[Alumni-chat] What will the BOT do?

[john_hevelin (bwotte at rexx.com)]

Hi, Alan,

I really like a lot of your contributions to the Forum, so if I get a bit cranky at the end of this post, it's just business, nothing personal.

>>Again, I guess I don't understand.  The majority of co-op jobs I had paid minimum wage.  As a financial aid student, I was expected to cover all living costs out of that plus save at least two hundred dollars towards the study quarter.  I managed to do this.  Some co-op jobs paid much better than minimum wage, but these were usually in the sciences.  Many interesting jobs paid nothing because they were essentially volunteer -- excellent learning opportunities, very poor pay.  If you were on financial aid, you had to balance all these options, another learning experience.
>[Statistics and URLs demonstrating that the minimum wage has not kept pace with the cost of living over the past forty years.]
The fact that the minimum wage has not kept pace with the cost of living is a national disgrace.  The status quo makes life needlessly challenging for minorities, the elderly, single mothers, the disabled, and everyone else who (loosely quoting Kurt Vonnegut's "Up Is Better Than Down") don't have "what Nelson Rockefeller has in abundance."  And while this also increases the challenge for students, I think that students attending a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year school are probably somewhat better positioned to cope with these challenges than some of the other groups.  And since these conditions are unlikely to improve over night, wouldn't it be better for students to learn effective strategies while they're in school rather than after graduation?

Your post stimulated a lot of thinking, Alan.  I checked rentals in New York City on craigslist and got very discouraged -- "affordable" housing seems to run about a thousand a month, even in neighborhoods I remember as fairly borderline.  I don't know what students at Columbia or Hunter do.  (Actually, I tried to include the URL to Hunter's housing suggestions, but the Forum software choked on it.)

But then I checked Milwaukee, a city I lived in twenty years ago.  Milwaukee is a very pleasant city with several institutions of higher education, good restaurants, congenial housing, public transportation, mostly safe neighborhoods, and only ninety miles from Chicago.  You can obtain good housing in Milwaukee for four hundred dollars a month.  And craigslist shows a reasonable selection of jobs suitable for students.  There are options.

Perhaps we need to consider a tiered structure for the co-op program:

Level 1 -- Jobs at the College or within Yellow Springs.

Level 2 -- Jobs in smaller cities, hopefully at the periphery of major metropolitan centers.  Advantages would be affordable housing and the availability of work.  Disadvantages would be reduced cultural opportunities.

Level 3 -- Jobs in major metropolitan centers such as New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, etc.  In view of the challenging cost of living in these places, we might want to treat this as a kind of "AEA" ("Antioch Education in America"[TM]), i.e., the College would provide additional assistance with housing or employment to make the cultural resources in these areas more accessible.

>I know it hurts to hear it, and it isn't fair, but there are reasons why Gens X through Z are pissed off at boomers.
Really?  <Cranky Mode on>  Tell them to grow up and let it go.  We're experiencing the worst outbreak of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism since before the Great Depression, and if Gens X-Z don't have a better strategy than scapegoating boomers, they're hosed.  The challenges posed by the military-industrial complex transcend any generational differences, i.e., it's going to take all of Middle Earth to destroy the Ring.  When they were younger than you are now, a lot of the boomers stood foursquare in front of the juggernaut, in case you've forgotten, i.e., if you think the Iraq war is fun now, think how much fun it'll be when Selective Service cranks up again -- "I feel a draft" (Hunt the Wumpus). <Cranky Mode off>

John Hevelin '68