Search Results for: education

The Pros and Cons of Culinary Education

Longreads Pick

The writer investigates the financial realities of attending culinary school, and the hard life of a working chef:

“Chef Brad Spence wouldn’t go culinary school if he had to do it all over again. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, the chef/partner of Philadelphia’s Amis moved to New York City, where he made $8 or $9 an hour. Even though he was getting help from his dad to pay off the student loans, Spence says he “could barely live” between the low salary, high rent, and regular loan payments. And that’s the norm for New York City line cooks. Dirt Candy’s Amanda Cohen says that generally cooks can expect a raise of $1 a year, meaning one can hope to be making $20 an hour 10 years into a career. That’s still not very helpful for someone who needs to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in culinary school debt.”

Source: Eater
Published: Jul 11, 2013
Length: 34 minutes (8,587 words)

The Re-education of Chris Copeland

Longreads Pick

How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks:

“You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in the twilight of your career. Eventually, you do move back home and tell anyone that will listen that you did, in fact, play pro basketball. You try to find a 9-to-5 job while fighting off the inevitable depression that comes from losing the only thing you’ve ever truly loved, and, over time, you forget you ever had a dream in the first place. It’s a good life, at times an amazing life, filled with peaks and valleys higher and lower than you could ever imagine. And then, it’s over.

“For Copeland, however, there remained a gnawing inside his gut. No matter how well he did, it wasn’t quite enough. ‘I was feeling sad even though I was having a lot of success. In my head,’ he said. ‘I just still believed I could do better. I knew if I didn’t make it, I’d look back with a lot of regrets.'”

Source: SB Nation
Published: Apr 12, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,198 words)

The Slow Death of Public Higher Education

Longreads Pick

How California’s public university system went from “Master Plan” to “no plan,” and how it is now incentivized to favor out-of-state students over in-state students:

“When we talk about the decline of public higher education systems such as California’s, however, rising tuition is only part of the story, and maybe not the most important part. Along with pushing instructional costs onto students, for example, the state of California has made it easier for state universities to balance their budgets by accepting more out-of-state students (and thus, fewer and fewer Californian students). Out-of-state students pay much higher tuition rates, but under the Master Plan, state funding was contingent on enrolling a minimum number of in-state students. As the state has withdrawn its commitment to fully fund its universities, it has progressively detached what funding remains from these kinds of commitments. Governor Jerry Brown may have put the final nail in the coffin when, in June, he vetoed specific enrollment targets for the UC from the annual budget. Moreover, since 2007, the extra $20,000 in tuition money that out-of-state students pay has gone directly to the schools enrolling these students—rather than reverting to the UC as a whole—perversely incentivizing each campus to take on fewer California students.

“This gradual retreat from enrollment quotas only adds to a problem that has plagued the California system since its inception: too many applicants and too little space. Over the last three decades, the state has given up on increasing the total institutional capacity—the classrooms, dorms, and new campuses—that a continuously growing university-age population requires. This shortfall is not as immediately visible as red lines in planning documents, as politically explosive as enrollment targets, or as sharply felt by stretched family budgets. But the fact that the state has stopped keeping up with the demand for more higher education points to a slow but fundamental structural change underway in higher education as a whole.”

Source: Dissent
Published: Oct 22, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,436 words)

The Political Education of Elizabeth Warren

Longreads Pick

Elizabeth Warren has energized Democrats in Massachusetts during her 2012 Senate race against Republican incumbent Scott Brown, but has also faced many difficulties as a first-time candidate. The race remains very close:

“Lydon brought up an anecdote he’d heard: Warren, while she served on the bankruptcy panel during Clinton’s presidency, had known the first lady, Hillary Clinton. Clinton had supported Warren’s work and opposed changes to bankruptcy law. But later, when Clinton was in the Senate, she’d turned around and voted for changes Warren opposed. Lydon quoted what Warren had said at the time: ‘If she can’t take the heat, who can?’ Later, Lydon asked Warren if she thought she could withstand the same pressures Hillary had sometimes caved to, or whether she’d just join the old boy’s club of the Senate. ‘Nobody’s fooled about what I stand for,’ she started to answer. He interrupted: ‘No one was fooled by what Hillary stood for.’ He was trying to raise, in a roundabout way, a concern that Warren’s fans had worried about since the race with Brown had begun: Was it possible to enter politics without being compromised? Warren knew what he was getting at. ‘Oh, I think there’s a real question about what people run for,’ she replied. She added that she got into the race to uphold her principles, ‘not because this was a great career move for me.’ The implication was that other politicians, including Clinton, were in it for themselves. It was a pretty harsh dig at a Democrat admired by many in Massachusetts, whether or not Warren meant it to be. Like Obama on occasion, she was trying to sound self-effacing but ended up being self-aggrandizing.”

Published: Sep 4, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,911 words)

The Education of Dasmine Cathey

Longreads Pick

How a semiliterate University of Memphis football player educated himself while facing countless obstacles:

You can’t hide for long in college when you’re semiliterate. But somehow Mr. Cathey slipped through his freshman year with just under a C average, taking classes like elementary algebra and music appreciation. Then he saw the syllabus for HIST 2010: U.S. to 1877, his sophomore history class. How would he ever finish five books in four months?

He knew there was only one way: He had to go back to the beginning.

After practice every night, he would close the door to his room in the Carpenter Complex, reach under his bed, and pull out his 10 learn-to-read books. Twenty minutes, he thought, looking down at his watch. I’ve got to beat 20.

Published: Jun 3, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,986 words)

Bad Education

Longreads Pick

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined.

Source: n+1
Published: Apr 25, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,969 words)

The Trials of Kaplan Higher Ed and the Education of The Washington Post Co.

Longreads Pick

Eleven years ago, one of Washington’s most tradition-bound companies placed a bet that would transform its fortunes. The wager, by The Washington Post Co. and its Kaplan division, took the form of a $165 million purchase of an Atlanta-based chain of for-profit vocational schools that catered to low-income students. The bet was big — the price equal to the profits earned that year by The Post Co.’s print-media pillars: this newspaper and Newsweek magazine. So was the payoff. But what proved a deftly timed business move brought other, less welcome scrutiny to a family-run company that had long prided itself in serving the public interest.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Apr 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,209 words)

The Education of President Obama

Longreads Pick

If there was something incongruous about the president of the United States checking out reviews of his décor by Arianna Huffington, well, let’s face it, he has endured worse reviews lately.

Published: Oct 12, 2010
Length: 33 minutes (8,285 words)

The Education of Ms. Barsallo

Longreads Pick

An inside look at the life of a first-year Denver teacher

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 29 minutes (7,419 words)

Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

Longreads Pick
Published: May 22, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,380 words)