Working and lower-middle-class children are less likely to participate in structured extracurricular activities than their more privileged peers while growing up (and when they do, they tend to participate in fewer of them). This hurts their job prospects in two ways. First, it affects the types of schools students attend. Elite universities weigh extracurricular activities heavily in admissions decisions. Given that these employers—which offer some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs in the country—recruit almost exclusively at top schools, many students who focus purely on their studies will be out of the game long before they ever apply to firms. Second, employers also use extracurricular activities, especially those that are driven by ‘passion’ rather than academic or professional interest and require large investments of time and money over many years, to screen résumés. But participation in these activities while in college or graduate school is not a luxury that all can afford, especially if someone needs to work long hours to pay the bills or take care of family members. Essentially, extracurriculars end up being a double filter on social class that disadvantages job applicants from more modest means both in entering the recruiting pipeline and succeeding within it.
Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard at college. - The Washington Post. How incredibly depressing. I was one of those kids: I worked 25-30 hours a week during term, and full-time on breaks, to pay for my own college education, which was (amazingly) still possible in those days. But I didn’t have to pay a price for it, in part because I chose graduate school instead of trying to get a high-paying job, but also in part because workplace priorities weren’t quite so indefensibly weird then.
I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even deeper in the Pacific’s heart. Beneath the earth’s umbra, I stopped believing in blood as a season of the moon, trained the iphone lens on the western blue and waited for moonset. I woke all but covered in worry and sea foam. Small black and white birds called out a nonsense verse in an island dialect. My boat listed, half-full of blooded water. I had been lulled into dreams of Illinois autumn where hunters and harvesters take the moon seriously as a version of gospel, where we stalk dinner through dark orange fields of corn wide as seascapes. I flailed for my phone, for oars and, finding nothing in my hands, filled them with red ocean and swam into the sky.
I can almost bring Yogi back in memory, up at the plate, powerfully round and thick and bearish in his work-smudged pinstripes, with his head (in a cap, not a helmet) tipped a little, as if to give him more height while he stares out at the pitcher. The pitch is up, out of the strike zone, but Berra slashes at it anyway—it’s up by his eyes, because the force of his swing has dropped him down—and he drives it distantly. He runs hard, startling you again with his speed and strength, and rounds first base at full speed, leaning sideways like a racing car, then pulls up in a shower of dirt and scrambles back to the bag. I’m on my feet, yelling and laughing with everyone else. Yogi, Yogi—there’s no one else like him. The laughter isn’t sweet; it’s all wonder.
