1) University of Hawaii - Hilo (never enrolled)
2) Hawaii Pacific University
3) North Idaho College
4) University of Idaho
5) Matanuska-Susitna Community College, Alaska
6) University of Idaho (2nd time)
Some have suggested that there's a relationship between the relatively non-selective, non-elite nature of these institutions and Palin's much-noted struggles in television interviews. That's nonsense; lots of articulate people graduate from public universities. Sarah Vowell graduated from Montana State, and let's face it: Idaho, Montana, tomato, tomahto.
The Los Angeles Times made a big deal about the fact that nobody at those colleges seems to remember much about Sarah Heath circa 1982-87, as if that's somehow strange or even vaguely sinister. As Sherman Dorn rightly notes, it's actually completely typical. Public universities tend to be large and impersonal and often do a poor job of engaging their students. "I don't remember her," said Roy Atwood, Palin's academic advisor at the university. I guarantee you my academic advisor doesn't remember me, because we never once met. He (she?) was just a name and a phone number that I could call if I wanted advice, and I never did. Colleges that have succeeded in boosting student retention rates talk a lot about "intrusive" advising, reaching out to students proactively, but that clearly wasn't happen back at the U of I in the mid-80s.
The LA Times also notes:
Palin's parents -- a high school science teacher and school secretary -- could not afford the college tours so common today. Their four children were expected to, and did, work their way through college."We didn't have the luxury of spending a week driving around visiting universities to see what they're like," said Kim "Tilly" Ketchum, a high school friend. "We were looking at pictures of campuses."This is right, except for the part about "so common today." Remember those weekends when you and your parents spent all that time driving around visiting colleges, getting on each other's nerves? Most people don't, because most students don't apply to lots of colleges, and that's as true now as it was then. In this sense, Palin is just guilty of being an average American college student. (And it does rain a lot in Hilo; I've been there. The Big Island of Hawaii is the most climactically diverse place on the face of the Earth. In a few hours you can drive from the beach through a desert that gets less than 10 inches of rain per year, over a 14,000 foot lava-spewing volcano, through a rain forest, to an area that gets over 125 inches of rain per year--Hilo.)
Palin and Ketchum picked the University of Hawaii at Hilo from a brochure. Only after arriving in Hawaii did they realize that Hilo had rainfall approaching 100 inches a year. "The rain," Ketchum said, "was disturbing.
Governor Palin worked in food service jobs over summers to help pay college expenses, and again that's very typical; most college students work. Most don't make money from beauty pageants, but heck, that sure sounds a lot better than the night shift at Kinko's.
Palin's transfer activity was definitely above the norm, but as Sara Goldrick-Rab notes, it's hardly unheard of, and that includes transferring down from a four-year institution to a two-year community college, which happens more than you might think. What's a little more unusual is then getting back to a four-year institution and managing to complete the whole process within five years. Only 41 percent of all students who start college at a four-year institution earn a bachelor's degree within five years, whether they transfer or not.
This suggests an above-average level of discipline and determination on the governor's part, which certainly isn't inconsistent with her subsequent career. As to what she learned there--who knows? Nobody really understands how much students at any college learn, since as a rule colleges don't try to measure that sort of thing, and if they do they don't make the results available to the public. In any event, it all happened over 20 years ago, and like most other professional people her age, most of what Governor Palin has--or hasn't--learned in life came outside the walls of an educational institution.
In other words, Governor Palin's college career doesn't really tell us much about her, other than reinforcing her goal-oriented-ness and supporting her claims of being in touch with the average American experience.
2 comments:
Despite what many graduates of elite private universities would like to believe, not all kids of equal talent in this country have equal chances of attending one of those schools.
I'm not going to claim that Gov. Palin would've necessarily gotten into Sen. Obama's alma mater of Columbia had she attended a ritzy prep school like he did and had parents who were both PhD.'s like his were, but those things would've made it significantly more likely.
My DH and I had similar grades, class ranks, SAT scores, and honors like being National Merit finalists. I grew up in an affluent neighborhood where almost everyone was a highly educated white collar professional. My DH grew up in a middle-class neighborhood where most folks worked in blue collar or low level civil service jobs. The expectations for both of us given our academic achievements were college. But the similarity ends there.
There was tremendous pressure on me to attend an Ivy caliber school, to the point where anything else would've been seen as a "failure". By contrast, my DH never even considered applying to anything other than the local state university and the 3 military academies until one of his teachers encouraged him to apply to Stanford. When he got in, he had to go over the specific objections of his family who simply couldn't understand why in the world he would pass up scholarships to the other schools to attend the more prestigious one.
Had my DH been less stubborn and resourceful in finding alternate financing for his Stanford education after his parents refused to help him out, he would've wound up at a less-prestigious school like so many other bright kids from modest backgrounds.
What's wrong with wanting articulate, intelligent, well-educated people running the country? Why should we even consider electing someone we have to defend in these areas? We don't need more apologetics in this country, we need to make smart, informed moves. This isn't a popularity (or beauty) contest, and it's not an interview at the local bank ... this is about the LEADERS OF THE COUNTRY for the next four years.
Ignorance is not "cute" or "personable."
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