6 ms·

A successful academic faces lifelong debt

22 points by Arun2009 17y ago

patio11 17y ago
Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.
- javanix 17y ago
  I agree with the sentiment - anyone expecting to make a ton of money off of a career in Native American studies is naive at best. That said, the author did manage to be hired in multiple tenure-track positions, and made it to an Ivy League school. One would hope - expect, really - that with that level of career success she should be able to at least pay off their college debts, especially if she was as frugal as she claimed to be in her essay.
- jnovek 17y ago
  Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.
  - cynicalkane 17y ago
    I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.
    - j_baker 17y ago
      That's only if doing what you love is truly not useful, which it usually isn't. I'd say that 90% of the time, a person who does what they love is more useful than a person who does what they don't love.
    - jnovek 17y ago
      Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examination: how would you feel if she were a math professor instead? Being an academic mathematician is just as self-indulgent as anything in the humanities.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - pwnstigator 17y ago
        On humanities and "self-indulgence": I hate the corporatization of academia in general, but professors really dicked themselves over when they took the attitude that their research was their "real work" and that teaching was commodity grunt work to be delegated to TAs as much as possible. Star physics researchers can get away with this-- just as, to use a fictional example, Dr. House can slough off his clinic duty-- because they are retained for their brilliant ideas. Most academics can't. This attitude fails the humanities especially, because the entire point of these departments' existence is to transmit culture from one generation to the next (e.g. teaching). Most humanities research (unlike in the sciences) is not very useful, especially if only academics can understand it.
      - catzaa 17y ago
        Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities. Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.
        pwnstigator 17y ago
        Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities. You know nothing about poverty. Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome. Almost no one expects or even wants "equality of outcome", but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs. You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.
    - jon_dahl 17y ago
      This is true for many people. But if you have a choice - and large portions of the world do - you're better off being underpaid and enjoying your work, than being paid well and hating it.
    - pwnstigator 17y ago
      It's a good thing we have large, inefficient, hierarchical corporations. Having most working people doing things they hate that are also pretty useless really puts the damn proles in their place. (Sarcasm, obviously.)
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      And yet persistent threads in entrepreneurial discussions on HN is 'find your passion, the follow it' and 'make something great, if you build it they will come'. I agree with these ideas, the whole point of a large open economy (and one that is compounded by the internet) is that there's a market for everything and if you're really good at what you do then you'll get by. The point of meritocracy is to reward excellence. And, you know, this lady excels in the field of native american studies. That might seem frivolous and useless to other people, but suppose we pursue your thought to its logical conclusion and let that field die off because the economic benefits are not clearly quantifiable. Who will teach it if anyone wants to study it in the future? It's not like we can import people from Asian or Europe, is it? They don't mint scholars of our indigenous culture. I'm disturbed by your suggestion that the history and anthropology of a country's indigenous culture (even one that has been displaced) lacks any economic utility.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Just because there's a market for everything doesn't mean there's a living wage attached to every possible activity. I think you're getting yourself a little tangled up here.
      - istari 17y ago
        Totally agree. "They" should be paying her a lot more because it's completely unfair to let the market set wages.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Yes, doing whatever you want regardless of it's commercial viability is a privilege reserved for the affluent. Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      I think her work probably does benefit others. Maybe the benefits of teaching the history and situation of a defeated indigenous culture are not all that tangible, but I suggest that that is in part due to a weakness in our social mechanism of assigning value. The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.
      - yummyfajitas 17y ago
        Her work does not benefit others very much as demonstrated by their revealed preferences: no one is willing to pay her much for her teaching. I'm saying that we'd be better off as a society if most people who want to become scholars in Native American Studies don't do it, and become nurses instead. Less fun for them, but great for those of us who want the services of a nurse more than the services of a professor. We compensate them for the lack of fun with money.
        anigbrowl 17y ago
        Again, your syllogism is faulty. You assume her work is fairly valued in exact proportion to the income it generates. But what of the possibility that her department's revenues subsidize the high cost of other departments, such as physics labs or in-demand business speakers? It's not cheap to participate in a program like this, especially not at a decent school. If there was very low demand, you would expect this to be cheaper, no? http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indian-Native-American-Studies http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indi... I can't get with your thesis that she's being poorly paid because she's choosing to have more fun. It sounds as if she's worked extremely hard to get to the academic level she is at. And if you sample people, I imagine that most would expect that a professorship at an ivy-league university would pay well, since you have to be at or near the top of your field to land such a job.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- jon_dahl 17y ago
  You're basically saying that a humanities education doesn't have professional value. I disagree completely. A lot of employers (myself included) would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major. For many careers, a corresponding college major is 80% useless and 100% unnecessary.
  - indiejade 17y ago
    would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major Why? Business is essentially just economics, which is history (macroeconomics) + philosophy (microeconomics with a little bit of sociology and psychology thrown in). The day YC News readers stop throwing their own feces at business majors will be a fascinating one indeed.
    - jon_dahl 17y ago
      IMHO, giving a Management or Marketing class to a 20 year old is like learning a foreign language from a textbook, without ever speaking with a native. You're better off spending 1 year actually doing it than 4 years studying. Studying history, philosophy, literature, art, etc. helps you learn how to think and communicate. Someone who knows how to think and communicate can pick up business or programming easily enough, and can consult formal training when they're ready for it (which is rarely at the age of 20). These aren't absolutes, of course - there are plenty of philosophy majors who can't think their way out of a cardboard box, and plenty of business majors who think really well.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one. I understand that you believe her field of study to be an unwise economic choice, such that the cost of acquiring her expertise exceeds the commercial potential. To me the problem is that even though students are paying more than ever for school, the perceived value of educators continues to fall. a story like 'girl starts out poor, gets PhD and job at top university' ought to be an inspiration, but now apparently we have to tack on '...stays poor because she picked some frou-frou field of study I don't approve of'. MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.
  - pwnstigator 17y ago
    MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly. Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale). Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Her field of study is an unwise economic choice. That part of the comment you're replying to isn't an opinion.
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      I'd have to see the college accounts before I'd concede that. If it is so lacking in value, I wonder how come it was so expensive for her to obtain her PhD?
      - 17y ago
ShabbyDoo 17y ago
If she is current on other financial obligations, should't she be able to finance that $30K at much less than 10%? So, the interest portion would be $3K/year. Is that a significant portion of a Dartmouth Assistant Professor's income? I live in the MidWest, and cleaning "ladies" want $20-$25/hour under-the-table. Perhaps she should take on such work on Saturdays to reduce her debt load. [As an aside, I can't understand how bad America can be if one can make this much cleaning houses. Some of these people aren't even all that good at it!]
- hegemonicon 17y ago
  That's what I'd like to know - how LITTLE does an assistant professor make that 60,000 dollars of debt will take a lifetime to pay off, even in the absence of a mortgage (and presumably a car) payment?
  - luchak 17y ago
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup might be a good starting point ... looks like the average for an assistant professor is around 60k, but Dartmouth is likely to be above that.
  - coliveira 17y ago
    Assistant professors in humanities (even at an Ivy League school) don't make much money.
    - sschronk 17y ago
      There is no demand for Humanities professors. Look at the job boards of the colleges and most of them are hiring either science, math or nursing professors. Also this person seems to have studied a fringe subject that would have a far weaker demand.
  - weaksauce 17y ago
    according to the chronicle the average assistant professor salary is ~$80k. I doubt that a native american studies assistant professor will get that much but I have been wrong before. http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&search=dartmouth&state=&year=2009&category=&withRanks=1 http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&...
jrockway 17y ago
The comments on the site are ... pleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a blog post where the author admits to having some personal flaw where the first 10 comments aren't "HAH UR DUM". Looks like the Chronicle attracts slightly more intelligent readers than the average blog.
sschronk 17y ago
I'm a college professor myself. It is a thankless job. You spend more than 20 years in school, washing dishes, working at a dead end job waiting for that moment when you finally get to teach. My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on. Also realize the pressures of college teaching: Society needs you to teach skills to the students that they will need to excel. The students have been given a free ride all the way though High School. How do you teach C programming to students that cannot do any algebra and have no understanding of logic? If you make the class hard enough for them to excel in the global marketplace, all of the students drop out. It you make it easy enough for everyone to pass, you have scarcely covered the first one or two chapters of the book.
- mixmax 17y ago
  I think this is a huge problem for America. It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press has to play along with this, if they don't nobody will read their newspapers or see their newscasts. Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country. It's an economic problem because in the future (and now) we have to be pretty darn smart to compete in the international arena, and India, China, etc. are basically eating Americas lunch. Education is one of the best and most important investments a country can make, and to be frank I think it's despicable that a college professor doesn't make more than you do.
  - catzaa 17y ago
    > Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country. This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.
ganley 17y ago
Many people have worked off far larger debts on far smaller salaries, many of them working far more difficult jobs than being a college professor. Not to mention those to whom these kinds of educational opportunities were never even a possibility. A little perspective is in order.
wglb 17y ago
While I empathize with the difficulties she surmounted, I think it not good to be ashamed of where you came from. To the contrary, attaining the recognition that she did starting with the humble beginnings should be something to feel proud of.

22 points by Arun2009 17y ago

Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.

javanix 17y ago
I agree with the sentiment - anyone expecting to make a ton of money off of a career in Native American studies is naive at best. That said, the author did manage to be hired in multiple tenure-track positions, and made it to an Ivy League school. One would hope - expect, really - that with that level of career success she should be able to at least pay off their college debts, especially if she was as frugal as she claimed to be in her essay.
jnovek 17y ago
Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.
- cynicalkane 17y ago
  I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    That's only if doing what you love is truly not useful, which it usually isn't. I'd say that 90% of the time, a person who does what they love is more useful than a person who does what they don't love.
  - jnovek 17y ago
    Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examination: how would you feel if she were a math professor instead? Being an academic mathematician is just as self-indulgent as anything in the humanities.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - pwnstigator 17y ago
      On humanities and "self-indulgence": I hate the corporatization of academia in general, but professors really dicked themselves over when they took the attitude that their research was their "real work" and that teaching was commodity grunt work to be delegated to TAs as much as possible. Star physics researchers can get away with this-- just as, to use a fictional example, Dr. House can slough off his clinic duty-- because they are retained for their brilliant ideas. Most academics can't. This attitude fails the humanities especially, because the entire point of these departments' existence is to transmit culture from one generation to the next (e.g. teaching). Most humanities research (unlike in the sciences) is not very useful, especially if only academics can understand it.
    - catzaa 17y ago
      Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities. Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.
      - pwnstigator 17y ago
        Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities. You know nothing about poverty. Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome. Almost no one expects or even wants "equality of outcome", but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs. You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.
  - jon_dahl 17y ago
    This is true for many people. But if you have a choice - and large portions of the world do - you're better off being underpaid and enjoying your work, than being paid well and hating it.
  - pwnstigator 17y ago
    It's a good thing we have large, inefficient, hierarchical corporations. Having most working people doing things they hate that are also pretty useless really puts the damn proles in their place. (Sarcasm, obviously.)
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    And yet persistent threads in entrepreneurial discussions on HN is 'find your passion, the follow it' and 'make something great, if you build it they will come'. I agree with these ideas, the whole point of a large open economy (and one that is compounded by the internet) is that there's a market for everything and if you're really good at what you do then you'll get by. The point of meritocracy is to reward excellence. And, you know, this lady excels in the field of native american studies. That might seem frivolous and useless to other people, but suppose we pursue your thought to its logical conclusion and let that field die off because the economic benefits are not clearly quantifiable. Who will teach it if anyone wants to study it in the future? It's not like we can import people from Asian or Europe, is it? They don't mint scholars of our indigenous culture. I'm disturbed by your suggestion that the history and anthropology of a country's indigenous culture (even one that has been displaced) lacks any economic utility.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Just because there's a market for everything doesn't mean there's a living wage attached to every possible activity. I think you're getting yourself a little tangled up here.
    - istari 17y ago
      Totally agree. "They" should be paying her a lot more because it's completely unfair to let the market set wages.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Yes, doing whatever you want regardless of it's commercial viability is a privilege reserved for the affluent. Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    I think her work probably does benefit others. Maybe the benefits of teaching the history and situation of a defeated indigenous culture are not all that tangible, but I suggest that that is in part due to a weakness in our social mechanism of assigning value. The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Her work does not benefit others very much as demonstrated by their revealed preferences: no one is willing to pay her much for her teaching. I'm saying that we'd be better off as a society if most people who want to become scholars in Native American Studies don't do it, and become nurses instead. Less fun for them, but great for those of us who want the services of a nurse more than the services of a professor. We compensate them for the lack of fun with money.
      - anigbrowl 17y ago
        Again, your syllogism is faulty. You assume her work is fairly valued in exact proportion to the income it generates. But what of the possibility that her department's revenues subsidize the high cost of other departments, such as physics labs or in-demand business speakers? It's not cheap to participate in a program like this, especially not at a decent school. If there was very low demand, you would expect this to be cheaper, no? http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indian-Native-American-Studies http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indi... I can't get with your thesis that she's being poorly paid because she's choosing to have more fun. It sounds as if she's worked extremely hard to get to the academic level she is at. And if you sample people, I imagine that most would expect that a professorship at an ivy-league university would pay well, since you have to be at or near the top of your field to land such a job.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
jon_dahl 17y ago
You're basically saying that a humanities education doesn't have professional value. I disagree completely. A lot of employers (myself included) would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major. For many careers, a corresponding college major is 80% useless and 100% unnecessary.
- indiejade 17y ago
  would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major Why? Business is essentially just economics, which is history (macroeconomics) + philosophy (microeconomics with a little bit of sociology and psychology thrown in). The day YC News readers stop throwing their own feces at business majors will be a fascinating one indeed.
  - jon_dahl 17y ago
    IMHO, giving a Management or Marketing class to a 20 year old is like learning a foreign language from a textbook, without ever speaking with a native. You're better off spending 1 year actually doing it than 4 years studying. Studying history, philosophy, literature, art, etc. helps you learn how to think and communicate. Someone who knows how to think and communicate can pick up business or programming easily enough, and can consult formal training when they're ready for it (which is rarely at the age of 20). These aren't absolutes, of course - there are plenty of philosophy majors who can't think their way out of a cardboard box, and plenty of business majors who think really well.
anigbrowl 17y ago
How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one. I understand that you believe her field of study to be an unwise economic choice, such that the cost of acquiring her expertise exceeds the commercial potential. To me the problem is that even though students are paying more than ever for school, the perceived value of educators continues to fall. a story like 'girl starts out poor, gets PhD and job at top university' ought to be an inspiration, but now apparently we have to tack on '...stays poor because she picked some frou-frou field of study I don't approve of'. MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.
- pwnstigator 17y ago
  MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly. Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale). Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Her field of study is an unwise economic choice. That part of the comment you're replying to isn't an opinion.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    I'd have to see the college accounts before I'd concede that. If it is so lacking in value, I wonder how come it was so expensive for her to obtain her PhD?
    - 17y ago

ShabbyDoo 17y ago

If she is current on other financial obligations, should't she be able to finance that $30K at much less than 10%? So, the interest portion would be $3K/year. Is that a significant portion of a Dartmouth Assistant Professor's income? I live in the MidWest, and cleaning "ladies" want $20-$25/hour under-the-table. Perhaps she should take on such work on Saturdays to reduce her debt load. [As an aside, I can't understand how bad America can be if one can make this much cleaning houses. Some of these people aren't even all that good at it!]

hegemonicon 17y ago
That's what I'd like to know - how LITTLE does an assistant professor make that 60,000 dollars of debt will take a lifetime to pay off, even in the absence of a mortgage (and presumably a car) payment?
- luchak 17y ago
  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup might be a good starting point ... looks like the average for an assistant professor is around 60k, but Dartmouth is likely to be above that.
- coliveira 17y ago
  Assistant professors in humanities (even at an Ivy League school) don't make much money.
  - sschronk 17y ago
    There is no demand for Humanities professors. Look at the job boards of the colleges and most of them are hiring either science, math or nursing professors. Also this person seems to have studied a fringe subject that would have a far weaker demand.
- weaksauce 17y ago
  according to the chronicle the average assistant professor salary is ~$80k. I doubt that a native american studies assistant professor will get that much but I have been wrong before. http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&search=dartmouth&state=&year=2009&category=&withRanks=1 http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&...

jrockway 17y ago

The comments on the site are ... pleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a blog post where the author admits to having some personal flaw where the first 10 comments aren't "HAH UR DUM". Looks like the Chronicle attracts slightly more intelligent readers than the average blog.

sschronk 17y ago

I'm a college professor myself. It is a thankless job. You spend more than 20 years in school, washing dishes, working at a dead end job waiting for that moment when you finally get to teach. My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on. Also realize the pressures of college teaching: Society needs you to teach skills to the students that they will need to excel. The students have been given a free ride all the way though High School. How do you teach C programming to students that cannot do any algebra and have no understanding of logic? If you make the class hard enough for them to excel in the global marketplace, all of the students drop out. It you make it easy enough for everyone to pass, you have scarcely covered the first one or two chapters of the book.

mixmax 17y ago
I think this is a huge problem for America. It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press has to play along with this, if they don't nobody will read their newspapers or see their newscasts. Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country. It's an economic problem because in the future (and now) we have to be pretty darn smart to compete in the international arena, and India, China, etc. are basically eating Americas lunch. Education is one of the best and most important investments a country can make, and to be frank I think it's despicable that a college professor doesn't make more than you do.
- catzaa 17y ago
  > Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country. This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.

ganley 17y ago

Many people have worked off far larger debts on far smaller salaries, many of them working far more difficult jobs than being a college professor. Not to mention those to whom these kinds of educational opportunities were never even a possibility. A little perspective is in order.

wglb 17y ago

While I empathize with the difficulties she surmounted, I think it not good to be ashamed of where you came from. To the contrary, attaining the recognition that she did starting with the humble beginnings should be something to feel proud of.