To all recent graduates: Does your major matter? Does Plato matter? “A lot of life gets lost—almost everything, in fact.” —Daniel Mendelsohn in a graduation speech to Classics majors at UC-Berkeley
(Photo by Aaron Logan)
Does It Matter Where You Go to College?
Meet Ben. He’s a high school senior from a middle class family in Massachusettes who is choosing where to attend college next year. He’s down to two schools: prestigious Boston College, or the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his state’s top public campus. Even with the generous financial aid package from BC, he would still graduate with a big mound of loans. UMass, meanwhile, would be more than $15,000 a year cheaper.
Which should Ben pick? Prestige or price?
With the cost of higher education climbing every year, and student debt surpassing $1 trillion, more and more young people will have to decide whether to make that trade-off. It begs the question: Does it really pay to go to an elite university, financially speaking? Researchers have been investigating this issue since at least the 1980s. And their findings tend to show that when it comes to future earnings, where you go to college counts.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Michigan…
First Lady Betty Ford dancing aboard President Gerald Ford’s Whistlestop Campaign Train Trip. 05/15/197.
White House Trivia: Did you know that Betty Ford was a Martha Graham dancer in her youth?
“Don’t classify me. Read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.” ― Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012
A 2008 sign endorses same-sex marriage. What’s it like to be a gay Mormon in Utah? Read Jennifer Sinor’s essay Out in the West, published in The American Scholar, Autumn 2011.
(Photo by SFist)
“Alongside a small tree and rectangular pond in the Hirshorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., there is a reclining figure (by Henri Laurens) of a woman in utmost repose. Her stomach is a comfortable hill, and she exudes largesse, self-containment, and serenity. Entitled Maternity, she represents the way women are seen in art, in Italian opera, and even in tinted imitations of life like the Pampers and baby aspirin ads — but hardly ever in the real modern world.”
— Isa Kapp, “Oh Mom, Poor Mom,” from the Summer 1980 issue of The American Scholar
(Image via Hirshorn Museum)
Like the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle before it, organizers of the upcoming London Olympics are hoping that this work in progress, Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit will become an iconic piece of the city’s skyline.
N. S. Thompson ruminates on the legacy of these controversial buildings in our Spring issue. What do you think about look of London 2012?
(Image via AAJ Press)
“One can’t tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path. But one can fervently wish that they—that we—would come back from the periphery. We do not, we writers, represent mankind adequately.” —
Saul Bellow, ”The Nobel Lecture,” published in the Summer 1977 issue of The American Scholar.
© 1976, The Nobel Foundation
“In the midst of all your memories there is one
Faded away beyond recovering;
Neither the yellow moon nor the white sun
Will ever see you drinking from that spring.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Limits”
For more on Borges, be sure to check out our Summer 2012 issue, due to hit newsstands in early June.
Before Candace Bushnell gave the world Sex and the City, Iris Owens gave us After Claude, a frank portrayal of life, love and sex in 1970s New York. In our Winter 2012 issue, Lisa Zeidner makes the case for an Iris Owens resurgence.