Like just about everyone else in America, I went to college. I graduated in four years with a degree in Computer Science (No, I will not fix your computer) and ended up working as a computer programmer. I love what I do. It allows me to solve complex problems using inanimate objects and helps me to organize a virtual world into some kind of working order.
But while I attended college, I consider much of my time spent there to be time wasted. Not that I did not learn a lot and come out of there with new perspectives on things, but the culture of a college campus seemed to be heavily grounded in the illusion of what the real world was not.
It is really hard to explain, but looking back on college, I feel as though the entire college atmosphere was not trying to mimic the real world, but the world the administrators sought to create through us.
Think about all the stereotypes about college these days. Colleges have become the symbol of the 24-hour party, the place where you go as a reward for enduring our government skools. Usually, this is at the expense of our parents or on loans that are differed until after we leave college. So why not have fun and enjoy your time there?
I remember hearing pathetic college girls bragging to their friends about how drunk they were going to get on Friday night. If I were a person lacking in moral character, I might have followed that girl to the party and taken advantage of the situation. I wonder if such girls were not taken advantage of countless times and they didn’t even know. It’s sad if you really think about it.
But the 24-hour party mentality is just the tip of the iceberg. Even though most college campuses tend to not condone heavy drinking, frequent sex and drug use, and other such reckless behavior, I think they purposely do nothing about it on campus. I believe that this fits in with their indoctrination agenda of the students they are trying to mold and shape.
The idea of the modern college campus is not to give you the technical skills you need to survive in the real, but to demonstrate what the real world could be like if you accept their ideas. It would be filled with nothing but constant parties, discussions of ideas, endless nights of online gaming, free sex without consequence, and whatever your heart’s desire entails.
That was the atmosphere that I felt was created on campus. Or maybe it just happened that way through the lackluster policies of the administrators. Either way, they do nothing to reverse the dangerous trend.
College should not be about having fun as the top priority. Really, nothing should be that way. In this case, it causes people to place unreasonable expectations on college and as such, administrators adjust their policies rather than enforce the ones that were tried and true.
Higher learning is about honing your strengths into marketable skills or discovering how you can use your strengths to make you money in the real world. That is not to say that you can’t have fun in the process and that partying with your friends is not out of the question. But when the emphasis in higher learning is more about having fun than it is about actual learning, there is something very wrong over all.
Some of my perspective, though, probably comes from my own experiences in which I probably could have applied myself more. But I didn’t and I don’t really regret that entirely. Most of what I learned in college was not really all the relevant toward my career field, it merely gave me a base to work from. What I learned in the corporate was far more useful to me than what I learned in college.
So maybe this viewpoint is skewed because of my own personal growth experiences. One thing is for certain, and that is that I know most people don’t have to go to college in order to succeed in their own personal strengths.
But don’t tell that to high school students. We all want them to be duped into going into thousands of dollars of debt by the time they graduate or drop out.