Blog #5 - The Cost of Affiliation

In Ann M. Johns' "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity," Johns states that to "succeed in school, they (students) may have to make considerable sacrifices. To become active academic participants, they sometimes must make major trade-offs that: can create personal and social distance between them and their families and communities. Students are asked to modify their language to fit that of the academic classroom or discipline. They often must drop, or at least diminish in importance, their affiliations to their home cultures in order to take on the values, language, and genres of their disciplinary culture." To me, this excerpt immediately sounded like a basic concept of marketing.

The first thing I learned in marketing was that marketing is everywhere, because everything carries a price. Price does not have to be monetary; the amount of time spent on performing particular tasks is also considered a price. Payment for tuition and living expenses aside, the enrollment in SDSU carries other prices, as well.

The determination of the price of attending SDSU started from the early stages in my decision-making process when choosing a university to attend. On one hand, there was San Jose State. Being a Bay Area local, the apparent advantage of attending SJSU was being much closer in proximity to my home. However, the prices included a reduced experience of being independent and the attendance of less-reputable school (in comparison to SDSU). On the other hand, accepting SDSU would mean that I would be able to add a much more reputable school on my resume, experiencing much better weather, and a change in scenery (a potentially more exciting experience). One price of attending SDSU is that I would be entering an unknown community; none of my friends from high school nor any family friends went to SDSU. The second price of going to SDSU is much steeper. I would be required to create massive distance between from my family, closest friends, and family friends.

Partaking in the commitment to an academic discourse community as a whole has both its advantages and its burdens. The advantages include meeting an extremely large variety of people, becoming academically enlightened, and finding one's true identity. The burdens on the other hand, consist of separating oneself from their families and friends. As Johns mentions, becoming academic participants means to "create personal and social distance between them and their families and communities." Both my parents knew this would be a high cost of going to college, so they request for me to contact them via. FaceTime once a week to maintain a strong family bond and to update each other on the local and personal news. However, the high intensity and high volume of workload from several classes cause substantial amounts of stress and require heavy investments of time. This has caused me to forget to contact both family and friends (forgot my best friend's birthday last week for the first time).

My double-PhD economics professor back in community college raised the question of whether or not the investment of a college education was worth it. If not attending college, one can immediately begin to work and earn money. In contrast, one can choose to attend college and pay a heavy price of tuition and living expenses (and financial aid for some) for four or more years. For some, it would take several years to be able to break even with the college expenses and eventually gaining actual return on investments from the attendance of college. The cost of affiliation in an academic discourse community shines light on a new costs of attending college: the emotional, personal, and social burdens. So, is college truly worth investing money and time in? In the long run, I believe a college degree is worth the investment; it gives an individual much more job security, ultimately giving one a more reliable and flexible key to survive the dangers of reality.