Posted on 08/18/2008 11:30:55 AM PDT by reaganaut1
College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity.
Once upon a time college was a halfway house for practicing how to be a grown-up. Students couldn't count on the dean of students to make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they wanted to avoid getting kicked out, they had to weigh the potential consequences of their actions, just as in adult life. The student-teacher relationship was more distant and less nurturing than in high school, and more like the employee-supervisor relationship awaiting them after graduation. Students had to accept that they no longer got hugs for trying hard. If they didn't get the job done, they were flunked with as little ceremony as they would be fired by an employer.
This apprenticeship in adulthood has been gutted.
The light workload alone can make college today a joke. The most recent data say that students self-report only about 14 hours per week spent studying (the true figure is presumably lower). The definition of "weekend" has sprawled to the point that, as a Duke administrator put it, "We've run out of classroom space between 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday."
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
There have always been college students who are not serious about their studies. I wonder if there is evidence that the proportion of such students at 4-year residential colleges has increased.
The best place to transition from childhood to adulthood is the US Military.
or having a child.
In many countries military service is mandatory. Discipline would fix many of us.
We are proud to have an all volunteer military force though.
We shouldn’t punish our kids with babies...(Sarc)
From the linked article:
“There’s no intellectual loss in delaying college.”
Maybe true for the arts or humanties. I can say from personal experience, however, that a couple of years off from higher math, chemistry, or physics (and probably language studies, too) leaves a lot of re-learning and refreshing to do when you do get back into it. Not to say that it can’t be done, though, and I suppose approaching these subjects with a fresh mind might even be helpful.
Don't call me Mr. Peterson. Mr. Peterson is my father. Just call me Bill."
I could not agree more with the statement that title makes.
There is also anecdotal evidence that a lot of college girls get into sex in college. Being away from home and away from supervision, there’s a tendency among some college students to go wild.
How quaint to talk about when college girls had housemothers in the dorms. Today, these resident life people do not act as chaperones or do anything to discourage these girls from spending nights with guys.
Certainly many young people are serious about college and approach it with the attitudes that they are learning and developing themselves for their futures. But the whole environment at college nowadays doesn’t encourage that as much as it should.
And you have to consider that some colleges, esp. religious ones, are more strict than others about rules of behavior for their students.
I’m doing ROTC in college... does that count?
Remember when many college professors were conservative? They wore tweed jackets with patches on the elbow area, and sometimes smoked a pipe, and they behaved with quite dignity?
That stereo type has gone the way of the dodo bird.
I would say Yes, that does count, but ONLY after you have been through basic [grin]
yeah, you know why? because that is when professor's want to teach their classes and request those times as well. classes are only as good as the people teaching them. i just got my master's degree and let me tell you: the teachers were great, but they liked their weekends just as much as we did.
Looks like the Clinton presidency has a legacy, after all...
as societies grow more affluent they tend to extend childhood.
wealthy families have always done that.
also, it was a policy of the post-ww2 u.s. government to keep people out of the workforce, and college was one vehicle.
College is a holding tank for many.
I'm shocked I tell you!!!!
[what about the boys?????]
interesting
“The best place to transition from childhood to adulthood is the US Military.”
....I should have gone in after my freshman year...I would have been the better for it.
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