Because by the time you get to college you’ve grown up, at least somewhat. Plus your actions are no longer considered to be ‘kid stuff’…and instead you are treated like an adult. Beating the crap out of someone in high school, assuming no one is seriously hurt, might get you detention or a school suspension (or nothing at all). Doing the same in college is likely to wind you in jail and probably tossed out of the college you go to if you are caught or charges pressed.
Besides, I assume you were in a fraternity or sorority depending on your gender…there was plenty of bullying in mine. Some of it was more ritualized, to be sure, but it was still there. And there were plenty of fights too that I vaguely recall though the alcohol soaked memories I still possess of that time.
I think that the majority of hard-core, school-wide bullying happens in junior high school/middle school. The girls start early in 6th grade, and the boys soon follow. By sophomore year, most of the fire of puberty has simmered down, and the kids are trying out and finding new, more positive activities to participate in.
Since most bullying comes from lack of self-confidence, that impulse erodes as you gain self-confidence. Of course, bullying still happens, but it’s usually a core of several dickhead students targeting a core of nerdy/unpopular students, with most of the rest starting to go their own way.
I know several bullies in their 30s and 40s, so it never ends entirely.
A lot of the bullies are segregated into either the athletic programs or fraternities/sororities. From what I’ve heard, they do plenty of bullying there, but it’s behind closed doors. And hey, as long as they leave the GDIs alone, they can have all the fun they want.
Less peer group support. In college, you don’t generally have your little clique that you hang with all day, that will always be there to back you up when you pick on someone.
Less contact, more freedom. You don’t see the same people all day long like you did in high school. If you start giving me shit one day, I’ll just take a different route to class tomorrow to avoid you. If you give me shit in class, I’ll complain to the prof or switch classes. If you give me shit in the dorms, I’ll file a complaint with housing and/or switch dorms. A lot of those options aren’t really very available in high school.
Physical bullying is no longer a cute little “boys/girls will be boys/girls” thing. It’s called assault, and I can have you arrested for it. Verbal bullying is also often counted as assault, and I can have you arrested for it. Otherwise, it’s harassment, and I can file complaints with the police and cause you grief, even if you don’t end up with charges. Continual harassment is called stalking and, once again, I can have you arrested for that.
And some of it is because people have grown up a bit by then. The bully-ees, if not the bully-ers.
My daughter, who is handicapped (spina bifida), didn’t have a very good time of it in high school. Not so much the bullying, but the ostricization, the cool kids being jerks, etc. Now she’s a freshman in college and she’s having a much better time and is making friend easier. I’d told her this would probably be the case because, as I said to her probably a hundred times … “kids go to high school because the *have *to; they go to college because they *want *to.” I’d say that’s a decent enough reason for the lessening of bullying as well.
I think so…most of the kids I knew who bullied were “not all there”-some of them were borderline retarded.
This would explain why so few are in college.
NY Times article
I think outside of frat or sorority there is some bullying but this is done by the 18 or 19 year old freshmen. The presence of some 22 year old seniors who will call them on this bullshit settles them down.
Universities are generally larger and more diverse. In high school people, people are coming out of the same community and it’s easy for them to congregate along that community’s divisions (be that race, class, etc.) There is a power dynamic to a lot of these relationships, which of course leads to friction.
In university, you are getting people from so many different communities that there are not clear us vs. them lines. There are people from so many backgrounds that your background becomes less apparent or important. The poorest kid at his high school probably got made fun of a lot, but in college he’d probably meet people poorer than him, and in any case nobody would really know or care about his class background because it doesn’t really relate to the community they are in at the time.
People start to congregate around people with similar interests (which you are more likely to find in a large diverse group) rather than people from a similar background. So while the black kids and the white kids might have friction in high school, in university it’s more likely to be the computer nerds and the artists, and there isn’t really the kind of power dynamic there that creates friction.
When you put together groups of college students from similar backgrounds, like a fraternity, the bullying comes back. The power divisions become meaningful again.
I think the secondary factor is just the general hothouse atmosphere of high school- you are in close contact with the same people, day after day, with little interest in what you are doing and little immediate reward for your work. When people are in contact like that, hierarchies are going to develop and tempers are going to flare.
I remember being scared and dreading college because I assumed it would be just like high school. Movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds didn’t help matters any.
I agree with most of the previous comments, by then people are more grown up, universities are more diverse with many groups for like minded folks and generally people choose to attend.
I was bullied quite badly during certain periods of my childhood. Especially from about grades 7-10. So I was a little nervous before going off to college. I didn’t know what it would be like to live with strangers (at least at first) in a dorm.
But it was such a great surprise to discover that the other freshmen were guys just like me: They were geeks who loved to learn new things. I felt completely at home.
By college people have matured a bit. There’s more pressure to act like an adult, and people by and large will be less tolerant of the type of crap that is put up with in high school and is too often dismissed as “boys will be boys behavior.” If you beat someone up, or even engage in antics like delivering wedgies, there’s a good chance your ass will be slapped with an assault charge.
And unlike in high school where your parents’ connections might be able to help you out of a bind, in college no one cares if your dad is some local big wig. Unless they also happen to be a big donor to the school, the administration will likely punish you the same as everyone else.
And as several people here have mentioned, it’s harder for bullies to pick out easy targets in college. The student body is so big, and you aren’t really forced to spend a lot of time with the same group of classmates. The student body is usually large enough, that so long as you’re not going out of your way to draw a lot of attention to yourself, nobody cares who you are or what your particular deficiencies may be.
Most people select their college based on factors like cost, location, and campus atmosphere/whether they feel 'comfortable" there. Most people have their choice of several options, such as different campuses within State University systems. So that if a person does not like the idea or image of fraternities (rightly or wrongly) they probably will not select a college where 90% of the people join frats. If they like art, they will select the college with the most/best programs meeting their interests. And if they find they’ve made a terrible mistake in their choice, they can transfer.
By comparison, most people attend the high school they are required to attend. If they don’t fit in with the culture it’s just tough cookies.
In my completely non-scientific anecdotal graduating class experience, the majority of career bullies from my high school were not anywhere near the top of the class. Certainly not qualified for or interested in college.
These former bullies still, to this day (it’s only 8 years later, but still) hang out in their little cliques and their children will likely grow up to be the next generation of cheerleaders and football players. Most other people have moved on from high school, but they never will.
Jerks don’t just stop being jerks just because they turn 18 and move to college.
I actually found bullying to be worse at college than in high school. Other than maybe a handful of kids, I didn’t witness too much bullying. And the worse those kids got was maybe having their lunch knocked out of their hands or being called “gaylord” or something.
College seemed to have a lot more bullying and social conflicts. A lot of it was driven by the fraternity system, but even freshmen year, there were certain kids who didn’t fit into the “alpha male frat guy jock” model who were routinely targeted for practical jokes. You had conflcits between the fraternities and the GDIs, between students and “townies”, between fraternities and even within the fraternities.
I’m not a social scientist or anything, but I think bullying is about power and control both within and outside your social group. Bullying is used to exclude some from the group and enhance status within the group. High school tends to be a small, closed system. People are forced together. People who don’t fit into a group tend to be easily identified, isolated and victimized.
College tends to be a much larger pool. People have more options for groups to socialize with and aren’t as forced to be with people they don’t like. You can pick your roomates off campus. You don’t need to join a fraternity or go to their parties.
In the case of my college though, when you have a system where half the school belongs to one of 40 self-selecting elitist groups that all live near each other and drink excessively, you create a potential for conflict.
The summer before my first year in college, I was in a six week orientation program. It was about a 100 of us, and we stayed in a dorm, took classes, and basically given a glimspe of how hard college was going to be so that we would be academically prepared. (They went way overboard, but that’s besides the point).
For the first week or so, everything was cool. But slowly the teasing started. Not real bullying, but people would make fun of me and say the same things about me that they did in high school. I was used to it so it didn’t bother me. I just hung out by myself, most of the time.
Once college started and we became mixed in with thousands of students, I never had to associate with those people again. Even if some of them popped up in my classes, what were they going to do? The lecture halls were full of hundreds of students. They would look foolish picking on me in front of a bunch of “strangers”.
As someone said earlier, bullying reaches its peak during the middle school years. I don’t remember a lot of it going on during my junior and senior years in high school. Also, I think bullies take advantage of knowing the history of their victim. They remember that time, in the fourth grade, when you peed your pants on the playground. Or they know you live on the “bad part of town” and that your mother is morbidly obese. No one knows this information in college.
your social unit in college is constantly in flux whereas in K-12 you are surrounded by the same people for years on end, so the chance to determine who is the alpha male/female is questionable since the social groups constantly change. Many people I went to high school with I also went to junior high with, and grade school too. So a social heirarchy develops which never has a chance to develop in college. If your group is made of assholes, you stop socializing with them. That option doesn’t exist in high school.
Then again, work has stable social units and bullying doesn’t really exist there, at least not to the extent as in junior high.
My impression is when bullying did happen it was more in the frats. But I never saw any firsthand.