New School University: Eugene Lang Review

The time: Late August, 2003.
The place: Staples "Easy Button" Department Store.

I'm cruising the aisles, mother in tow, picking up everything that may possibly be useful-sharpies, pens, staples, a stapler, Ethernet cord-until I reach an employee, who kindly asks what I need, and I kindly respond "A decent printer that works with a Dell Laptop," and he points me towards the printers. Seeing the abundance of school supplies and approximating my age as to someone above the high school level, he asks "So what school you heading off to?" I reply, "The New School, the only school I applied to," with a certain swagger. Then, he followed up with one of the more redundant and annoying questions I had to contend with the last month:

"But like, what's its actual name?" I rolled my eyes, but a fellow employee saved me. "The New School is the name of the college," his co-worker said, and then, "I graduated from there." He slid a brand new package of pencils onto the rack solemnly. Well, that sucks, I thought, but then again-he's not me. Never back in Jersey, never stuck in a department store, not me!

Flash forward two plus years later-I am on the verge of graduating from a 30,000 a year school-and I am looking into what grocery stores offer the best health insurance. In New Jersey. How did this happen? Where's my fat hook-up? Most schools, in the world, have career placement. What we have, instead, is a career counselor (i.e. someone who can whip up a resume) but what writer, who has been attending Lang full time, has much of a resume at all? Maybe some solid slices of writing residing in My Documents, or perhaps a greater capacity for bullshitting (in a way Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" does resemble the Book of Genesis, yeah uh-huh) but what, really, has Lang provided the average writer to get them jumpstarted to a new career that will put them in a position where they can at least dream of paying off their student loans-without ending up back at square 1?

The average writing class at Lang is composed of three/four written assignments and readings plus analysis. You can just as easily join a writer's workshop for, in some cases, free. Grades aside you'll leave the class with in class critiques in mind and be…well, 4 credits closer to your degree. Though these are really just cannon fodder classes that keep students busy while they scrounge for work via Craigslist; why aren't classes offered that directly relate to our field? Why don't we have magazine editing courses? How about a writing class where you'll, if you work, earn your WGA (Writers Guild of America) card by semester's end? How about education classes, especially in the writing/English field, since so many "writers" become teachers to pay the bills? If we don't have career placement we should be offered something with our degree other than a pat on the back and vote of confidence that "Yeah! I can write better now than I could when I entered the school!"

Now granted a B.A. from a Liberal Arts school isn't useless, if you cruise Craigslist you'll have noticed that some gigs/jobs require a Bachelor's Degree…however it makes me wonder if going to a state school where I could have gotten my Bachelor's and saved at least 40,000 dollars would have been the move.

My time is just about up, but before I go let me recommend to all you lower classmen, get an internship-immediately-and while you're at it make an outcry for more career conscious classes. Try and mold Eugene Lang into more than just an overpriced preparation for graduate school. And if not, at least remember this: the Wegmans grocery chain offers great health benefits; I checked it out, it's legit.