In the news: “A college student claims he was injured when a fraternity member in a ‘drunken stupor’ decided ‘that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his —
I’m stopping right there. You’ll have to click through to read the rest (found via Boing Boing).
Why colledge? That’s my word for “the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan.” Colledge cheapens the experience of students who are in college. Colledge students and college students are often found on the very same campus.
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Thursday, February 2, 2012
Life in colledge
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comments: 5
I did 'click through'--and it was just as I had feared... For several years we lived across the street from a University of Cincinnati fraternity house...one that attracted a lot of colledge students (majoring in Alcohol and Tobacco, mostly.)
Likely the mind set develops well before matriculation.....
“Majoring in Alcohol and Tobacco”: that’s a good one.
There are of course terrific students in social fraternities and sororities too.
I just never met one, I guess. Sorry!
I suppose the benefit of "colledge" students is that they subsidize academia for both researchers and fellow students.
Most colledge kids are probably only there because they are young, naive, got accepted, and simply don't know what else to do with themselves. Anecdotally, that's why I was there combined with my parents' insistence that "that's what you do". So while they may detract from the experience of more academically driven students, in a way they may also provide the resources necessary for the experience in the first place.
Maybe the real tragedy here is that universities accept students who aren't a) capable, or b) mature enough to fully benefit from the experience they ostensibly are paying for.
A recent Chicago Tribune article says that 23% of Illinois high-school seniors are “college-ready.” But I’d add something to your points: c) don’t need to do very much to succeed in their coursework. The recent book Academically Adrift suggests that many courses require very little of students. “College” in that way can make it easy to be in “colledge.”
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