Probably the best point made in this article is that universities aim for "surface" diversity: they take the easy route of pretending that picking enough students of enough different racial backgrounds is actually making their school diverse. Its not. You end up with a bunch of kids from the same upper middle class suburbs. They might not all have the same skin color, but they will have the same accent, culture, and their version of a summer job in high school was at a shopping mall.

I felt like an alien at school. Rural communities have a much lower cost of living, but also a much lower income. A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent...etc. This divide was apparent to me as a student at Virginia Tech. 80% of VT's students come from the wealth DC suburbs. Yet wherever I worked when I was a student, the vast majority of my coworkers were from rural parts of the state. The "NoVa" kids in general didn't have to get jobs at all due to their parent's earning power. For them, rent was a joke. For rural kids, rent for a room is half what their parent's pay on mortgage or rent. Take this single piece of difference, and then extrapolate it to every other aspect of culture.

I fear that this is one of those "I've heard someone make a metaphor and taken it too literally, then rebutted that literalism broadly."

I imagine 99% of the time that metaphor is made the author would be just as happy saying "JS is the new C", it simply doesn't roll off the tongue as well.

My mother can't travel by plane, because she has aphasia (can't speak) and a leg brace, due to her stroke.

If I go through the airport with her, there is no guarantee the agents will let me stay with her and explain the situation. She can't remove the leg brace on her own for them to make sure it's not a weapon, and TSA agents can't do it properly.

So, basically, taking her to the airport is a recipe for having her verbally abused (treated like a mentally handicapped or non-cooperative person), and then physically abused (TSA agents going under her clothes to determine that she's just wearing a leg brace).

Maybe there's some special procedure for dealing with this, but it's easier to just not travel than risk it.

The TSA is a direct, overt violation of the 4th amendment (search and seizure). Thus, the US federal government is not legitimate under the US Constitution. (No, I am not advocating rebellion, violent or otherwise.)

If we simply let the airlines handle their own security, which is not a violation of the 4th amendment, none of this would be an issue. Moreover, it would make air travel and security screening a voluntary relationship between consenting parties (travellers and airlines), instead of a coercive relationship between two consenting parties and government agents.

Kiln is already a well-known software development tool from Fog Creek: http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/. I wonder if the author knows.

No offense, but your comment is a symptom of the very problem the article is highlighting. You say:

"A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent...etc."

The point of the article is that this is not true and almost no one knows it! If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free. All covered by the school. No crippling student loans, no expectation of you working a job while in school (except maybe 10hrs/wk of cushy work-study for spending money). Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school. Very few families know this.

Is there culture shock? Sure, of course. That's part of the point -- for both the poor rural kids and the rich urban kids, and everyone in between. But at schools with the resources to do diversity right (which, sorry to hear, doesn't sound like it includes Virginia Tech), the shock is only cultural, not financial, so the full college experience really is accessible to students from any background.