Even though it’s important to graduate with a respectable GPA.
However, everyone is different when it comes to their own college experience, which means that there’s nothing wrong with focusing more on academics, despite being told that you should have a healthy balance between work and play at college.
Is that a controversial statement? Yes, I totally agree. Most of what was useful for me and my future career in college had nothing to do with academics itself. I’m probably a bit of an outlier there, but I would be surprised if most people would said college should be ALL about academics.
IMHO, college is not and never was “all about academics.” Athletics, soft skills, friendships, new experiences… these have always been a part of the university experience, I would wager for centuries.
Why would you think that it was all about academics?
I’ve worked at universities since the mid-1980’s. Universities don’t think college is all about academics.
I’d like to hear from someone who thinks this is a thing. Even at MIT, which you’d think would be a hotbed for this idea, the stereotype of the student who lived in the dorm with all singles and who did nothing but study was looked down on.
Indeed.
I had a neighbor in the dorms who was an engineering major. He was pretty smart (as one has to be to earn an engineering degree), but he had little in the way of social skills, and did nothing other than going to class, studying, and watching TV in the dorm lounge
When he was a senior, he interviewed like crazy to get a job, but what he wound up getting was a big stack of rejection letters. I suspect that he didn’t interview well, but a complete lack of any extracurriculars or interests on his resume, outside of “but I got good grades,” led to him being passed over again and again.
Here’s one professor’s argument that college should be all about academics:
…it’s common knowledge that Harvard students stay away from lectures in droves, burning a fifty-dollar bill from their parents’ wallets every time they do. Obviously they’re not slackers; the reason is that they are crazy-busy. Since they’re not punching a clock at Safeway or picking up kids at day-care, what could they be doing that is more important than learning in class? The answer is that they are consumed by the same kinds of extracurricular activities that got them here in the first place.
Some of these activities, like writing for the campus newspaper, are clearly educational, but most would be classified in any other setting as recreation: sports, dance, improv comedy, and music, music, music (many students perform in more than one ensemble). The commitments can be draconian: a member of the crew might pull an oar four hours a day, seven days a week, and musical ensembles can be just as demanding. Many students have told me that the camaraderie, teamwork, and sense of accomplishment made these activities their most important experiences at Harvard. But it’s not clear why they could not have had the same experiences at Tailgate State, or, for that matter, the local YMCA, opening up places for less “well-rounded” students who could take better advantage of the libraries, labs, and lectures.
I’ve never worked at a college but I went to one for 5 years and yeah…there’s a reason I was required to take Billiards and Weight Training before I could graduate. And I’m pretty sure I recall very little of the literature showing pictures of happy students in classrooms or even touting the availability of classes.
Student life is at least 50% or more of the college’s recruiting focus. Even in the academic part of the college experience your focus isn’t entirely on grades. There’s everything from learning to work in a group, to getting to class on time, to taking notes, speaking up to ask a question, reading a syllabus…
Heck, employers don’t even look at your GPA for the most part. They just want to know if you could handle all that college threw at you for 4 years, long enough to get a degree at the end.
The real question is: How much socializing, exercising, drinking, does an 18-to-22 year-old actually require to release stress, feel like he or she is enjoying his or her life, maintain good health, etc.?
College is a rare opportunity to do something–attend classes taught by experts in their fields–and figure out important things about oneself, one’s interests, one’s skills, one’s potential. Sure, we all need to blow off steam, but most students (in my experience, as a longtime college professor) abuse this need, and don’t get nearly enough out of the academic experience as they could (and in my view, should).
I say this as not only a professor, but as an ex-student. I spent four years working pretty hard in college, but my one regret was all the hard courses I didn’t take, and all the work I blew off so I could have fun. I wish I’d 10% less fun, and challenged myself 10% more.
Well, yes. Many college students are off on their own for the first time in their lives, and at that age, are likely to lack in impulse control and the ability to think about long-term consequences. Those who focus on socializing and partying are the ones who typically find that the school “invites them to seek other opportunities” (i.e., they flunk out).
One of my goddaughters graduated from a big state school in the Midwest last year; as a freshman, she shared a dorm room with three other girls. Two of her roommates were from small towns, and were clearly there to “have a great time” (at their parents’ expense). They regularly teased and berated my goddaughter for “missing out on what college is about,” because she was actually studying and going to class, rather than drinking and sleeping around like they were. (Neither of those roommates made it past the end of their freshman year.)
Then, there are good students, but who aren’t “grinds” – I was one of those. I got my work done, and got pretty good grades, but I also hung out with friends, played D&D, went out to the bars sometimes, and had a girlfriend through most of my college years. I got a 3.5 GPA as an undergrad; I know I was capable of something closer to a 4.0 if I’d cared to. 35 years later, I’ve had a good career, and I also have a group of college friends who are still among my best friends in the world. I don’t regret not being a grind.
You speak as if the only option is to work hard at classes or party. I have no such regrets in my college career. Perhaps I wish I didn’t skip as many classes as I did when I was (unknowingly) depressed and taken avail of student health services, but it wasn’t going out and getting drunk every other day. My non-academic coursework was basically living at the student daily newspaper. That wrecked my grades but was what I needed for my career now as a photographer. I also developed a lot of skills working through the last two years at a couple of jobs, where I may have been able to take time to study. I could have given up all that and done 10% more and harder coursework but, by my calculus, it wasn’t worth it.
Hardly. I did lots of other stuff–chase girls, play basketball, go to the theater–and it was great and necessary, just not quite to the degree (excessive, in retrospect) that I did it. I just didn’t exercise the best judgment.
I still don’t. I’m 68, and I need to revise my will, but instead of contacting a lawyer, I decided to spend most of today on the internet, yakking with Dopers about college, the book Genesis, and Will Smith. Probably regret it someday.
Don’t waste your time with regret. No need to. Live and let the past be.
One January when I was in college I blew off a non-credit, non-graded seminar on AI to stay up all night with friends and see the sunrise. That’s where I met my wife. I think I made the right decision.
When my younger daughter was in college she was on the Equestrian team. She wasn’t the star rider, but she became president, and learned how to do contracts when they moved barns and how to deal with obnoxious parents. She also worked in Student Life and learned how to organize events and programs. She now works in project management, and got more training for that from her non-academic part of college than she ever did in the academic part. She still got good grades, but used her time efficiently.
There is a lot of time outside of classes. Using all of it to study is not going to optimize your life.
The OP and most of the conversation seems to equate “college” with “four-year residential experience during the ages of 18-21 or so, away from home and parents for the first time.” That’s a very common equation, and almost every time you read (or think) about “higher education” in this country, that’s the image that comes to mind.
Perhaps this is because that particular kind of college experience is vastly overrepresented in people who work in media or politics (and here on SD?).
But the fact is that that kind of college experience is a distinct minority. The most common type of college experience, by far, is non-residential, takes place later in life, is not full-time, and is self-funded. Most college students (numerically) are around 23 years old and financially independent, paying their own way. About a quarter of college students have children of their own. The number of college students attending community colleges far exceeds those spending time on private, leafy green campuses with frats and parties and sex and clubs and shenanigans. But the leafy green campuses are pretty much the only thing people imagine when they hear “college.”
When you are (like the majority of college students) paying your own way, learning because you feel strong motivation and need to do so, you tend to work more diligently on the academics and having fun away from your parents is not so high on the agenda.
Not that I disagree with the idea that many U.S. college students aren’t the stereotype of the 18-21 year old who goes away from home and lives on (or near) campus, but do you have any cites to back up your statements that they are a “distinct minority,” or that “most college students (numerically) are around 23 years old”?
Looking deeper, my statistics were a little dated (I’ve been in this game a long time, and every year for the past 10 or so, the number of traditionally college-aged students in the country has been declining. It’s a demographic thing we’re all aware of. And costs keep going up.)
The most recent data I can find quickly has the average age of college students as 26.
Perception vs. Reality: The Typical College Student.
This post about residential vs. non-residential is a bit older, but I’m sure the trend has continued
And this somewhat argumentative piece in the Washington Post is much older (2013), but it does lay things out pretty clearly.
It’s interesting (to me, at least!) that the stereotype of what college is like is so prevalent and widely accepted, and so inaccurate.
More than just interesting, though–there are serious consequences for public funding of higher education. The idea of paying for someone to party and live it up is (naturally) pretty unappealing to voters. The reality (I had 20 years teaching in a community college before my current position) for so many students is that they are bright, driven, motivated, with families to support, and barely struggling to get by, hoping that a degree will let them make a big jump in income or to a safer or more rewarding job.
College isn’t all about academics, and the people in college are proud of that. Two t-shirts I recall from my college days:
“College. Where else could 15 hours a week be considered full time?”
“You can always retake a class, but you can never re-live a party.”
Even now, decades later, I routinely see people leveraging their social networks for career advancement. Many of those connections were made at a university, so if a person is solely there for the academics they are depriving themselves of one of the most important resources at school - networking.
Thank you for that.
I had found that first link earlier this morning, as well, and while the average age is 26, a chart on that site shows that just over half of American college students are 23 or younger (making the median age 23, it would appear), and 9% are age 18 or younger. The average is several years higher than the median, of course, because a quarter of college students are age 30+, and that’s pulling the average age up.
So, definitely, those “traditional” college students, age-wise, aren’t the majority, but on the other hand, it also appears that the “minority” that they represent is probably in the 40+% range. OTOH, it’s also likely that many of those, even if they are in that 18-22 age range, may not be full-time students, and/or may not be living on campus, or attending a school some distance away from their family’s home.