I will say this for the ROTC scholarship program: the military tells you up front that if you pass your classes and graduate from college, they’ll find you a job. And if you don’t… they’ll find you a job.
Depends on both your parents and how good you are at playing the “not my fault” card.
Even knowing my kid has screwed up without excuse the first semester, I have to say I’d give him or her (I have one of each) a followup probationary semester. Like Meyer6, a lot of people just need a semester of “oh shit, I screwed up.”
But as a parent after that its the “live at home, go to community college if you want Mom and Dad to foot the bill.”
Footing the bill is another issue. A lot of kids are going almost completely off student loans - it isn’t like Dad is writing the tuition check. And if you have your own student loans, your parents don’t get a whole lot of say. You just need to keep your grades good enough that the “aid” doesn’t drop. Now, graduating with a 2.3 and $80k worth of loans from “Low Tier State College of Beer” doesn’t seem wise to me…but if all you THINK you need is a rubber stamp degree to be rolling in the big bucks.
There are a lot of classes that simply Don’t require any work, and a slightly thoughtful student can find the professors for many of these classes by asking around. Many of the classes are required for distribution, and pretty much already known. Especially the weaker sciences like Anthro, Psych, Sociology World history, American History etc. The sections where the Profs have everything in the grade in the midterm and final multiple choice, and only require memorization, 75% of which a Intelligent person already knows.
A quick 12 hour scan through the book before the tests, and It's an easy A. My "fill out the distribution" semester only had about 4 day of doing anything at all, and was an easy 4.0.Well put…and I love your name!
There was a guy in my dorm who, when asked what his major was, responded that he’s “here to play baseball.” Once he brought over a girl who puked all over the girl’s bathroom floor. The one on MY building floor, as boys had their own floor. He partied a lot; my door was across from the stairs and I could hear them yelling as they went up to their floor.
What I learned is that, when freshmen athletes don’t even attend any of their classes and get drunk every night, they get kicked out and sent home before baseball season even starts.
Because “Nobody ever took care of anything that was given them for free.” is true more often than it is false.
I think I’ll need to stay out of this one as I found that this system of university participation worked out quite well for me, and on a grant no less.
Well, my college experience was a bit different-I was a physics major. First semester was tough-I took 5 courses (Calculus I, Physics I, German, English Composition, and World History). The physics course was 5 hours per week, plus recitation and laboratory. Recitation was 2 hours per week…and many nights I would stumble out of the library at 11:30 PM! I can truly say I never worked as hard as I did…and I was totally unprepared. Between reading the assignments, and doing lab reports, and preparing for classes, I was averaging 3-4 hours study per night.
So I guess I don’t understand this idea of skipping the hard work-what do these kids think that they are going to learn? My daughter keeps telling me that they do their “homework” at school-so no need to study! This I just cannot believe…what is the point?
I’m pretty sure Socrates attended a few keggers.
Hell, the guy drank himself to death.
Plato gave an account of one.
Yes, some college students spend all their time partying. But to my way of thinking, there are many other fun things to do, primarily involving all of the cool clubs in the student union, or the club and intramural athletics, or just the socialization. We used to say, and were only half joking, that college was a great place to be for four years, if not for all of those annoying classes.
So I was never surprised that some people tried to stay on campus as long as possible. Some did this by taking more than four years to get their undergraduate degree. (I had a couple of friends who took eight years to do so.) Some stayed on as grad students or joined the school in staff positions. Some just stayed around in town, but not as students. (And this is Troy, New York, a depressing and decaying place, so you’d have to really like the school to want to continue to live there.)
I think this happens because most of these students have spent eighteen years being told what to do, and suddenly the structure is gone gone and there’s no one to tell them they have to get up in the morning and show up for classes. Most eighteen-year-olds are mature enough to handle that level of responsibility; some aren’t.
I would say that in most of the sections of freshman comp that I’ve taught (16 to 22 students), there has been at least one student who crashed and burned.
As for why the parents put up with it: Some of these students successfully deceive their parents. (Note that the parents can’t see their grades because of federal privacy regulations.) Some hit bottom and then straighten themselves out. Most, however, will be gone in a semester or two.
Physics majors aren’t typical. I learned that when I took an upper-level class for math majors at the same time I was taking upper-level physics major classes. In the physics major classes, we would come in on Monday and talk about how much homework we had been doing over the weekend. The math majors would come in and talk about parties and such they had been to. Majoring in physics involves a lot more work than majoring in a lot of other subjects. It’s easy to forget that if you’re a physics major- since you don’t have a lot of spare time, you don’t tend to meet too many non-physics majors.
Nope. Majoring in physics is one of the refuges for people who are too nerdy to do those things…
You know what? The job I’m doing now, I could almost certainly have gotten just as easily if I hadn’t been a physics major. One of those math majors who went to parties on the weekends would have had just as good a chance of getting it as I did. For that matter, even if I hadn’t dropped out of grad school and had become a professor- professors don’t have it that much better than regular working stiffs, as far as I can tell. Mr. Neville is a professor. He works probably 80 hours a week. His salary doesn’t reflect that, or the amount of work he had to put in as an undergrad, grad student, and postdoc. He gets to pick which 80 hours he works per week to a greater degree than lots of other working people do, big whoop. Working hard in college doesn’t guarantee more money than slacking off does…
Really? My experience has been that most freshman will spend their first semester in a haze of alcohol and drugs and sex, and then come to their senses and manage to graduate with a decent GPA, none the worse (and perhaps even all the better) for their experience. I agree that a lot of students tend to go crazy because it’s the first time they’ve been on their own, but I think the ones that completely fall apart and end up dropping out of school altogether tend to be the exception, not the rule.
I guess this might also depend on the particular university.
I remember the first time I realized that and blew off class; it was a liberating experience.
I also remember waking up too late to wash my hair and get to Organic in time (I had long hair then). I went to class (clean of body but dirty of hair) and got my hair cut off that afternoon.
In any group of six students, two will talk about partying the night before; but only one talks about it every morning.
Well, I think there’s a difference in degree in what we’re talking about – I’m talking about the one person in a class of twenty or so who really crashes hard, the ones who miss huge numbers of classes (or show up drunk or stoned). This isn’t what most freshman do, by a long shot. That’s not to say that most of them don’t spend their weekends in a haze of alcohol and drugs and sex, but in my experience, the average college freshman is well aware there are times that are appropriate for partying and times that aren’t, and the ones who can’t pull it together long enough to pass freshman comp tend not to last very long.