1. Then the kid should have thought more about his actions. By the time someone hits college, they should know better. If not, they were probably taking the short bus to school and still shouldn't have been screwing someone out of money.
So you're saying that it's impossible to be a generally normal person who does something douchebaggy out of desperation/curiosity/greed/whatever-the-fuck? I don't buy that. In fact, the parts of our brains that control judgement and impulse behavior aren't even fully developed until 25. The entire point is that he probably didn't think about it. If being stupid or greedy is an automatic disqualification for a college education, then no one would have a diploma. Are we all going to go around hunting out every plagiarizer or AM thief on the internet? If the kid hadn't been able to pay for his education without crime,
then he would have deserved expulsion.
2. Don't give me the BS line about how if you don't go to school, you can't get a decent paying job. My family came from nothing, literally. 5 of us lived in a 20 foot travel trailer for 6 months eating ramen noodles and spaghetti. My dad doesn't have a degree. He dropped out of college after a semester. He worked his ass off and is now the VP of an aerospace company...all without a degree. Just because someone doesn't go to school doesn't mean that they have no opportunity. There is opportunity everywhere, it just takes some work (I know - sucks to have to work at something, huh? ) to make it happen.
You obviously didn't read my previous post. I've worked harder than 99 percent of the people my age since fucking kindergarten and went to an Ivy League school without any fancy prep courses or ten years of private school or tutors or anything else. I was sick a third of the time and still managed to get the highest grades in all of my classes, and I remember when that story broke in 2003 about the girl in NJ who used chronic fatigue syndrome to get out of going to school and to win the valedictorian spot that I thought it was the the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. My health was at least as bad as hers was and I had NEVER used it as a crutch. I seriously hope you weren't implying anything about my work ethics in that last statement. I'll assume you were insulting BYA.
I had a lot of plans for my degree, and a lot of fall-back plans if I decided not to pursue a graduate degree. It IS that hard to find a job in a third-tier city with negative population growth and absolutely no way to move to a metropoliatn area. The managers at crap jobs won't hire you because you're overqualified, and the managers at decent companies won't hire you because officially you have no college credentials.
For every success story like your father, there are ten more lives that didn't turn around even with hard work. It's a nice fairytale; that's why books like "The Secret" and other power-of-positive-thinking kits sell so well.
...By the way, I can win the sob-story contest, too. My dad was born on a third-world country in the middle of the Caribbean (where poverty literally means living in a shack made out of scrap tin and there's one main dirt road) and won the only scholarship off the island to have a free ride through Cambridge, UK. He then went on to teach at CalTech and works as a manager at a successful chem-engineering company. He works as hard and for as many hours as a typical CEO and gets paid less than a quarter of what they do. Even 'success' can be limited to one generation in our current economy.
Oh, and he did most of that when being mutliracial meant he was 'black enough' to get called the n-word. Someone called him that as recently as the late nineties, but his 'fro is mostly gone, so he blends in better as 'white.'
It's hard enough just worrying about fucking harassment as a woman without having to think about race. And yes, some fucktards even pull that shit on jobs as lowly as dorm crew; it's not just the office. Defining 'success' is a relative term.
Please don't preach to me about the 'value' of hard work.
We're cool.
