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I'm conflicted in responding to this. What you described was not my experience. I come from an underprivileged background and was fortunate to escape my social

I'm conflicted in responding to this. What you described was not my experience. I come from an underprivileged background and was fortunate to escape my social location. Part of it was luck though which is not replicable. But I agree that it is harder to take risks coming from a low-income background where the cost of bad choices is amplified. Risk taking is risky though. That's the tragedy, it's hard to escape your social location incrementally. But at the same time for each success story there are many that don't succeed whose stories we don't hear. I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization. It makes it hard to adapt when everything around you is bound to change.

chaostheory 6y ago
> I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization We moved away from that because higher education has gotten exponentially more expensive. I'm sure there are some valid reasons for that (e.g. increasing graduate student TA pay?) as well as terrible ones (e.g. an increase in both administrative execs along with administrative exec pay), but that's what's directly hurting the motivation for experimentation. Only the well-to-do have that privilege now. For others, it's risk and not harmless experimentation.