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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, October 01, 2005

I SPENT $800,000 ON
MY DAUGHTER’S EDUCATION
AND ALL I GOT WAS
THIS GRANDDAUGHTER.


Cast your mind back to that much-discussed front-page New York Times article which revealed that quite a lot of Ivy-educated women will leave the work world - some for good - as soon as they have children.

How can we explain this? Commentators have talked about biology (Women on average, writes Richard Posner, “have a greater taste and aptitude for taking care of children, and indeed for nonmarket activities generally, than men do.”), continued inequalities in the home, workplace rigidities, and so forth.

But could there be a deeper motive in play for some of these expensively cultivated exotics?




Assume they’ve gone from twelve years of private school to four years of private college. That’s roughly $800,000 worth of bills for their parents. The return on that enormous sum -- with all its attendant anxiety about getting into certain schools, all the busyness of volunteering at and donating yet more money to these schools, all the botheration of arranging and financing mucho extracurricular activities and tutoring, etc., etc., -- has been, for some of these parents, exactly nil.

Whatever they thought their daughter might become after these herculean efforts -- a partner in a law firm, a surgeon, a politician, a CEO, a professor, a concert violinist -- has outrageously, given their immense investment on her behalf, fizzled. In its place is an amateur watercolorist with triplets (fertility treatments).





Now, a cold Rat Choicer like Richard Posner will look at this outcome and tsk. “The fact that a significant percentage of places in the best [colleges and] professional schools are being occupied by individuals who are not going to obtain the maximum possible value from such an education is troubling from an overall economic standpoint.” Universities graduating wildly overeducated wives and mothers will get less in alumni donations and less of the more inchoate but equally important element of public renown. Maybe, Posner suggests, schools should raise the price of admission so as to discourage less work-serious applicants…

You could also look at this in terms of fundamental inequalities. Sarah Pembrook, well-heeled daughter of assortatively mated attorneys, enjoys all sorts of subsidies from all sorts of sources for the benefit of her long expensive education, at the end of which she becomes a once-a-week yoga instructor at her town hall. Ylang Nguyen, scrappy daughter of recently arrived Vietnamese, endures a shitty public school, works her way through a second-rate public university, then works her way through a second-rate law school, and then becomes a state senator. Shouldn’t Ylang, not Sarah, have had the benefit of Yale? Wouldn’t it have been better for Yale? (Of course, Posner’s idea would make it even more difficult for Ylang to enjoy the benefit of a first-rate education.)



Whatever. All I’d like to suggest is that this curious and striking gesture of responding to your parents’ years of pressure on you to excel, their years of financial sacrifice on your behalf, by kissing your diploma goodbye and editing your vegetarian collective’s newsletter can also be read as a sardonic message from daughter to parents.

To be sure, these have been good, obedient girls, not taken to rebellion against their parents’ values and schemes. But maybe under that richly rewarded submission all of those years, that heavily crowned competitiveness in writing contests and science fairs, Ms. Pembrook has been inwardly roiling. Maybe her impressive noggin has gradually hatched a scheme designed to inflict maximum agony on the people she dislikes for having turned her into an SAT machine.

To wit, she’s decided to play along and play along until her parents’ fondest dream, that dream to which all of their effort was tending, is actually realized: She’s admitted to Yale. She sails through and then gets a money job in New York City… for a year and a half. And then she disappears into the ether of married life…