In class, I referred to the college system as a "fucking womb". In this post, I'd like to expand on that.
College is an enigmatic thing where people pay thousands of dollars to live in a mass illusion. The main problem with college is that it inures us in a cocoon of familiar faces, established routines, and guaranteed short-term future, with the promise of similarly guaranteed long term future. College does not prepare us for the outside world; it only prepares us for college.
College should, if anything, slope neatly towards involvement in the adult world, yet it doesn't. The main transition in college is from high school to campus, yet after that the system largely plateaus--we set established routines of college life, but do not set establish routines of adult life. In many cases, students can successfully navigate all four years of college without having to leave the campus environment. They need only go to classes and compete assignments on time. They do not need to go outside of campus for meals, but can attend one of the many dining halls. Often they do not need to apply for jobs, or build work contacts, or indeed have to pay their own bills. This seems a reason, then, why so many fellow students in my class feel this gnawing anxiety as the end of senior year approaches--they are used to this system, but they are not used to the outside world. They have been secure in a system they are familiar with for a number of years, and now they learn--quite intensely--how insufficient that system actually is. For an organization which is designed precisely to help us transition to adulthood, it seems to spent a lot of time delaying that very transition.
The college culture itself seems tailored to that cocooning atmosphere. In the absence of the rigors of adult life, we pass the time through other measures--through clubs and parties and university-organized events We exist in a space where thousands of young adults, and only young adults, are pressed together. Our leisure is composed of interactions within that college system and only within that college system. Very few of us make friends outside of college during this time, and thus we have few friends we can rely on for information on the adult world. No surprise, then, the insularity of so many of our problems and complaints. On my Facebook feed I often see complaints in the form of talking about how annoying the sheer amount of homework they have is, or how frustrated they are because they spilled food on their bed. Within the inuring college system, where no larger problems yet exist, such responses seem somewhat logical, but in contrast with the adult world they become hilariously petty in contrast.
There are means to better adjust oneself to the adult world, certainly. But they exist mainly in the form of part-jobs and optional lectures, classes, and events. In order to adjust ourselves to the adult world, we must put forward the effort, yet in the college culture where so much of what we need to do is directly fed to us, personal initiative is not always a strong suit among college attendees, especially when it is so much easier to reside within the comfortable confines of college for as long as one can.
One may argue, as Arnett did, that college helps to facilitate identity exploration, yet does it really? Many students, whether undecided or with a definite major--are not fully aware of other possibilities, and have not experienced those possibilities themselves. We experience only what we have already signed up for, and to actually get a sense of other possibilities, again we have to take our own initiative. As example, when I began college, I was not aware that I might be able to do a great deal in mental health advocacy. That came primarily through my therapy and my exploration of other options through my blog on Asperger's and Depression.
I don't mind that college is a safety-net--to be honest I needed it when I was transitioning to college, as I still had mental health issues that would have left me quite vulnerable in the outside world--but not enough impetus is placed upon encouraging us to break out of that safety net. It is too comfortable for our own good, and it's too easy to just relax into it now and worry about other problems when they come later.
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