So I was perusing the Scripps website, seeing what opportunities there were for targeted giving. The online form allows you to give to various vague categories (“student/faculty scholarship”); the most specific it gets is it allows you to give to a specific CLORG. But, unless I’m close to campus and talk with current students, how am I supposed to know which of my favorite CLORGS needs investment? And what if there are specific projects that aren’t CLORG-based but worth funding? Fundraising works best when the outcome of the money is tangible and exciting. That’s what makes special campaigns for new buildings (assuming the building is expected to be useful) work. But you shouldn’t just be harnessing that assignment for buildings–there should be a list of smaller (say, < $10,000) projects that alumnae can read about, give to, and propose. Large, wealthy donors can productively give toward specific projects because they can give enough to accomplish the goal all by themselves. (One senior-now-alumnae told me that if she became wealthy and Dean Wood were still in charge, she'd offer to leave all her money to the school if Wood would wear a red clown nose at all college functions. For example.) Less wealthy (especially recent) alumnae need an infrastructure to enable the same. It both bolsters enthusiasm for giving generally and brings those of us who distrust the Scripps administration into the fold.

Basically, the alumnae office needs to start using Fundable, or something like it. Seriously. Obama got elected by harnessing microdonations. Scripps should do the same.

So here’s a PSA: free organic/free-range/vegan/whatever-the-hell peaches behind Browning! Go eat some so they don’t go to waste. :)

One of the Core II’s this year was about food–where it comes from, how it’s made, etc etc. Basically The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a class. (Why didn’t we have such awesome Core IIs in my day??) Some of the students for their final project mapped out all the edibles growing on Scripps’ campus and posted it in the Motley. There’s a surprising number of plants and fruit trees growing here–a bunch I didn’t even know about! I’ll have to get a picture of the posterboard and post it.

In the last three days, I have written an all-nighter-enhanced 12-page paper about sweding, studied for and took a two-part Civil Liberties final, recorded two new acapella songs (“When My Boy Walks Down the Street” by Magnetic Fields and “Sumer Is Icumen In,” an Old English semi-pagan song we learned in choir), held two Free Culture 5C events (a showing of “Freedom of Expression” and a music mixtrade), and performed in my last Chamber Choir concert ever.

Today senior grades were due. My undergraduate education is complete. Holy crap.

Not to say that there ain’t things left to do. My room desperately needs cleaning, I need to pack stuff to ship home, and I continue to search for gainful employment. There’s about a billion todos and personal projects that I put on hold while finishing up my academic work. I expect many raucous, amusing exploits between now and graduation with my fellow seniors, and Nelson once he’s here.

But it’s really over. I’m no longer a college student. I just haven’t realized it yet.

Ho-ly crap.

So, every year the graduating class paints a section of Scripps’ graffiti wall. I submitted the design above for voting. Lots of people liked it, and of the three submissions I thought I’d win.

But then there was a late entry.

It’s a cliff, all pretty and green grass, with the blue sky shining down. At the edge of the cliff is the Scripps symbol/mascot/thing, La Semeuse. She is throwing stick figures (us) off the cliff into the ocean below, where it appears the stick figures are drowning. One stick figure holds on desperately to a tree root sticking out of the cliff, trying not to fall in the water. It was Untitled, but I’d call it “Sink or Swim.”

Even having a horse in the race, I was tempted to vote for it. It was well-drawn and *so* perverse. Well, apparently I’m not the only one here who’s sleepless, stressed, and bitter as hell in the midst of finals and an awful job market. Lots of people voted for it. “Sink or Swim” won.

Maybe people will feel some voters’ remorse later once they’re done with finals, I guess we’ll see. Already a number of the seniors in the kitchen when Elaine told us the results weren’t very happy with the result. But as much as I liked my own design, “Sink or Swim” will look nice on the wall, next to the “Strange Fruit” design from the ’30s with all graduates hanging from the branches of a tree.

Someone a while back said to me that there ain’t much that unites our class other than bitterness and cynicism. I agreed entirely. On those grounds, I think this design is totally appropriate for the Scripps Class of 2008.

This didn’t actually happen at the party on Friday. But it would’ve been funny.

Here’s the male equivalent, just in time for finals:

I’m planning to print both out and have them at the artsy fartsy Motley art show Lisa’s organizing (where senior non-art majors show off their artistic side!) Mwahahaha…

I don’t have any recordings of the Concert repertoire (though I intend to get a copy of the CD) but my lovely former peer mentor Cypress videotaped two of the Chamber songs, The Tree and My Bonny Lass She Smelleth. Quality!

Basically: any family making $60,000 or less goes to Harvard for free. Anywhere from there to $180,000, you pay a percentage of your income somewhere between zero to ten percent. A family making $120,000/year pays $12,000 for Harvard. Jesus Christ, my family makes significantly less than that yet year after year the FAFSA told me that my parents could realistically cough up like $50,000! Goddammit do I hate the FAFSA.

Like so many other things, other schools are following Harvard’s lead. A number of other liberal arts colleges have also announced explicit income floors below which you don’t have to pay a cent. The competitors haven’t beaten Harvard in the price war, but it does mark the first reduction in the effective price of college in what seems like centuries. Meanwhile, tons of liberal arts colleges, unable or unwilling to provide income floors but still needing to compete, are now guaranteeing loan-free financial aid packages. As far as I’m considered, these are mostly bullshit, in that you’ll still have to take out loans when/if the financial aid office thinks you can afford more than what your parents are willing to pay. Assuming that you *do* qualify for financial aid in the first place, this just gets rid of a (at Swarthmore) $4500 loan each year. Nice, sure, but in practice not as awesome as the press releases imply. Unless you have the cold hard numbers in your hand of what family income levels get what aid (as Harvard’s program does), I don’t trust it.

So far, however, Scripps isn’t even offering that. And given the word around campus, I doubt that they will be improving their financial aid offers for the next few years at least. What word? Apparently the administration is nervous about Scripps’ endowment. My understanding is that back in the day, when Scripps was a finishing school verdant educational institution for young ladies, Scripps alumnae typically married old-money billionaire douchebags. These alums were able to use their husbands’ bank accounts to give ridiculously large sums of cash back to the school.

Now, things are different. Scripps graduates are still frequently affluent, to be sure–we graduate tons of future doctors, lawyers, and business owners. But that’s just it–Scripps alumnae are making their own money instead of marrying into it. As such, while they can certainly give back to their alma mater, they don’t tend to be so ridiculously wealthy that they can offer the kind of mind-blowing one-time contributions that get buildings named after you.

Now there’s no reason to fear that Scripps is gonna go bankrupt or something anytime soon. We don’t have that much lawn to water! But given the relatively generous financial aid offers that are now in vogue–and being implemented at two of our 5C sister schools, CMC and Pomona–if Scripps doesn’t have the capital to keep up, we may lose the bidding war that Harvard began. Scripps initially created the JES scholarship so they could buy high SAT scores and raise their average.* Competition from the new wave of financial aid might bring that average right back down again.

What an awful prospect for our dear alma mater! Clearly us Scripps Women, the class of 2008, need to take things old-school style and go out and wed some old-money billionaire douchebags! Just lie back and think of Claremont, ladies! Incipit vita nova!!**

—–

* Can’t find the memo where I originally drew this conclusion, but this Scripps Magazine article pretty much states the same:

Average SAT scores have jumped about 100 points in the past five years, a “huge” leap according to Goldsmith, who directly attributes the rise to the expansion of merit scholarship aid. “Also, we’ve gone from no National Merit Finalists to 20 in the same period,” Goldsmith concludes, a record number among women’s colleges this year.

** “Here Begins New Life,” the Scripps school motto. Lisa was planning to print it on thongs and sell them at the Seal Court craft fair. I need to bug her about that.

It’s in Torrance (the Del Amo Fashion Center) on a Saturday at 8:30 AM. Turns out, there is physically no way for me to get there. The LA bus I would need to catch leaves at 7:10; the first Metrolink doesn’t arrive in LA until after 8.

What is the point of having public transit when it is completely ****ing useless? Seriously–I can’t think of a time when an LA-area bus or train *ever* went where I wanted when I needed it. The pathetic state of public transit here screwed me over when I tried to interview for an internship with American Public Media. It made me walk for two miles without a sidewalk to fetch a U-Haul. It makes it impossible to do anything outside of walking distance on the weekends, midday, or at night.

Get me out of this godforsaken, car-addicted hellhole.