And I say that as someone who has done his share of trend pieces for newspapers. The rule at our newspaper was if we hear of three instances of something that constitutes enough of a trend to be worthy of a story.

So by that logic this story is truly reporting on a trend.

But as Jack Shafer has aptly pointed out – as have others – the story is full of what he calls weasel words and what I call wishy washy words, particularly all the uses of “many” to replace the absence of numbers.

It’s possible to both write about a purported trend and to provide some real numbers too.

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RCin Prov mentions the class series.

The Times class series did a good job of doing both – writing about trends and patterrns but also providing numbers.

I expect better from the Times.

Are there no distinctions within this type of journalism? Is there nothing between three examples and major sociological data? Seems to me that such articles sometimes actually have evidence beyond the few “cases” — something to support the claim that three examples constitutes a “trend.” I would rather try to hold bloggers and journalists to a higher standard than accept that any example can support a lifestyle article. This expectation does not require a major study for any observation about lifestyles; rather, it expects a real attempt to think beyond specific cases to put them in some larger context.

So from this relatively detached perspective, one could easily observe that getting an elite education even if one simply plans to marry and raise children is a wise economic strategy, that professional class men largely seek professional class partners (whether they’re homosexual or heterosexual, in fact) and vice-versa for professional working women. That your class-reproducing “marriagability” is just as much a product of your education as your class-reproducing “employability”.

I also often think about what Malcolm Gladwell said about the kids he taught at an elite college:

>He once taught a course for a bunch of Princeton freshmen. He asked them to look around at each other and see if they noticed anything they had in common. They didn’t. “You’re all most attractive group of kids I’ve ever seen!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you think that has anything to do with why you’re here?” Oh no, of course not, they reply. (Gladwell doesn’t go into this, but this one could run pretty deep. It’s not just admissions officers picking cute kids, it’s professors and students and people who run clubs and things in high school too.)

These women are not going to have that hard a time getting upper middle class husbands.

I would like to know why the kids in the elite colleges are so attractive. My bet is subconscious discrimination, but some weird genetic cross-correlation between intellegence and attractiveness is possible.

Here, here. Nicely said, Tim.

If anything, I think the general critique we should have here is not the critique of choice and privilege, but the critique of the idolatry of productivity in white-collar careers, the notion that allowing people time to balance life and work in cycles related to child-rearing somehow makes them less valuable or productive in an overall sense to an employer. There’s an incredibly short-porch sense of value involved here. Look at the last ten years of top corporate executives getting caught in misconduct: wouldn’t you have rather had men and women in those positions who had a wider, richer connection to their families and communities, the kind of thing that only comes when you live at least a little outside the bubble of work? Making work a total culture isn’t even good for the interests of a company or institution, let alone the wider interests of society.

The lines from the original article which really got up my nose were these: “…will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.”

“Not likely.” So the intervening decade before she plans to reproduce, and any years when she returns to work after having kids, will likely count for nothing and she’ll accomplish nothing worth noting? That’s the same assumption as is made by any employer who thinks it’s not worth hiring a woman because she’ll only go off and have kids at some time in the future, thus she can’t possibly achieve anything now. She wants children, therefore she’s not serious, she’s not committed, she’s not really in the world of work because it’s not her sole and overriding interest in life. That’s internalising the “can’t have it all” idea as if one’s only choice were to have either 100% of one thing or 100% of the other, as if the idea of having a percentage of each (in a ratio, moreover, that can change over time) could never be an option.