Wednesday 25 May 2011, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - Use of the Firefox browser set to "private browsing" as a means of bypassing the New York Times firewall and reading the digital edition without limitation for free continues to merit no better than the complete disapproval of this log.
Earlier The New York Times published a column condemning top United States educational institutions, many those of higher learning, of excluding most all disadvantaged and less financially able students so that they never even have a chance to attend these schools with a privileged elite who get in through money, legacy connections, power and other factors irrelevant to their suitability or ability once matriculated.
The New York Times furthermore presents an incomprehensible assessment that these educational institutions are not "meritocracies" because they give no advantage nor disadvantage to applicants with similar standardized testing scores regardless of from where the applicants hail as to their financial and other background. What? Is that not the very definition of a "meritocracy"?
The Times column does a terrible disservice to both top educational institutions and the students who might attend them but now will only suffer a further disservice should they become aware of these top schools then read a completely wrong and misleading piece such as the one presented in The New York Times. Ninth Amendment editors and staff attended and graduated from schools such as Exeter, Princeton, and the University of Michigan Law School. No, none of our families had previously attended any of these schools.
Yes, one editor's father was a doctor, but he was a child psychiatrist who worked twelve-hour days never raising his rates and seeing many patients for free for years. They lived in Hackensack, New Jersey in a modest 1930's house on a street with a cross-section of white and blue-collar workers.
Furthermore, their father died when they were sixteen years old on summer vacation home from Exeter between junior and senior years. The "family" money they received for higher education came mostly from a trust set up by their immigrant paternal grandparents who worked their entire lives in the United States for minimum wage since emigrating here with nothing from northern Italy soon after World War One.
Money or rather lack thereof was never an issue for anyone of whom we are aware in attending Exeter, Princeton, or the University of Michigan Law School because it was then more or less and now most definitely the policy of the top schools (while the Times here totally discourages the disadvantaged from attending) that if you got in, you went. Period. Please research and write accurate information on this extremely important subject, especially in a newspaper considered one of the very few "newspapers of record" in this country the contents of which then in turn are picked up by thousands of other papers all over the country and published with no further research whatsoever.
The Ninth Amendment files everything (unless it needs to be destroyed), and right next to us now we have an actual very real letter from Exeter to "Exonians" dated September 2008 that among other things announces that henceforth "an Exeter education will be free to any admitted student whose family income is $75,000 or less". Exeter's endowment, friend and alumni giving alone mean that when Exeter announced this it was INCLUDING a free room, board, health care, and ALL (emphasis in Exeter letter) other expenses, such as laundry, gym and sports uniforms. In short Exeter provides for free to those mentioned all this plus a tuition that in September 2008 was worth over $50,000.
Exeter eliminated loans and replaced them with grants, as have most all of the top educational institutions in the country, so that students and their families would be burdened with NO DEBT from education allowing them to pursue whatever they believed in rather than needing to do anything for "the Man" simply because they would after multiple levels of top education then graduate only to spend up to a very long period of their working years after school taking high-paying jobs they loathed so as to pay off a mountain of debt.
Exeter's web address is http://phillips.exeter.edu, and we are confident the New York Times can find Exeter's phone number. Just ask Exeter directly if this is true, but then PLEASE immediately attempt wholeheartedly to correct the terrible mistake the Times has made by publishing then a correction to your dead wrong reporting of current facts in modern times that will only serve further to discourage the disadvantaged young and their families from ever trying to get into these schools.
They will not even apply because with wrong information such as yours they will not have a clue that for starters they can be excuseD of having to pay ANY costs right from the beginning on applications to the schools and for all standardized testing that is required as part of the process. Please get the word out to the extremely large group of students and their families that are not even aware that these schools even EXIST and actually have real addresses and phones that anyone is free to contact, and that in almost all these schools students in need can now attend for nothing at all. You get in, you go.
That is what we at our Ninth Amendment log ("blog" is not a word) at www.waronnothing.blogspot.com seek ultimately to communicate to everyone who reads any one of our posts - yes, there exists a United States elite without doubt. However now the disadvantaged who are informed and in the know can have the same opportunities in higher education that the privileged and non-privileged have.
Our Ninth Amendment editor arrived back from volunteer teaching in sub-Saharan Africa (traveling there and back on their dime earned at temporary agency work, thank you) the day before the University of Michigan Law School started lectures. They had neglected to apply for financial aid for tuition or anything else, find housing, and had literally $50 in travellers' checks left, primarily due to the difficulties of accomplishing any planning at such a distance with the limitations of operating from an African country with a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.
They do not recommend this approach to arrival at a "top" or any other school, but the fact is that starting from the afternoon before commencing school, they received emergency funds to start and from there did in fact to go on to earn their J.D. three years later. One in fact does not need any money if they have the intelligence, integrity, discipline and outstanding character traits that these institutions seek. As for the "elite", they are just flesh and blood and put on their pants in the morning one leg at a time just like everyone else.
Do not think of them as mythic figures, this still is a country where anyone CAN become President, and at www.waronnothing.blogspot.com we expose the elite and anyone else just for what they are. Human beings like all of us. Now, New York Times, please get the CORRECT word out, and do this country a great service by seeing that everyone knows the real facts. It bears saying one more time regarding almost all top educational institutions now, you get in, you go. Nor need you come out drowning in a mountain of debt. End of story.
Copyright 2011 Big M and Little L All World Rights Expressly Reserved
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