The Access Problem

Many elite institutions of higher education are taking action to make their financial aid policies for students from low-income families more generous. That's nice to see, but as Kevin Carey argues it's also a bit besides the point: "The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in."

A combination of the fact that low-income kids tend to be poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems, plus the fact that college admissions procedures give a lot of advantages to people from privileged backgrounds, makes it very difficult for the poor to get accepted into selective schools. Consequently, the schools can afford to be generous to low income students in part because there are so few eligible people being admitted.

Photo by Flickr user Jos Shlabotnik used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

Isn't this why we should make it easier for children from poor-income families to attend private schools, using vouchers or other programs?

Posted by right | April 21, 2008 11:31 AM

Exactly right. The fact of the matter is, talking about expanding support for poor students is really a matter of public relations for elite colleges. There's very little financial cost to the universities, because so few people are going to receive this aid, and they get a nice splashy New York Times or USA Today story that makes them seem magnanimous. If they really wanted to support poor and working class students in this country, they'd stop giving such an absurdly large advantage to students who attend elite private schools within the admissions process. But then, they'd risk alienating wealthy donors and potential donors, and then you can't grow your enormous endowment....

Posted by Freddie | April 21, 2008 11:35 AM

Sure, and it may not be unfair to suggest that if you are willing to pay to send your already-advantaged child to an elite private college, part of what you are paying for is allowing your child to be around a lot of other already-advantaged fellow students.

But, um, so what? Rich people tend to buy expensive things for their kids, and so kids with rich parents tend to get things kids with less-rich parents don't get. Fortunately, a person can still get a great education in this country without attending an elite private college.

Of course if you want to talk about admissions policies at public universities, that is a more interesting topic. But I really don't see much point in getting overly concerned about who is getting into Harvard.

Posted by DTM | April 21, 2008 11:43 AM

Isn't this why we should make it easier for children from poor-income families to attend private schools, using vouchers or other programs?

If private schools did a better job of educating, sure. But they don't; the educate better students. This is the perfect example of why the voucher arguments are bankrupt, actually. The reason private schools have a better reputation than public is because private schools overwhelmingly don't teach students who have the hardest time reaching high academic achievement.

The goal shouldn't be to get everyone into elite college. The goal should be to give everyone an equal chance to attend colleges . Fred or Steve Sailer will say that the impediment to that is race-based affirmative action. I say the impediment to that is the absolutely enormous institutional advantages that rich students have.

Posted by Freddie | April 21, 2008 11:45 AM

When I was 18 my parents were stuck in reagon era reversals of fortune and school didn't seem even remotely doable in my family. much later my wife and I figured out financial aid and loans and realized it was possible and I soared through undergrad and grad school in 2 1/2 years.
Now as an elementary public school teacher in a very disadvantaged inner city area I talk not only about college but about loans and aid and scholarships.
We read these articles about yale and harvard and stamford and brown AND I talk about them at parents nights.

Many of my student's parents dropped out, didn't finish, went to work, went to jail and some are illegal or undocumented. But all are facinated with this information.

If these universities continue to do this, and if school systems tell parents that dreaming about school is feasable then these trends in eliminating tuition and costs for those who make less than 60 (yale and harvard) or less than 100 (stamford) will really change the way many families emphasize higher education.

of the twenty students I have in my class this year, it would not be hard to see 14 -15 of them at fine schools. They have fine minds and fine habits.

If school can be a realistic option, then it stays on the grid about what is possible.
these new trends might be revolutionary.

Posted by Michael C. | April 21, 2008 11:47 AM

I think this overlooks the external factors that make wealthy students succeed at elite institutions. It's not just the cost of tuition. Lots of colleges and universities (though certainly not all) already had generous grant/loan programs for those that really needed it. The main problems are that:

a) Low income students, like many students of color, find it incredibly difficult to fit in with the culture of prep schools and "summering." It's such a foreign world if you did not grow up in those environments.

b) The money that makes school, and success possible, is spent on never worrying about paying for medicine, gas, internships, having a few drinks, test prep, etc. That doesn't even get into the spring break ski trips and all of that crap.

c) Low income students are often not prepared academically to compete with other students. I think that you hit this nail right on the head, but it's important to understand what the repercussions of this truly are. If a kid wants to go to med school, they don't have two or three semesters to figure this whole college thing out. They have to perform at a high level right out of the gate. Ditto for other grad programs, etc. It's really a problem.

And schools just don't provide the support that would be required for many students to overcome these hurdles

Posted by silver spoon | April 21, 2008 11:48 AM

"c) Low income students are often not prepared academically to compete with other students. I think that you hit this nail right on the head, but it's important to understand what the repercussions of this truly are. If a kid wants to go to med school, they don't have two or three semesters to figure this whole college thing out. They have to perform at a high level right out of the gate. Ditto for other grad programs, etc. It's really a problem.

And schools just don't provide the support that would be required for many students to overcome these hurdles

Posted by silver spoon | April 21, 2008 11:48 AM"

Very true. It seems like there's just the remedial writing class and then all of a sudden it's down to pre-med requirements. In college, I definitely felt that my prep school background made me a lot more ready for the work than even kids who went to decent suburban high schools. The public school kids who entered at the same level of readiness often graduated Phi Beta Kappa, while a lot of people continued playing catch-up. A lot of my upper-level classes had about a 50/50 public/private breakdown, which definitely doesn't come close to the public at large.

Posted by Reality Man | April 21, 2008 12:02 PM

If private schools did a better job of educating, sure. But they don't; the educate better students. This is the perfect example of why the voucher arguments are bankrupt, actually.

Then you're disagreeing with Matt's contention that "low-income kids tend to be poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems"? Your claim would indicate that everyone is poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems. I'm skeptical of this claim.

Posted by right | April 21, 2008 12:08 PM

No. "Being poorly served" does not mean that they are receiving an inferior education. It means that they emerge unable to compete academically. Poverty, family structure, drug use, criminality, community breakdown... there are many reasons why someone can receive an educational experience that is functionally identical to that of a middle class peer and emerge well behind that peer academically. Education here, as always, is a surrogate for much larger social problems. Our educational problems won't be solved until those structural, endemic problems are addressed.

Posted by Freddie | April 21, 2008 12:16 PM

Why this really bothers me is that graduates of those top few schools are way overrepresented in our government and big corporations, the institutions that run the world. I'm not even sure that the education you recieve at these schools beats good state run schools. Or at the very least, I'm pretty sure that there is nothing that you learn (academically) at Harvard that you don't learn at Wisconsin madison that will make you more qualified to be a sentate aid or reporter on the NY Times or sumpreme court clerk.

Schools like Harvard and Yale have always been places for the elites to prepare their children to be the next elites. It would be nice if we could break free of this kind of millinial old class system. Although if I think about it we are definitely more egalitarian than in the past.

Posted by cw | April 21, 2008 12:19 PM

And schools just don't provide the support that would be required for many students to overcome these hurdles

That is only true because the hurdles are nearly impossible to get over. You can't fix 12 years of broken learning with a few remedial courses. I tutored in college and was appalled to see the low to nonexistant levels of basic knowledge some students arrived with, particularly in math. IMHO, the problems with college education begin in kindergarten.

It's not the student's fault if he arrives at college having gotten A's all through high school for middle school level work.

Posted by guineapigfury | April 21, 2008 12:20 PM

This post identifies a real problem, but I have to categorically disagree that this is a problem college's should be addressing. There is nothing wrong with the admissions process. The problem is a society that permits gross inequalities in primary education and gross economic inequality both leading to gross inequalities in educational outcomes well before the college application process.

Putting this on colleges to fix is a huge, stupid dodge. Let's identify the real cause of this problem: Failing communities due to the War on Black People, large economic inequality and locally funded school systems, insuring inequally funded schools.

Posted by mpowell | April 21, 2008 12:28 PM

There's also an adverse side-effect to Harvard's and Yale's decisions to use more of their endowments to cover costs for low-income students: It will pressure other colleges and universities to do the same. That sounds like a good thing, but it's easy to forget that the endowments of uber-elite institutions like Harvard and Yale are on a completely different plane than most very good schools. The result is probably going to be even more pressure on those schools to raise tuition.

This point has been covered (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/06/AR2008010602189.html), but it seems a bit overlooked to me.

Posted by Chris | April 21, 2008 12:31 PM

mpowell has it right.The focus--at this point--on college is bassackwards.

Rather than attacking college admissions again, we should make pre-school and elementary school opportunities equal, then fix the remaining secondary and high-school problems. If we do that, higher education will be in a lot better shape than if they just admit more kids who've already been screwed over for 18 years..

Posted by southpaw | April 21, 2008 12:34 PM

There's also an adverse side-effect to Harvard's and Yale's decisions to use more of their endowments to cover costs for low-income students: It will pressure other colleges and universities to do the same. That sounds like a good thing, but it's easy to forget that the endowments of uber-elite institutions like Harvard and Yale are on a completely different plane than most very good schools. The result is probably going to be even more pressure on those schools to raise tuition.

This point has been a little overlooked, I think.

Posted by Chris | April 21, 2008 12:36 PM

Education here, as always, is a surrogate for much larger social problems. Our educational problems won't be solved until those structural, endemic problems are addressed.

Freddie, I agree with this, and also with mpowell, that it's ultimately misguided to expect elite colleges to fix these problems through their admissions criteria.

Schools like Harvard and Yale have always been places for the elites to prepare their children to be the next elites.

I wonder if there are any statistics on this. I went to an Ivy-league school during the past decade, and my impression was that, of my classmates, probably 30-40% had at least one parent who went to an Ivy-league (or equivalent) school. If my obviously anecdotal impression is accurate, that doesn't really seem high enough to really distort the meritocratic system. There were plenty of spots for students, like myself, who were high achievers without alumni connections.

Posted by right | April 21, 2008 12:43 PM

If a big issue for underprivileged kids is inadequate preparation, some of these big-endowment schools could open up one-year prep schools to which these students could be admitted prior to their first year of college. Sell the idea as a five-year program where the first year doesn't affect your college transcript.

Posted by Brandon | April 21, 2008 1:06 PM

Check out this story:

http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/04/19/0419perfect.html

It has a sort of happy ending, Rice is a fine university, but it bodes ill for kids less qualified than this young man.

Posted by Nat | April 21, 2008 1:11 PM

right,

You wrote: "Your claim would indicate that everyone is poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems. I'm skeptical of this claim."

I'm not. The only real basis for comparison is something like the TIMSS scores, which serve as a decent test for comparing math and science educational results between countries (and math and science are the only subjects really suitable for international comparisons). What the TIMSS scores have indicated is that U.S. students are about average in 4th grade, but then they get worse in 8th grade, and even worse in 12th grade. That indicates an educational system which is overall doing a poor job of serving U.S. students. And incidentally, it doesn't help if you just look at just "Advanced" math and science students--again, by 12th grade we have fallen way down the list.

Now obviously it is dangerously overbroad to say something like that "everyone" is poorly served by pre-college education in this country. But I do think it is fair to say that "almost everyone" who is going through pre-college education in this country is not being served as well as they could be. And I also think that many parents who believe they have gotten relatively good schooling for their children are being somewhat deluded by only including other schools in the US for the purposes of comparison.

Posted by DTM | April 21, 2008 1:36 PM

The time to fix inequities in education is not during college admissions, it's from the beginning of primary education. Even if inner-city schools had the same funding and used the same techniques as the more elite schools, they'd still fall behind because the home environment for many of these kids is just not conducive to learning. The parents may not have much of an education themselves, there may not be many books in the house, the home may be overcrowded, etc.

There needs to be a concentrated, well-funded effort to improve academic performance in poorer schools. That could improve life for entire communities, not just for the marginal few who might get admitted to an elite college.

Posted by Adam Villani | April 21, 2008 1:40 PM

What DTM said. No matter what, elite private universities are only going to educate a tiny fraction of our nation's college students. The vast majority will go to public schools. Surely that's where we should be concerned about admissions policies.

Posted by John | April 21, 2008 2:17 PM

John, that's an excellent point. Unfortunately California courts have decided against affirmative action, so there's very few hispanics and a lot of Asian-Americans and whites. Texas makes it so if you are in the top 10% of your graduating class, you are guaranteed admission to a top ranked school. They're definitely trying, but they clearly aren't getting the best kids they could.

As for the main point, there's not a whole lot colleges can do to change that. Drastically lowering their standards for people from lower socioeconomic classes is disadvantaging the whole school and why people hate affirmative action. The burden falls on public high schools to better educate their students.

Posted by Travis | April 21, 2008 2:33 PM

First, 'eligible' is the word you use, but what students are 'eligible' to be admitted to an elite institution is determined by them, not you or society. Second, while it is true that those who are not prepared because of an overburdened, underfunded public school system cannot get into elite schools, there is a reason for that: have you ever been a part of a group of people who were just faster, better, stronger and smarter than you? It can be quite disparaging.

Focus on middle and high school; reform our orthodoxies surroundnig public education. It may be that a 'general' education for everyone just isn't appropriate for a modern public school system.

Posted by John | April 21, 2008 2:33 PM

40% of the undergraduates at Harvard, Yale and Princeton come from the top 25% of richest families, right. Kids from the bottom half only make up 9%.

Posted by Freddie | April 21, 2008 2:49 PM

A combination of the fact that low-income kids tend to be poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems, plus the fact that college admissions procedures give a lot of advantages to people from privileged backgrounds, makes it very difficult for the poor to get accepted into selective schools.

Is this really true? I admit that I don't really know what I'm talking about, but isn't it more likely that a straight A student, with decent SAT scores, coming from a economically disadvantaged area, who writes his/her college essay about the disadvantages he/she has faced and who participates in a couple extra-curricular/community activites will have no problems getting into a top school? Maybe they won't be as well prepared for the coursework as others, but that's why most colleges have free tutoring programs. Does anyone think I'm way off base?

Posted by Alan | April 21, 2008 3:33 PM

I'm skeptical that who gets in is the main reason people at lower income levels don't go to elite universities. I went to public school and came from an moderately above median income household. I applied to a variety of them and got into many, but only had enough money for your typical in-state public university tuition available, so I couldn't afford to go to them without taking on absurd amounts of debt. I ended up going to a slightly lower tier school that gave me a merit scholarship instead of the elite schools that didn't offer any aid but loans. When discussing the finances, the expected parential contribution was in the >$20k a year range, which was not happening, especially since my brother would be going to college concurrently. I can't imagine getting together the money to pay for an elite private university is any easier for the truly low-income family than my fairly well-to-do one. The system may currently make it hard for them to clear the admissions hurdle as well, but it won't help much when they just smack into the massive financial barrier behind it.

Posted by MattXIV | April 21, 2008 3:50 PM

40% of the undergraduates at Harvard, Yale and Princeton come from the top 25% of richest families, right. Kids from the bottom half only make up 9%.

Freddie, do you have a citation for that? It doesn't strike me as quite right, in part because it implies that 51% come from the "second 25%".

Posted by right | April 21, 2008 4:04 PM

I ended up going to a slightly lower tier school that gave me a merit scholarship instead of the elite schools that didn't offer any aid but loans.

What, you too?

I lost interest in elite schools when my friend from high school (GPA: C) got into Bryn Mawr because her surgeon father could pay the full ride. My valedictorian self was offered a $900 work study because they didn't believe in merit scholarships, and "your parents could take out a second mortgage." (That's a verbatim quote). My father, the sole breadwinner, was 63 at the time and had been downsized. Thanks, O Women Empowering Seven Sisters School!

(The campus visit was also enlightening. All the women of color were from varied economic backgrounds -- think daughters of single Newark moms *and* daughters of Nigerian UN ambassador dads -- but all the white chicks, like my friend, came from rich or very upper middle class families. If you came from a poor inner-city environment, say, and thought all white folks were rich? Let me tell you, attending Bryn Mawr would not disabuse you of the notion.).

Posted by zacksback | April 21, 2008 4:49 PM

It would be interesting also to see the percentage of people positions of power who come from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. I suspect these schools are way over represented in the federal government. Like I said earlier, I also don't believe that it is becasue the education you recieve at these schools is massivly superior. I thinks it's left over from an earlier age when these schools served pretty much exclusively as a conduit to power for the ruling class.

Posted by cw | April 21, 2008 5:03 PM

Throughout the 20th century there were plenty of poor, working-class and lower-middle-class kids in America who had the ability to excel in Ivy Leauge colleges. They had a name. They were called "Jews" and their numbers were kept in line via quotas and the like so that there never would be too many in any elite school. (We still see the remnants of that in the professed search for a "well rounded student body" and "geographic representation" and the other games.)

For the last few decades there have been thousands upon thousands of poor, working-class and lower-middle-class kids who have had the ability to excel in Ivy Leauge college. You guessed it: Asians, Indians, etc. Methods are taken to make sure there are never too many of them.

I have a degree from an Ivy Leauge college. It wasn't Harvard, but, oh, it was up there. Trust me, I was exposed to plenty of mediocre minds just out of elite prep-schools.

And, indeed, some of these pedestrian minds were Asian and Jewish and Indian. But their owners had been though the prepschool pipeline or otherwise had the connections. (It's amusing to think of all the intelligent Jews who were rejected from Yale the year they took blithering idiot Naomi Wolf. Well, I find it funny.) Still, the prepschool and legacy wagons seemed to lean towards white Christians. No doubt, that gets a bit less egregious with the passing of time.

In the late 1980s Brown and Columbia, to pick two, could've been full of brilliant students whose families had little money. It could've put a greater emphasis on math scores and filled it's classrooms with young Asian men. (Along with, yeah, some Jews and Indians, etc. More men than women.)

They, like the other Ivies, chose not to do that.

Things haven't changed. Colleges (elite and otherwise) still can't be bothered to come up with tests that might differ from what yuppie kids are prepped for in their pricey Kaplan Review courses. That should tell you something right there about what a sham any meritocracy talk is.

Now none of this is a knock on affirmative action, mind you. It is a knock on the other 90% who get in. And how that's fixed.

Now Matt was a smart Jewish kid with a Spanish last name who attended Manhattan's most elite prepschool. If he doesn't want to contemplate what life would've been like had he been named "Cohen" (or "Li" or "Patel") and gone to a mediocre public high-school in Long Island that's his business.

If nothing else, Matt is an intelligent youth who means well. And he's genuinely concerned about African-Americans. Granted, his understanding of black people is derived entirely through academic studies, liberal think-tanks, HBO's 'The Wire' and 'The NBA on TNT', but he's right to care and in his own way he does struggle against his provincialism.

Alas, when you talk about stuff like this (college admissions, the economics of who gets to go, etc.) there are other issues as well. And the poor-black-people/everyone-else-in-America dichotomy can let you off the hook, I'm afraid. Yale doesn't discriminate against African-Americans. It does however discriminate against Korean-Americans. And Jewish-Americans. And Chinese-Americans. And Indian-Americans. And Pakistani-Americans. And kids from New York and California. And so on.

And -- again -- the colleges a step down are complicit in a system where Kaplan Review and various yuppie cottage industries grease the way for the children of the upper-middle-class.

Posted by M. | April 21, 2008 5:31 PM

Reading this thread, and other threads on other blogs, it appears that there is far too much emphasis on IVY league schools, as if failure to graduate from such a school is a mark of Cain.

Thus, for a student interested in going into engineering, IVY league schools are a poor choice, other then, perhaps Cornell. Such a student would be much better off going to a state university or a technically oriented private school like MIT, CalTech, or Rice. The IVY League schools are not for engineers.

Posted by SLC | April 21, 2008 6:03 PM

According to some USNWR engineering rankings I just looked up, Cornell was #10, Princeton #12, Columbia, Harvard, and Penn were part of a tie for #28, Brown was tied for #39, and Yale and Dartmouth were tied for #47.

So not great, but not completely awful either.

Posted by DTM | April 21, 2008 6:14 PM

Harvard, no doubt, has produced a lot of great people (Susan Faludi for one). Yet, I've never known a Yale graduate who wasn't a dullard. The Univ. of Florida offered me a baseball scholarship and off I went. Thomas Pynchon went to Cornell but then again so did Bill Maher.And, the fact is - I may not have learned that much there, but it was a lot of fun. I had a shot maybe to get into a second-tier Ivy, but, as an all-but-born Californian - I don't like the East, or Easterners. My sympathies are with Dick Cheney leaving Yale for Wyoming.

Posted by Trevor | April 21, 2008 6:23 PM

The primary purpose of college admissions is to admit kids who will, decades down the road, give lots of money to the school.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 21, 2008 6:34 PM

Re DTM

1. The IVY league schools in general don't have complete engineering departments, like the state universities.

2. The USNWR ratings have come under fire of late. The attached link is 12 years old but still may be pertinent.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html

Posted by SLC | April 21, 2008 7:14 PM

> Maybe they won't be as well prepared for
> the coursework as others, but that's why
> most colleges have free tutoring programs.
> Does anyone think I'm way off base?

I don't disagree that the cultural issues can be tough for the freshman from disadvantaged backgrounds, but at least back in the [cough cough]s the end result was a bit different. Yeah, some of the preppies had gone to prep schools that were truly good and deep, and they were well prepared. But many of the "advantaged" kids had never faced any real adversity in their lives, and when they hit college work that they hadn't been led through step-by-step in high school (say 2nd semester sophomore year, or 1st semester junior) they folded under the pressure. My fellow inner-city scholarship students and I may not have been quite as prepared academically but we _were_ prepared to keep slogging when the going got tough; at least no one was shooting at us.

Cranky

OK, to be fair I only had to hit the ground once in HS and the bullet wasn't actually aimed at me personally. But I still love to watch the preppies (now my parenting neighbors) jaws' drop when I tell that story.

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 21, 2008 7:25 PM

Steve Sailer has no idea what he's talking about. His point simply does not apply to the colleges under discussion. Right now, the best Ivies have huge endowments and can pretty much take whoever they want. They're like millionaire trust-fund kids who can afford to just hang out and play in bands. They're beyond rich and can indulge in whatever fantasies they want. Thoughts turn to idealism.

Perhaps Tom Wolfe will write a long, dreadful novel elucidating this simple fact or one of Sailer's racist buddies who somehow did get manage to get into an elite college will fill him in on how life works today for the upper classes. We'll just have to wait.

Moving to Sailer's favorite topic . . . I.Q.s

No doubt had Trevor forgone U. Florida for "a second-tier Ivy" the average IQ of both schools might've been a bit lower.

On the plus, side Trevor might've developed some better comedy.

Still, it's hard not to get a kick out a such a self-involved buffoon and his incessant effusions.

Keep talking about yourself, Trevor!

Tell yourself it never gets dull and you never seem like a total douche!

Your fans await your ever dumbass pronouncement and autobiographical revelation! Keep it coming, assclown!

Posted by Trevor Appreciation Society | April 21, 2008 10:39 PM

Luckily, there's no particular reason why anyone should need to go to an Ivy League school to succeed in life. While Harvard/Yale/etc graduates may be over-represented in the more "elite" strata of society, one can make a perfectly good living with mediocre grades and a physics degree from, say, Texas A&M University.

I'm a manager for an engineering firm, and I hire a lot of folks with a technical degree from a state school and no experience in the $50k+ range. With a few years experience, one can easily get to the high 5 figures range, and very experienced folks command well over $100k. This is a good living by any standards, and no, English majors from Yale and Poli Sci majors from Harvard need not apply.

Posted by Sean Peters | April 21, 2008 10:39 PM

"Keep talking about yourself, Trevor!
Tell yourself it never gets dull and you never seem like a total douche!
Your fans await your ever dumbass pronouncement and autobiographical revelation! Keep it coming, assclown!" (TAS)

Assclown? Was I talking about your looks? Ha, ha! How's that for comedy, Hesh? Anyone who would waste the time to spill their seed over a rodomontade post has to be one step-on-their-dick wallflower. Try E-Harmony- I hear they do homely. Oh, and did I tell you about the time I...?

Posted by Trevor | April 21, 2008 11:24 PM

Agree with the above. Give me an engineering degree from Univ of Texas any day over some crap liberal arts degree from Harvard. The average UT engineering grad will be making 50k more than the average Harvard liberal arts grad.

Posted by joe blow | April 21, 2008 11:31 PM

Nah, Trevor, you post five to ten times a day, can't stop talking about yourself and when you're nailed on your utter buffoonery you assume your opponent is Jewish. (Guess again, assclown.)

I love your stuff, Trev'!

You're an assclown's assclown!

No doubt you'll be posting ten to twenty more times in the coming days. Do be sure to tell us more about the Trevor experience. Your likes and dislikes (and not just the Jews -- we got a kick that you expanded your vitriol to something called "Easterners." Too funny.) Or, hey, anything that's ever happened in the Trevor life that it might get you off to drone on about in a public forum like the shameless and total jerkoff you are.

You're our assclown, Trevor, and we love you for it!

Keep posting! (Added points for comically affected prose: "waste the time to spill their seed over a rodomontade"! Man, talk about the pot calling the rodomontade kettle black! You're priceless, assclown! Rock on!)

Posted by Trevor Appreciation Society | April 22, 2008 11:30 AM

Re Trevor Appreciation Society

But Mr. Trevors' father is a federal judge and he is a Hollywood screenwriter who once met Mel Gibson. How can Mr. Trevor Appreciation Society have such a low opinion of such a person (snark)?

Posted by SLC | April 22, 2008 12:44 PM

(TAS) (SLC),

Guy, guys, I feel the bilious love. Look, tell you what- the next time I sing a Song of Self...sing along with me. What else do you puds have to do except jerk each other off? Think of it this way: I'm "Johnny-Boy" (DeNiro) from 'Mean Streets" and you two are the mooks I keep stiffin'. Except in your cases - when it came time to ambush me - you both spazzed out and teared up in frustration.

"rock on!"? Tas, you're dating yourself, sweetie. what'd you do- do the okey-doke to Rick Dees in the morning?

Posted by Trevor | April 22, 2008 3:45 PM