School Daze

In the thick heat of August, thoughts don't automatically return to a new school year, particularly college. Some colleges, like my alma mater, don't begin until the third week of September, but many are starting today, including the one across the street (just about), Humboldt State University.

So here are a few college facts from a New Yorker essay last spring (probably part of a commencement address in progress) by one of the best writers writing, Louis Menand. There are some 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the U.S. A far greater percentage of the population goes to college now than when I did (about half) , and a lower percentage graduates (also about half.) Harvard used to accept about 30% of its applicants; today it accepts 9%.

About a million and a half students graduated last spring. 22% of them majored in business, far more than any other field. Some 4% majored in English, as I did. Menand writes: "There are more bachelor degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies, than in all foreign languages and literatures combined."

So college and its apparent purpose for many students is very different now, although my contact with students is generally in the arts, so I know they still exist! College is far more of an employment prerequisite, and so surly students must go into debt for this credential. There was a certain scam quality to the enterprise in the past as well, but today it's a dim student who doesn't sense that possibility. Some college teachers and administrators may also suspect it, though they must wonder who is really getting the financial benefit.

I just heard a Virginia Tech professor on TV mentioning that far more students now are "on medication," meaning for psychological problems. This is a new item that transcends the dubious and the gloomy into the territory of danger. Teachers are not trained to handle aggressively disturbed students (in fact, in a generally unappreciated irony, most college teachers haven't actually trained to teach.) The movement (it's hard to say how big it is, since TV news picks up on the novel and strange whenever possible) for students to tote guns, is hardly a practical alternative, unless more routine bloodshed is the goal.

The idea that colleges have shifted to cynical credential mills and one dimensional job training facilities with poor security screening is pretty disheartening. All the more heroic then are the students who pursue real education and the teachers who help them. Such students are a minority but we always were. But today they must be even more focused on their ideals.

Menand had another message for American students as well, as good in August as it was in May. In facing the great questions of the day and of all time, in learning the many approaches and points of view, and in experiencing the great diversity that is another newer feature of the U.S. campus, they may learn humility. "We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence," he wrote.

It's the statement that reflects a nation no longer changed only by 9-11 but by the arrogance of the war in Iraq. But it's universal enough for a university in any time.

As for my own college daze, there's not a week that I don't connect to something that began or that I learned there. Right now on my desk is a book--the actual, physical book--that I bought for a literature class some 40 years ago. I went to a liberal arts college, which according to Menand is a classification no longer used. I may not have done all that well at business, but I'm proud to be in the four percent.