HOMESCHOOL - CAMPUS TRENDS

By Barrett Seaman

More than 20 years after my graduation, I was elected to my college’s board of trustees and began returning there for regular quarterly meetings. Each time I arrived on campus and saw the spire of the chapel, the dorm I lived in during my junior year, the lecture halls, I felt a wave of nostalgia, remembering fondly the four years I had spent there.

I also assumed — mistakenly — that the life I experienced in the 1960s was pretty much the same as the one experienced by today’s students. The more time I spent with them, however, the more I realized how very different college was from what I remembered —and from what your own parents probably experienced if they went to a residential college. I was so fascinated by the changes that I decided to visit other college campuses around the country — big, small, public and private — to see if other colleges had changed as much as mine had. At the end of my travels, I wrote a book, entitled “Res Life: How College Students Are Really Living Today.”

There are lots of obvious ways in which colleges have changed. Not only are most co-ed today, men and women live together in the same dorms, often sharing the same bathrooms. Communications technology, which used to consist of a pay phone at the end of the corridor, now plays a role in almost every aspect of campus life: IMing your friends down the hall, checking with professors on assignments, researching papers, staying in touch with your parents. It often seems that more communication takes place electronically than it does in person.

A lot of the changes I found were exciting and positive. Dining hall food was much better than I remembered. The facilities were nicer, and the athletes all seemed to be bigger, stronger and better trained — both men and women. There were many more courses available and more students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, bringing much more diversity to campuses that once served mostly middle class whites. And there were a lot of adults around to provide help and advice for students who were having trouble adjusting to life away from home.

But I found other changes that concerned me. Many of the students I met seemed to be under a lot of stress — not necessarily from their academic workload, although getting As and Bs was high on their list of expectations, but rather from their social and extracurricular lives. Their feeling that they had to hang out with the right people, to look just right, to seem serene and unchallenged even as they were succeeding, was even greater than in high school, where they could at least escape peer pressure by going home at night. In college, it’s there, as they say, 24/7.

While there were lots of adults around the college campuses I visited during the day, the ones most students interacted with were not their professors so much as they were the residential life (“Res Life”) professionals whose main job seemed to be to keep students out of trouble. After class, teachers disappeared — going home or someplace else to pursue their scholarly research, which seemed more important than getting to know students. That was not my college experience at all.

The absence of adults in students’ social lives is one reason I think that alcohol has become a big problem on college campuses. I drank in college and have nothing against drinking. But I found many students drinking with an intensity that was frightening. They said they drank to relieve tension, but they seemed to me to be drinking just to get drunk. It’s now almost routine for college students to get hauled off to the hospital with alcohol poisoning — something that almost never happened when I was a student. The 21-year-old drinking age doesn’t seem to have any effect, and many people I spoke with thought that it actually made the problem worse by creating a “forbidden fruit” aura around alcohol.

Despite these issues, college can be a wonderful, growing experience. It’s important, however, to keep focused on the real reason for being there — which is, after all, to learn.