Unless you're doing some course you hate because of family pressure or something, why are you there?
As someone who teaches in the US system, I have to say I’m pretty much completely of this view. I really hate seeing all the resources of my university so under-utilized by most of the students. We’ll bring in brilliant lecturers who speak to half-capacity crowds of dull-eyed students who are only there if their profs force them to go. We have a wonderful library system that many students studiously resist learning to use. I know that many professors work very hard on making our classes both challenging and at least reasonably engaging, and most at least present some worthwhile material, even if the presentation leaves something to be desired. So this middle-class entitled angst bullshit is pretty wearing.
But for my own part, I have tended, in the past, to place myself in the Ganesh camp, roughly—i.e., should’ve had more sex, especially, and should’ve (although I’m not sure if, financially, I could’ve) gone to uni farther from home. I have also tended to think that I needed, mostly, to relax a little and open myself up to the work I was reading, rather than seeing it as a task, as Work. I was a bit Hermione Granger about things, too. Not just academic things.
Yet I am not still sure I was fundamentally capable of making other decisions at the time. In thinking about this question, which I interpreted as follows: Interested in whether those who pay alot more for their college educations [i.e., pay for it themselves] are generally more active?
I think that anyone who has an internal sense of motivation—whether that comes from paying your way or, in my case, knowing that an education was the only way out of my crushingly small Midwestern town—are the ones who tend to take it all more “seriously.” For better or worse.
But, I’d say, largely for the better. My high school was so small and provincial, that I was always mildly shocked when something I’d learned there actually turned out to be accurate: I realized at some point that I just expected to find out that everything I’d ever learned turn out to be mostly wrong. This means that I was pretty much of a sponge for academic work, for going to lectures, for becoming truly “educated.”
Additionally, in regards to the dream of all that “great sex” I was missing out on by being too terrified of failing academically, especially my first two years at university . . . when it comes down to it, I, personally, had no basis for just “relaxing a little and opening myself” up in ways relating to sexual activities, anyway, that were also self-protective. As I discovered when I studied abroad, and that came as quite a shock. But such naivete, in my experience, is common to many 20 yo women.
(Date rape or sexual activities gone horribly wrong are pretty commonplace among my students, and I know one male former student who is doing time, right now, for a date rape incident that he still believes to have been consensual).
The hook-up culture that dominates the heterosexual social scene on US campuses, anyway—and has, to my mind, at least since I was in college in the late 1980s, although we didn’t have a label for it—is not something that either men or women in the US are really very prepared to deal with the potential consequences of, by and large.
So, I guess I do agree that going into debt in order to have wild debauched times in university is often a very costly mistake, not just financially. |
