A Statistic Strikes Back

A recent college dropout relates her view of the pressures on students from society's Great Plan for the young, critically evaluates some of the implicit assumptions of the higher education establishment, and reacts to the three articles following on college dropouts by Williams, Leach and Goetz, and Berger. This paper enables the reader to learn not only about but from the dropout by reminding him that statistics sometimes interfere with our view of the people behind them, who are our only legitimate concern.