of the above
The more I read the exam and heard the stories about this professor of A&P, and the high failure rate in his course, which meant the students had to sign up to take it all over again, the more it became evident the man had a personality disorder, likely in response to having flunked out of pre med as an undergraduate.
He was the scourge of these women who had graduated high school and had high hopes of securing a job as a "medical assistant" to secure a $18 K a year position.
And the corporation who employed them colluded with the community colleges and the for-profit colleges to wring money out of these ladies.
Well, we'll hired you without your medical assistant degree, but you'd better get it within a year.
Really? The fact is everything these folks need to learn they will learn on the job and whatever background they need, the doctors are only too happy to provide, or they read on the internet.
The other explanation the college president made about the bachelors of dental hygiene was perhaps if you got a 4 year BA in dental hygiene, you could then get into dental school.
I looked at him in wonder. Here is a college president who clearly had not the faintest idea what the path is from high school to dental school, which is through a four year college, then through a four year dental school. The kids who had the backing to go that route were not in the same boat as the kids who would consider becoming dental hygienists. This was a class divide.
The real problem for these aspiring dental hygienists is they come from poor or lower middle class families where nobody has the faintest idea what you really need to do to become a dentist or a doctor. Nobody in their family ever had; nobody they knew ever had and none of the high school guidance counselors, who themselves were just one chapter ahead, had any idea.
These same families think an associates degree from Northern Essex Community College is pretty much the same as a college degree from, say, Harvard, except Harvard is for rich kids. But how Harvard insures the rich kids stay rich is a mystery.
It's not that these folks are stupid--they are simply not privy to the secrets of this world.
And of course, the joke may be on the kids who struggle to get into Harvard--it's not clear, because Harvard and every school in the Ivy league is unwilling to say, exactly how many kids from Hardscrablle, USA actually get out of these elite places and wind up making big bucks at Goldman Sacks and how many wind up driving taxicabs. Harvard trumpets its successes in getting underprivileged kids into Harvard; what Harvard will not tell you is how many of those kids translate that glittering prize into affluence afterwards.
That information is jealously guarded by the institutions.
I would hazard a guess more Harvard/Yale/Princeton grads do move into the upper classes; not so sure about Columbia/Brown/Penn or, for that matter Notre Dame, Syracuse, Lehigh. I suspect kids from families rich enough to support them through those colleges are rich enough to open doors for them afterwards.
I well remember my own parents who were the children of immigrants, telling me if I got into an Ivy League school I'd be living on Easy Street, could punch my own ticket. Would make easy money the rest of my life.
What did they know?
My father worked at an employment agency during the Great Depression and he told of seeing blonde haired, blue eyed boys from Yale being sent down to get jobs at Chase Manhattan. "We knew if we sent those guys down there, they wouldn't bounce back. They got the jobs at the banks. Kids from NYU, CCNY, don't even bother sending them."
But that was 1930, when the old school tie meant something. Does it still? In what fields? Banking? What kind of banking?
And what is Easy Street? How many of the kids who go from Princeton to Goldman Sacks are still there three years later?
The kids Trump University preyed upon never had a chance. They were fools soon separated from their money. Yokels and bumpkins fleeced by the city slicker.
But Trump U is just one of a whole spectrum of disease, which includes community colleges, state institutions and, of course, a whole cesspool of for profit scam colleges and "certification" mills.
The land of broken dreams.
A B.A. in what?
What would you need a B.A. for, in dental hygiene when in 6-12 months you can likely get trained as a dental hygienist and your prospects for employment are working in a dental office, period.
Your salary with a BA will be exactly what it is without that BA and you will be earning it three years earlier and advancing in seniority 3 years earlier.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love my dental hygienist. She has changed my life. She has done my mouth a real service. But would I wish on her 4 years of going to school for something she could learn in 6 months and the debt that goes with it?
I asked my friend, a former college president about this and he said, "Well, maybe you'll need a B.A. to get into administration. Like nursing."
Administration? In DENTAL HYGIENE?
Got me thinking about the "medical assistants" in our offices. These ladies take blood pressures, a brief why-are-you-here history from the patients, get them into exam rooms, pull up laboratories and organize information to streamline the information flow for the doctors.
Community colleges, but most especially commercial colleges, now advertise courses to "certify" medical assistants. They make these women take a year's course which includes "anatomy and physiology" at the Great Bay Community College.
My medical assistants showed me the exams from this course:
Sample question:
Select the answers which are true:
a/The nephron secretes glucose in the proximal tubule and reabsorbs it in the distal tubule
b/ The beta cell of the pancreas secretes insulin as a dimer connected by a connecting peptide
c/ Hepatic cells convert amino acids into glucose.
A and C
All of the above
The more I read the exam and heard the stories about this professor of A&P, and the high failure rate in his course, which meant the students had to sign up to take it all over again, the more it became evident the man had a personality disorder, likely in response to having flunked out of pre med as an undergraduate.
He was the scourge of these women who had graduated high school and had high hopes of securing a job as a "medical assistant" to secure a $18 K a year position.
And the corporation who employed them colluded with the community colleges and the for-profit colleges to wring money out of these ladies.
Well, we'll hired you without your medical assistant degree, but you'd better get it within a year.
Really? The fact is everything these folks need to learn they will learn on the job and whatever background they need, the doctors are only too happy to provide, or they read on the internet.
The other explanation the college president made about the bachelors of dental hygiene was perhaps if you got a 4 year BA in dental hygiene, you could then get into dental school.
I looked at him in wonder. Here is a college president who clearly had not the faintest idea what the path is from high school to dental school, which is through a four year college, then through a four year dental school. The kids who had the backing to go that route were not in the same boat as the kids who would consider becoming dental hygienists. This was a class divide.
The real problem for these aspiring dental hygienists is they come from poor or lower middle class families where nobody has the faintest idea what you really need to do to become a dentist or a doctor. Nobody in their family ever had; nobody they knew ever had and none of the high school guidance counselors, who themselves were just one chapter ahead, had any idea.
These same families think an associates degree from Northern Essex Community College is pretty much the same as a college degree from, say, Harvard, except Harvard is for rich kids. But how Harvard insures the rich kids stay rich is a mystery.
It's not that these folks are stupid--they are simply not privy to the secrets of this world.
And of course, the joke may be on the kids who struggle to get into Harvard--it's not clear, because Harvard and every school in the Ivy league is unwilling to say, exactly how many kids from Hardscrablle, USA actually get out of these elite places and wind up making big bucks at Goldman Sacks and how many wind up driving taxicabs. Harvard trumpets its successes in getting underprivileged kids into Harvard; what Harvard will not tell you is how many of those kids translate that glittering prize into affluence afterwards.
That information is jealously guarded by the institutions.
I would hazard a guess more Harvard/Yale/Princeton grads do move into the upper classes; not so sure about Columbia/Brown/Penn or, for that matter Notre Dame, Syracuse, Lehigh. I suspect kids from families rich enough to support them through those colleges are rich enough to open doors for them afterwards.
I well remember my own parents who were the children of immigrants, telling me if I got into an Ivy League school I'd be living on Easy Street, could punch my own ticket. Would make easy money the rest of my life.
What did they know?
My father worked at an employment agency during the Great Depression and he told of seeing blonde haired, blue eyed boys from Yale being sent down to get jobs at Chase Manhattan. "We knew if we sent those guys down there, they wouldn't bounce back. They got the jobs at the banks. Kids from NYU, CCNY, don't even bother sending them."
But that was 1930, when the old school tie meant something. Does it still? In what fields? Banking? What kind of banking?
And what is Easy Street? How many of the kids who go from Princeton to Goldman Sacks are still there three years later?
The kids Trump University preyed upon never had a chance. They were fools soon separated from their money. Yokels and bumpkins fleeced by the city slicker.
But Trump U is just one of a whole spectrum of disease, which includes community colleges, state institutions and, of course, a whole cesspool of for profit scam colleges and "certification" mills.
The land of broken dreams.
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