From the long comment thread to a NYT blog post about the ineffectiveness of efforts to control binge drinking at party schools.
My youngest (of five) kids – all fine people – is graduating from college this year. After paying college tuitions for 20 years now (the kids were spread out in age) I have started to question the necessity of spending all that money for what is, in many respects, a four-year party.
They all went to good private schools, but was the huge expense and all the worry really worth it? What would have been so terrible if they’d gone to the local state college, lived at home and worked to pay tuition? Add the number of actual weeks in the college year and you’ll be shocked to see how many vacation weeks there are.
I wish colleges were the challenging bedrocks of scholarship and intellectual pursuit they were hundreds of years ago. As things stand now, why should anyone pay $55,000/year for a huge four-year party?
— Jane Landers
I wonder whether a better remedy for college binge drinking would be stricter academics. My friends and I drank reasonably in college because our college was hard. If we’d been hungover we couldn’t have kept up with the work and we would have flunked out.
–Charlotte K
October 20th, 2009 at 3:16PM
"I wish colleges were the challenging bedrocks of scholarship and intellectual pursuit they were hundreds of years ago"
That Jane Landers thinks the above to be the case is gloriously wrong and thus–strangely–helps her case, as it is an indictment of the higher education she got.
October 21st, 2009 at 6:41AM
I have started to question the necessity of spending all that money for what is, in many respects, a four-year party … was the huge expense and all the worry really worth it? What would have been so terrible if they’d gone to the local state college, lived at home and worked to pay tuition?
She may be romanticizing a Golden Age that never was, but still … if people like Jane Landers start spouting dangerous common sense like this, who knows where it’ll end? Hmm?