College was not always a necessity for success and the coming of adulthood, but it sure made it obvious that a student is on the right, mature, track if they are in college. One was viewed as an adult when they announced their enrollment in college. It defined the step needed to be taken to show maturity and the understanding of the importance of education. A college degree is still valued, but does it have the same meaning as it used to? Does one having a college degree grant one automatic admission into the "adult club"? It seems as if college students are deteriorating their IQ count, and concentrating more on entertainment. What is the reason for this, if it is in fact true? Has the meaning of college changed over the past couple of years on the subject of growing into maturity?
I like this topic at lot. I had a student take on this topic two years ago, but she was not focused on the class and did not do the strongest work, unfortunately. Looking at her blog, I also see she did not include a bibliography. I remember that she asked a great question, though, which seems even more important now: "Is college still a rite of passage into adulthood?" Maybe we should also ask when it was and when it stopped being one... To answer that question, she turned to anthropologists studying college life, including Michael Moffatt and Rebekah Nathan (both of whom use the term to some extent). She also read Van Gennep's "The Rites of Passage" to help talk about what constitutes "a rite of passage." I had suggested she could look at media or film portraits of college students -- such as "The Graduate" with Dustin Hoffman -- as a case study for analysis, but she did not go that way. She definitely tried to take on an interesting analytic project, but either she did not have the academic preparation or perhaps the time commitment to really pull it off, though the questions she explored were fascinating. I think she could have made more of the discussion of drinking and sexual freedom as part of what college offers students as a transition to adulthood. I'm personally more interested in whether or not college helps you get the most important part of adulthood, which is having a career.
ReplyDeleteNow that I have focused the class more around the question of student debt, I think the question of whether college is still a "rite of passage" becomes even more interesting (though it could be a very complex question if historically considered, since I think that during the 60s and 70s students no longer wanted that rite of passage, which is interesting too). Today, though, college is not serving that function, and some people compare it to the new high school, with grad school as the new college.... After all, if students often end up moving back home with their parents and not finding a good career-type job for a few years, as increasingly happens today, then has college really served the function as a passage into adulthood? It used to be that college grads very easily moved into jobs and careers, so that they could quickly transition. Not today.
I have been reading two interesting books: "Strapped" (about the impoverishment of your generation and how difficult that makes the transition to adulthood) and "Fear of Falling" (which is a great read on the history of college). I will say more if you are interested.