I'm not gonna lie to you, I fucking hate the Ivy Leagues.
And it's honestly not because of those Ivy League schools themselves.
It's honestly because of the way that people view them that is completely disconnected
from reality.
Welcome everyone to the Pop Out.
I'm your host Albert Shen.
This is not a hip hop podcast.
I just really hate Drake.
Very much appreciate Kendrick Lamar for what he did in dismantling the fraud that is Drake.
No, this podcast is going to actually be about education in all its various forms and many
parts, moving parts and systems.
You know, I gotta be honest with you, I have been doing a lot of work in both the public
and private sector.
I'm currently a tenured faculty at Pasadena City College and have worked at four year
colleges in the years past, but also in the private sector.
And there's something that I learned in my time juggling both these different spheres,
which is that one, there's just a lot of bad information being given out to students.
And you know, the bad information being given out is from well-meaning people.
It's from parents, it's from counselors at schools, it's from the private sector who
has an incentive to try to convince you that they have the secret formula to get your kid
into a good college or to improve their the opportunities that they have in life.
You know, there's messaging that comes from politicians, there's messaging that comes
from all over the place.
And I think personally that I think most people are well-intentioned, they have a good heart,
they want the best for people.
There might be some snakes in the grass, some people that are being sneaky and using, you
know, opportunities to profit themselves.
But I think for the most part, people think that they know what they're talking about
and they do try to give the best advice they could without actually having the experience
of helping, you know, hundreds and thousands of students get through high school, onto
college and then also transition from out of college.
This is not something that most people I think have access to, in part because, you know,
life is life.
You don't have access to, you know, all of life's experiences, you just have your own
lane.
And so I wanted this to be a space where people like myself, and I'm hoping in the future,
other educators, other students, parents, we could all come together and have an honest
conversation about the educational system and to start dismantling a lot of the, you
know, false claims that exist out there about what a college is for, you know, how to get
into college, what you should be doing in high school, but also like that transition
into the workforce and, you know, what it is that you should be doing and preparing
in order to get yourself ready for these transitions in your life as you move from, you know, the
school system into the workforce and then beyond.
Right.
So, in this podcast, I'm going to be pretty blunt and I imagine I'm not going to make
some people very happy.
It'll impact at least the private sector.
I imagine it's going to impact some of their pocketbooks if people actually hear what it
is I'm going to say, you know, and so I expect to have a lot of, you know, negative feedback
and that's fine.
That's why I called this the pop out because I just wanted to pop out and pop off of the
mouth.
I luckily have the privilege of being tenured.
So you're not going to take anything away from me.
You could scream as loud as you want, but I'm going to do my best to speak at least truth
as I understand it or what I think has the best reason for us to believe to be true.
And in that process, I hope to accomplish at least a couple of things.
One, I want to make sure everybody has the right information and this is, you know, this
is regardless of your background, regardless of whatever advantages that you have or disadvantages
that you have.
I think there are opportunities out there for everybody.
It might look different depending on your life circumstances and you might have to kind
of adjust to your own, you know, personal situation.
But I wanted to let you know in this information of being able to access all, you know, information
for free and easily, you know, readily, conveniently, that this would be one place you can go and
hopefully trust to give you some good guidance on where to find good information.
And I hope that people will chime in and also share resources for people so that we could
all kind of collect it in one place and be a one stop shop for everybody.
But I wanted to be available, the same information to be available to everybody.
There's not to be something that you had to pay for.
There's something that's not something that you should have to know the right people to
get, you know, everybody should be making rational informed decisions.
That is my honest belief.
And I believe from that we'll get real, real meritocracy where the people who, you know,
they do make the best of the opportunities they're given are rewarded for their effort
and for the kind of things that they produce.
So that's one hope.
The second hope, honestly, is for us to actually help ourselves with regards to our own mental
health when it comes to education, when it comes to schools, when it comes to grades,
when it comes to college admissions.
I cannot tell you the number of times, especially in the private sector, but even while I was
teaching at, you know, UC Santa Barbara or at Villanova or, you know, currently at Pasadena
City College, I cannot tell you the number of times that students have undergone severe
stress, anxiety, depression as a result of education, as a result of sometimes the educational
system and the way that we evaluate students, the way that, you know, communities kind of
feed into the ideas of what makes a successful person with regards to the kind of education
you need or the kind of college you need to go to or graduate from.
So in serving to speak truth, I am hoping to also kind of allow students and parents
and educators to start being a little bit more mindful of what it is that we're doing
to fellow people as we put pressure on them in order to get them to accomplish what we
might consider the best life for them, which honestly might not be what's best for them,
right?
Education serves a purpose.
I truly believe that.
And I think it's something that we all need to have to some degree if we're going to live
in a society peacefully with, you know, rational, good decision making, right?
Like we're going to need people who have certain, a certain set of skills in evaluating the
information that we're bombarded with on a daily basis.
But the flip side of that is that sometimes comes at a cost to our emotional, psychological,
spiritual well-being, which at the end of the day hurts the whole purpose of getting
an education.
It actually goes antithetical to why we want people to be educated.
So I am hoping to at least create this kind of culture shift in the way that we view,
for example, college rankings, for the way that we have these discourses around terms
that honestly should not be in the public discourse, right?
I'm thinking specifically nowadays, things like DEI, affirmative action.
I'm trying to think what else, right?
Is it trigger warnings?
I mean, I am a philosopher by training and I go absolutely nuts when people get too hung
up on their reactions to these terms because they think they know what these terms mean
and it is absolutely not what they think it means.
You know, from private conversations to discourses with students, I mean, people seem to just
have the wrong idea of all these things.
I think that if people actually knew what these things meant, they would stop reacting
so strongly, right?
Even if I use the word, for instance, privilege, right?
I don't want people to get emotionally all worked up over it because the word has a specific
meaning that I'm trying to convey and it's not what you probably associate it with.
It's not a political term.
It is not meant to kind of, you know, evoke outrage.
It's not meant to kind of mobilize people necessarily to do anything.
It's just kind of a word used to express an idea to, you know, explain the realities of
the world that we live in.
So my hope, and you'll see this in all the episodes to come, is to kind of slowly start
breaking some of these ideas down, breaking down truths about what colleges are looking
for, what the educational system actually does, at least in the United States.
And I hope at the end of the day that it could serve as a good resource for those who actually
need it.
I did not have that resource.
I grew up to parents who did not necessarily go to college.
I mean, you could call it college by name, but I doubt it was actually like a college,
at least in the, you know, in the Western country sense of college.
And they were, you know, again, they were immigrants.
We grew up in a very poor home.
We did not have the resources to hire somebody to give us any information.
So I had to learn a lot of things on my own.
And I saw at an early age what kind of, you know, information I had received that later
on upon reflection realized, wow, that was terrible advice.
That was not actually true at all.
Right?
You know, I hope that this is not a situation that others have to go through, especially
at a day and age in which we can all access correct, truthful information.
You just need somebody to vet that information, I think, in part because we can't expect students
to do it.
We can't actually expect parents to do it because parents probably are thinking about
what they understood and knew from their own experiences, not necessarily what happens
to the thousands of other students and thousands of other administrators, what they're thinking,
right?
Like there's no way for them to know.
So the more voices we have, the better it'll be for us to collect that information into
one place and to get closer to what is actually true so that if we're going to have a discussion
about it, at least we could have a real honest one instead of one where we're talking past
each other because none of us really are talking about the same thing.
Okay?
So I hope that you enjoy the podcast to come.
I'm really excited for it.
I'm not going to lie.
I will be cursing.
I will not be filtering myself.
And there will be times when I will get really, really pissed off and angry, in part because
of my own experiences facing the same ridiculous claims again and again and again and again
and again.
So expect me to just speak like we are in a conversation.
And I hope that you would give me the same in return, right?
Good or bad.
I'm open to all of it.
I look forward to our engagement in the coming weeks, months, and hopefully I could get you
to be on board with at least changing some things up for the betterment of not just yourself
but for all of us.
I look forward to hearing from all of you.
I'm out.