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HorrorMovieRei

Do boomers hate minimum wage workers?

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Sociologists and statisticians have shown that's just what you get when you grow up and everything falls into your lap. Cheap houses, low education requirements for good jobs (because the previous generation got decimated storming Nazi pillboxes and minefields), no economic troubles. Leads to weak placated people who can't deal with hardship.

 

Gen X, Y and Z all had to deal with some serious economic hardships somewhere between highschool and raising a family. It just has reached the tipping point now across the Western world (because fucking Boomers can't get their money investments back from their big house they're selling because no one has the money to buy a house lol!).

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The short answer is, yes. Most people with a “Boomer mentality” (regardless of their actual age) look down on minimum wage work and generally lack empathy for those below their station in life. Because that’s how people are taught to behave, by and large. “Zero empathy for any demographic that I don’t belong to” is the name of the game.

 

To me the Boomer VS Millennial thing comes down more to the “wealthy mentality VS the working class mentality”.

 

A lot of older people who aren’t wealthy still adopt this richfuck mentality, because that is what older people are/were “taught” to do. “I earned all I have and I deserve all I have. Those who are poor or work shitty jobs chose to be that way. Those who don’t rise to or above my own station in life are not deserving of my respect.”

 

We are taught, in both direct and indirect ways, that your value as a person is directly linked to your income and the value of your assets. Not surprising living under a corporate oligarchy, where many people truly believe that if you cannot afford to pay exorbitant fees for medical treatment then you should just fucking die, but still. 

 

We’re not taught to ask why a homeless person is homeless or to even see them as a human or acknowledge their bad luck in life. They’re poor because they’re lazy, and because they’re both of those things, they’re worthless, and because they’re worthless, they’re not deserving of basic human dignity. Rarely are we encouraged to ask what financial situation they were born into, wether they have crippling mental illness, or anything else even approaching sympathy or, god forbid, empathy.

 

This ageism shit is just another way for our corporate overlords to funnel the frustration of the masses back onto the masses rather than directing the ire up the ladder (where it belongs!)

 

No one ever wants to talk about classism. No one ever wants to talk about the cultural pressures put on the masses to adopt a “boomer mentality” or a “millennial mentality” based on your appearance and age range. It’s a brilliant scheme by our corporate overlords though, you have to admit. Keep the fucking plebs divided over stupid, completely arbitrary shit like age, race, gender and sexuality. Because as long as every different pleb demographic is at eachother’s throats, very few of them will stop to think about why we are encouraged to hate every demographic we don’t belong to, but are also taught that excessive wealth is a virtue and that, by the nature of how money works, wealthy people are also smarter, cleaner, and generally just more human than the unwashed masses.

 

Get it? The name of the game is that money rules the world and that hating someone for a trait that they have no control over is fucking stupid, but everyone buys into it.

 

Seeing so many proudly-self-identified Boomers and Millennials and whatever else makes me sick to my stomach. “I’m proudly a part of this stupid fucking demographic”, no matter what that demographic may be, always comes with a baked-in assumption that all the people who don’t belong to that demographic are lesser beings.

 

Bleh, I’ll stop ranting and raving for now, but yeah, in short, “Boomers” look down on millennials and the lower class in general.

 

(I put it in quotes because Boomer is more a mentality at this point than an actual age range. My parents are technically baby boomers but just based on their opinions and the things they say, they are absolutely not “boomers”. They’re for socialised medicine, they’re for equality regardless of arbitrary physical traits, they’re just generally not crusty old sticks in the mud despite the horrible yet often accurate assumptions people make about that particular age group. My dad always talks about people he knew in the 70’s who claimed to be ‘hippies’ of some sort, then they just grew up to be the very same corporate dicksuckers they once claimed to be against. I can’t wait to see that happen to the current crop of young millennials and zoomers. Good fucking lord..)

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5 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I put it in quotes because Boomer is more a mentality at this point than an actual age range.

Probably 20 years later, there'll be thread in Doomworld or whatever forum it is called "Do Millennials hate minimum wage workers?", and it's because many Millennials adopted the "Boomer's mindset" right now (hypothetically, of course). Lol. Who knows whatever the world will look like at 2040.

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On a moderately related subject, I dislike how Doomer has been appropriated by certain groups recently and given a negative connotation. The community needs to take it back, to mean someone who enjoys the Doom franchise, again!

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It is the sole duty of The Elders to pass on wisdom to the newer generations, but if your passing Negativity what does that achieve?

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Doomkid put it brilliantly honestly. It is more of a mentality issue rather than something necessarily connected to age, as that sort of behavior can be observed in most demographics. We're being fed BS about who's "worth" something, who isn't, who and what should be tolerated, and ultimately what or who we should hate. So, no wonder there's such a great divide between people, because guess what, people actually buy into that BS. We're no longer listening to others or are even remotely interested in their situation, especially if it's worse than our's, and especially if they're different, but to outright dismiss them if they don't belong to "our group" and don't fit in it - and what is that mythical group exactly anyway, the group of "perfect humans" ? Holy shite.

 

It is extremely easy to make people hate something or someone else, no other thing, apart from maybe money,nsex, and drugs, both unites and divides simultaneously. And then we wonder why society is slowly but surely falling apart and rotten. No idea where that came from!

Edited by seed

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Pharmacy jobs are skilled and involve schooling so it’s weird that someone would try and use it as an example of failing to get an education and falling back to unskilled work. Like, it’s just straight up incorrect.

 

Also, people who define Boomer as 30+ are idiots. That’s me and I’m a millennial. On Reddit I saw someone precociously say “they are called boomers because of the 2008 housing boom”. Uh.. so much incorrect nonsense in one statement it still pisses me off to this day. I get it, that guy was clearly 5 in 2008 and now as a sophomoric 17 year old he’s got a lot of exciting takes he can’t wait to share but like holy fuck, a boom isn’t even a negative term in the context of market performance like he’s implying. The term exists because of the huge influx of post WWII infants in America after everyone came back from Europe, end of story. It’s been around much longer than gen Z’s weird appropriation of it. Go back to mumbling through a Xanax overdose on SoundCloud little children.

 

All that aside, the premise of this thread is correct in my experience. There is a resentment towards unskilled workers by the baby boomer generation and I personally think it’s because they all had unskilled jobs as teens and moved on and don’t realize that mobility isn’t as easy anymore, so they associate dead end jobs with laziness not desperation.

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Well, I can understand where the confusion comes from. People on 4chan playing modern FPS'es like Overwatch and such probably began using "boomer" to refer to retro-gamers enjoying arena shooters like us over here. The first "boomer" memes I've seen shows us some 30 something gamer with his own house using his lawnmower, who still is in the habit of talking about Quake 1 when cracking open a Monster Energy.

 

I always thought it was dumb as hell, so I like how it's been altered to properly fit the socio-historical concept of a babyboomer.
 

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What obligation do people who aren't poor or homeless have to assist anyone they don't feel compelled to assist?  I ask this as a 30 year old working middle class man.  I am by no means wealthy or poor, but I get by just fine with my wages.   I work hard for everything I have and work a job that most would consider life threatening on a somewhat regular basis.  I will sometimes buy food and give it to a homeless family if I come across them (always if children are involved) and have the time or give water on a hot day to a begger at the intersection if I have some.  But I don't ever feel guilty about being better off than some due to my labors or obligated to share anything I have with anyone I don't know.  They have their problems and I have (and have had) my own.  If I spent my days worrying about other peoples' problems, I likely wouldn't have solved many of my own.  There is also the darwinist response to this...not every member of any given species is supposed to survive or pass on their genes. That is how a species grows and gets stronger, and trying to help all that are weaker goes against that.  Cold and heartless yes, but as is nature.

 

Just my two cents.  Preparing myself now for the E-Lashing.

Edited by Rare Hatchiama

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19 minutes ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

There is also the darwinist response to this...not every member of any given species is supposed to survive or pass on their genes. That is how a species grows and gets stronger, and trying to help all that are weaker goes against that.  Cold and heartless yes, but as is nature.

i absolutely agree! all hospitals should be destroyed, and medics killed, as they're weakining human race!

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2 hours ago, FractalBeast said:

Well, I can understand where the confusion comes from. People on 4chan playing modern FPS'es like Overwatch and such probably began using "boomer" to refer to retro-gamers enjoying arena shooters like us over here. The first "boomer" memes I've seen shows us some 30 something gamer with his own house using his lawnmower, who still is in the habit of talking about Quake 1 when cracking open a Monster Energy.

 

I always thought it was dumb as hell, so I like how it's been altered to properly fit the socio-historical concept of a babyboomer.
 

Oh, this perfectly solved my problem because the last time I saw the word "Boomer", it's used to describe a 30+ person, which confused the heck out of me. This is very annoying and inconvenient for somebody who doesn't go to those kind of places and it alters the meaning of an existed word.

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18 hours ago, Vorpal said:

The Boomer vs. Millenial thing is manufactured animosity, it helps funnel people into groups so that you can reliably predict on them to behave a certain way (e.g. voting, purchasing)

 

17 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Keep the fucking plebs divided over stupid, completely arbitrary shit like age, race, gender and sexuality. Because as long as every different pleb demographic is at eachother’s throats, very few of them will stop to think about why we are encouraged to hate every demographic we don’t belong to, but are also taught that excessive wealth is a virtue and that, by the nature of how money works, wealthy people are also smarter, cleaner, and generally just more human than the unwashed masses.

Fuck, this hit hard. There are those who'd say this "divide and conquer" thing coming from the top is a conspiracy, but I will admit it's one I firmly believe. I feel dumb for not connecting the dots, but oh well it's like they say, no one is immune to propaganda.

 

15 hours ago, Spectre01 said:

On a moderately related subject, I dislike how Doomer has been appropriated by certain groups recently and given a negative connotation. The community needs to take it back, to mean someone who enjoys the Doom franchise, again!

I've stumbled upon a video of "10 hours of Doomer music". I was excited to listen to all the funky midis but was duly disappointed :(

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7 hours ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

But I don't ever feel guilty about being better off than some due to my labors or obligated to share anything I have with anyone I don't know.  They have their problems and I have (and have had) my own.

This is not so much a matter of "guilt", it's rather a matter of empathy, and social responsibility. I'm well aware that nowadays some subsets of folks tends to equate a decent financial status with being an "exploitative capitalist" (as if one couldn't be well situated by simply working hard), which is a kind of "shaming" I find particularly hilarious but I digress. The guilt is best placed in the hands of people like Bezos, because they're the ones who are taking way more money than they're worth. I'm saying "taking" instead of "earning", because employing slaves in the amazon box mines isn't something that should "earn" anybody anything of value.

 

You're also not supposed, or even able, to solve anybody's problems for them, because people need to ultimately get their stuff in line on their own. What does help, however, is actually making somebody who's "down on their luck" feel a little bit less miserable, even if it doesn't change much of anything in the long run.

7 hours ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

If I spent my days worrying about other peoples' problems, I likely wouldn't have solved many of my own.  There is also the darwinist response to this...not every member of any given species is supposed to survive or pass on their genes. That is how a species grows and gets stronger, and trying to help all that are weaker goes against that.  Cold and heartless yes, but as is nature.

I'm a huge fan of "fix your own stuff proper before trying to help someone else with their problems", but the "darwinist response" is not one to give in many cases. Quite a few people genuinely made an effort to get their shit together, find a job, and live a normal life but they can't for several reasons, not all of which are their very own fault. Generalizing people such that everybody who's hit rock bottom deserves their "fate" is not only inhuman, it's also ignorant towards those who do not deserve to be where they are at the time. Look no further than the educational system in the US: You wanna study something? Stump up the cash, or leave with a bunch of red numbers on your bankroll. Left with a bunch of red numbers and can't find a well-paid job in a timely fashion? Say goodbye to your belongings, and good luck paying rent when it's due. That's the kind of shit that results in people living in trailers, if they can even afford one, for that matter.

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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Couldn't agree more with @Doomkid. Boomer is not an age group, its a mindset. Also:

20 minutes ago, HorrorMovieGuy said:

Keep the fucking plebs divided over stupid, completely arbitrary shit like age, race, gender and sexuality. Because as long as every different pleb demographic is at eachother’s throats, very few of them will stop to think about why we are encouraged to hate every demographic we don’t belong to, but are also taught that excessive wealth is a virtue and that, by the nature of how money works, wealthy people are also smarter, cleaner, and generally just more human than the unwashed masses.

"Us and them

And after all, we're only ordinary men"

 

Sorry, but taking into account my profile pic, I just couldn't avoid it.

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1 hour ago, ketmar said:

i absolutely agree! all hospitals should be destroyed, and medics killed, as they're weakining human race!

Well that would certainly force humans to learn how to live off the land again to aide them in their ailments, and we wouldn't have the overpopulation issues we have now.  Life would be balanced again.

 

So while I know that this interpretation wasn't your intent behind your post, I can't say that you're wrong, either.

 

 

Save of course for the structural destruction and murder of medical professionals.  That's just silly.

Edited by Rare Hatchiama

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1 hour ago, fraggle said:

Thank you for the article that pretty much goes:  "I disagree with this idea because (insert heartstring pull here), so I guess we'll never see eye to eye." Over and over again.

 

Your point will not be disputed.  I agree that we won't see eye to eye.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

Well that would certainly force humans to learn how to live off the land again to aide them in their ailments, and we wouldn't have the overpopulation issues we have now.  Life would be balanced again.

 

So while I know that this interpretation wasn't your intent behind your post, I can't say that you're wrong, either.

 

Yes, let's undo centuries of social, political, philosophical, economical, and technological progress so that life can be "balanced" again and rivers of milk and honey will run once more.

 

This and the "natural selection" part are the single most idiotic and ignorant points made thus far - considering you actually also subscribe(d?) to "selective breeding" in an old post, do you have any deeper understanding of these failed, abhorrent concepts? They're considered "failed" for a reason.

 

Clearly you're either trolling or have no idea how the world actually works, or both, and frankly, I don't care - the scary part is that you're claiming you're in your thirties.

Edited by seed

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25 minutes ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

Thank you for the article that pretty much goes:  "I disagree with this idea because (insert heartstring pull here), so I guess we'll never see eye to eye." Over and over again.

 

Your point will not be disputed.  I agree that we won't see eye to eye.

Some defensiveness, I sense. Whatever you think of the structure of the article it's the core message that's the important one, and the reason I linked it. Your comment seemed to be trying to invite some kind of logical argument for why we should fight poverty, why we should help the poor. We could go back and forward for several pages trying to find a common ground, with me and others trying presenting you with the real-world evidence for how we can alleviate human suffering. But it will ultimately go nowhere because you are lacking the empathy to see why that is a good thing in the first place.

 

There is no logical argument for empathy and there is no argument I can present to convince you that people suffering is a bad thing, other than the fact that most of us as humans have that instinct and agree already. People on different sides of the political spectrum often disagree about the tradeoffs of different approaches and the means to get there, but they rarely disagree on the fundamental of "suffering is bad".

 

If you don't agree and you don't have that sense of empathy then you're either a sociopath or still immature (younger people often have poorly-developed senses of empathy). I don't intend that last sentence as an insult, by the way, simply a statement of fact. Hopefully it's the latter - I've found that I've grown and matured a lot as a person as I've passed through my 30s, and I sincerely hope you do too.

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I definitely find it melodramatic to say you've matured through your 30s. Surely, you were supposed to have fully matured at the end of your 20s.

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2 hours ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

There is also the darwinist response to this...not every member of any given species is supposed to survive or pass on their genes. That is how a species grows and gets stronger, and trying to help all that are weaker goes against that.  Cold and heartless yes, but as is nature.

That is natural, yes. A lot of what we do as a species is unnatural, and we are better off for it though. We are living years longer than previous generations. Yes, even the ones you'd call "strong" and worthy of survival.

We are able to travel to space, probe other planets and we can talk to people all around the globe in a few milliseconds.

Stephen Hawking for example would have died early in earlier periods of our history because of his disease. Luckly he didn't, and because of that we know more about the universe around us thanks to the knowledge he passed on.

 

I prefer this over living an empty existence, no different from that of animals, where the only things that matter is passing on your genes and not being eaten.

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10 minutes ago, fraggle said:

Some defensiveness, I sense. Whatever you think of the structure of the article it's the core message that's the important one, and the reason I linked it. Your comment seemed to be trying to invite some kind of logical argument for why we should fight poverty, why we should help the poor. We could go back and forward for several pages trying to find a common ground, with me and others trying presenting you with the real-world evidence for how we can alleviate human suffering. But it will ultimately go nowhere because you are lacking the empathy to see why that is a good thing in the first place.

 

There is no logical argument for empathy and there is no argument I can present to convince you that people suffering is a bad thing, other than the fact that most of us as humans have that instinct and agree already. People on different sides of the political spectrum often disagree about the tradeoffs of different approaches and the means to get there, but they rarely disagree on the fundamental of "suffering is bad".

 

If you don't agree and you don't have that sense of empathy then you're either a sociopath or still immature (younger people often have poorly-developed senses of empathy). I don't intend that last sentence as an insult, by the way, simply a statement of fact. Hopefully it's the latter - I've found that I've grown and matured a lot as a person as I've passed through my 30s, and I sincerely hope you do too.

 

I take no offense from any of your statements, sir.  My experiences throughout life have admittedly caused me to be very lacking in the empathy department, I can be quite callous  But it has enabled me to focus on my own progress, so I don't see it as a bad thing for me.  I also don't see empathy as a bad thing.  I don't view us as bad or good or right or wrong.  I think we just are.

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4 minutes ago, Asking4Id said:

I definitely find it melodramatic to say you've matured through your 30s. Surely, you were supposed to have fully matured at the end of your 20s.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by mature. Technically I was mature at the age of 18 in the sense that I was living on my own and organizing my own life. What I really mean is, I've found that the process of growing of as a human being is a continual one that doesn't just stop when you reach the age of 30. If you're still in your 20s yourself you might be surprised yourself by the changes you go through when you reach your mid-30s. I'm a considerably different person today than I was five years ago and I already know that others agree. That includes a better developed sense of empathy than I used to have, hence why I cited it in my previous comment. And it doesn't mean that there was anything "wrong" with me or "missing" when I turned 30: I've just grown as a human being.

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1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

 Look no further than the educational system in the US: You wanna study something? Stump up the cash, or leave with a bunch of red numbers on your bankroll.

You say that like scholarships and grants don't exist.  Any reasonably intelligent and studious person can go to college on the college's dime.

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11 minutes ago, Cynical said:

You say that like scholarships and grants don't exist.  Any reasonably intelligent and studious person can go to college on the college's dime.

So all the reasonably intelligent and studious college graduates who had to pay for their education were simply not intelligent and studious enough. Got it.

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Given that it's fairly easy to get a full academic scholarship (I did it, and have tons of friends who did the same), I'd say that those "intelligent and studious" people who couldn't get a scholarship weren't all that "intelligent and studious".

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29 minutes ago, Cynical said:

Given that it's fairly easy to get a full academic scholarship (I did it, and have tons of friends who did the same), I'd say that those "intelligent and studious" people who couldn't get a scholarship weren't all that "intelligent and studious".

So, here's where anecdotal evidence meets statistics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/16/odds-your-child-getting-full-ride-college-are-low/

 

Quote

 

Looking deeper into the data, here's what Kantrowitz says is the reality when you combine scholarships with need-based grants.

– 1.5 percent of students in bachelor’s degree programs got enough scholarships and grants to cover 100 percent of the cost of attendance.

AD

– 2.7 percent got enough to cover 90 percent of the cost of attendance.

– 5.9 percent got enough to cover 75 percent of the cost of attendance

– 18.8 percent received enough to cover 50 percent of the cost of attendance.

 

These numbers are from 2018, so not too long ago.

 

Looking at the percentage of graduates, I found numbers from 2016 - 2017 (also somewhat recent), which average out around roughly 85%:
figure-coi-1.png

 

 

In other words, less than 30% of all students received financial support from Uncle Sam (most of which getting 50% of their cost of attendance covered), while the percentage of graduates appears to be at 85%. That leaves us with >50% -who did graduate- and received no financial support whatsoever.

 

And that's not even considering that we are only looking at the cost of attendance, not the cost of sustaining oneself or anything beyond that. Never mind that graduating, regardless of grants, does not mean you're guaranteed to score a profitable job right after.

 

Looking even further into this matter, I stumbled upon this site... It compares Australia, Germany, Canada, UK, and USA with one another, and when it comes to the average student debt, the USA is second only to the UK, with an average debt of 30k$ versus 30.8k$ respectively. 

 

I'm honestly not particularly interested in dissecting every last little piece of statistical data and putting it into perspective with regards to lord knows how many other aspects, but saying it's "fairly easy" to get all your bases covered by Uncle Sam -while less than 2% actually get a full scholarship- is a stretch if I've ever seen one.

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Sure, but there's lots of holes in that data.  Different schools offer different scholarship options; the cited anecdote in the article of a kid in the top 5% of their class going to UofM and not getting a full scholarship was a student going to a flagship state U, which is always going to have less money available for academic scholarships (because they're giving away so many athletic scholarships).  The article doesn't tell us what offers that student received from other (smaller) schools.  Speaking from experience -- I wasn't even top 10% from my high school (just outside of it, was roughly #40 in a class of roughly 360), had a good but not amazing SAT score (1400, back in the days when it was out of 1600), and got different offers from different places; I ended up going to a smaller school, University of Texas at Dalls, because they offered me a full scholarship (which they give out a lot of, because they have no sports).  I could have gone to a larger school (UT Austin, UofH, and SHSU all accepted me as well), I made the choice to go to a smaller school for financial reasons. 

 

If you were a decent student, options to go to college cheaply are out there.  You don't get to say "but I deserve to go to a bigger school, paid for by the people who opted to make more responsible decisions" without getting called out for being ridiculously entitled.

 

(Another hole in this data -- people who do badly in college and get kicked off of their scholarship.  I was one of three people from my high school to go to UTD on a full ride; I was also the only one to maintain the required 3.5 GPA and not get kicked off of it.  Similar story among my Freshman roommates; of the four us us in that dorm room, all four started out on full scholarship, and by the end of our first years, I was the only one still on scholarship [two flunked out of college entirely, the third didn't completely flunk out but didn't maintain a 3.5, so lost scholarship].  The data cited in that article is among all college students, not just incoming freshmen; a whole lot of students who have opportunities piss them away given half a chance.)

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