Higher Higher Education

During the general meeting today, we talked about several important issues the Democratic and Republican candidates address. One of them is about higher education. Now, as a non-citizen permanent resident, I don't have the right to vote, and this may be why I care about the issues much more than the candidates. One of the issues brought up today was about education, and very interestingly, a community member suggested the idea of not ranking higher education institutions.

His idea is that, with the ranking system in place, people attach prestige to institutions, giving the institutions the incentives to raise tuition. Many top institutions, public or private, charges astronomically high tuitions, making it affordable mostly to people from privileged backgrounds. Getting rid of the system, he said, would probably help bringing the cost down, and the prestige, and people can afford to go to wherever they want to go.

Not surprisingly, other people argued against his idea. What's the point of that? We go to Michigan because of its prestige, because it leads us to great jobs and huge, multi-national corporations. We are used to think that we are top of the top, better than everyone else. Harvard is the Michigan of the East. If we don't have this ranking system in place, how do we separate the better from the worse? "Then we might as well be a communist country," someone said. I smirked.

It's interesting that we want to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, yet at the same time we want to keep each other separate to distinguish the best, better, worse, and worst. We fight for social justice, try to erase glass ceiling, but from the discussion today, it seems that we're only willing to do it to a certain degree-- until our very own status quo is challenged. I'm not going to argue whether communist is good or not. I'm sure some people think it's great, some think it's awful, and some think it's great in theory, awful in practice. And we know what happens when we attach -isms to things-- there are too many things associated with them and that defeats the whole point of tackling the issue straight. So what are we fighting for? So that the A/PIA community can be empowered and rise upward, while keeping other oppressed people on the bottom, so we can separate the better from the worse?

I'm not an expert of open admissions, and Wikipedia does a better job than I do. And if you know more about open admissions, feel free to comment on this entry. To be honest, I have my own hesitations about it, since "I worked so hard to get into the second best public institution in the country." But I'm definitely more open-minded about open admissions now than four years ago, when I first entered college. It took a lot for me to recognize my own privileges, to be honest with myself that I have resources others don't have, and this meritocracy talk is bunch of bull.

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