....., an 18-year-old graduate of ....., spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Mandarin in Nanjing, China. The next year he was an intern at a market research firm in Shanghai. When it came time to write a personal statement for his college applications, those summers offered a lot of inspiration.
When back at MIT in the early 60s the students were not Harvard, they were at best lower middle class, lots from New York, and they did what they did mostly on their own nickle. You had a job in the summer and the money for the job paid for room and board, and even a little left over for books. The jobs were at factories, barrel factories were popular, no air conditioning, lots of sweat. You got to meet all sorts of people, immigrants who came here to make it, telling you in their highly accented speech how grateful they were to work besides a "college boy". They wanted their children to do the same.
We saw America, we also saw Poland, Ukraine, China, Hungary, from the perspective of the gratefulness of being in America.
But in the current story the students leave the US and understand cultures in some structured foreign environment. In my experience, having no structure, when I went and started businesses in 20 countries I had to understand them, I had to fit their culture. It was akin to spending the summer aboard a Greek freighter, not speaking a word of Greek.
The article continues:
For those who lack the means to pay for an essay-inspiring trip, at least one scholarship program exists to help. Ten 11th-grade New York City public school students won the ...., which entailed traveling around Italy for a month this summer to study the culture, philosophy and arts of the Renaissance. The students were required to keep diaries and write a final essay, which the foundation said would be used with their college applications.
Again, perhaps they would have been better off in the barrel factory, and if colleges looked to the self starters, value creators, which we seriously lack. That is one reason in my opinion that we have the S&P debacle. Colleges look for glitz, not substance, because those doing the looking in my opinion often do not have a clue of what creates real value.
My latest example is that for reasons too long to explain, I decided to take an Organic Chemistry course at the local New Jersey Community College. In applying, besides have a bit of an age discrimination hurdle, they only admitted students who graduated High School from 1981 thereafter, I found that the demanded my High School Transcript from the 1950s! My MIT degrees were worthless, the rules said they needed a High School Transcript! Now that is a small example of those making these decisions. And we should be worried about the country, and yes, they get tremendous salaries, great benefits, and fantastic pensions!
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