There’s a difference between taking cello classes for some rich kid to get into Princeton and normal people. I didn’t grow up in a particularly bad neighborhood, but time I spent playing baseball, Boy Scouts, etc kept me away from trouble. I wasn’t directly exposed to drinking, smoking and other not so smart things in middle school. I got the benefit of encountering those things when I was older.
When I was in high school I volunteered as a counselor at a summer program affiliated with my dads job in an inner city environment. The stuff we did help keep those kids, 2-4 grades younger than me, away from (or perhaps delayed) getting recruited into the drug trade.
Asking bankers and economists to measure educational and social outcomes sounds pretty dumb. Enrichment isn’t designed to produce ROI, it’s to enrich your experience as a human being. We don’t have the income mobility we once did, so folks are likely to land in whatever income strata they came from. Using income as a metric to measure whether enrichment activities are worthwhile or not is the same as evaluating the quality of apples based on the price of oranges.
When I was in high school I volunteered as a counselor at a summer program affiliated with my dads job in an inner city environment. The stuff we did help keep those kids, 2-4 grades younger than me, away from (or perhaps delayed) getting recruited into the drug trade.
Asking bankers and economists to measure educational and social outcomes sounds pretty dumb. Enrichment isn’t designed to produce ROI, it’s to enrich your experience as a human being. We don’t have the income mobility we once did, so folks are likely to land in whatever income strata they came from. Using income as a metric to measure whether enrichment activities are worthwhile or not is the same as evaluating the quality of apples based on the price of oranges.