In the spring of my junior year of high school at an age long after that by which my great-grandparents held their first real jobs I began, like clockwork, making the rounds to various towns in the Northeast with my mom. Later, we flew out to the West Coast, hoping to maximize my chances of finding the best place to spend four seminal years.
From the beginning, I already had a basic template to guide my college search: not only did both of my parents and my sister attend college, but I also had a "guidance counselor" a title that sounds like it should probably refer to a guru who drew up a list of possibilities and probabilities. Almost every school that I visited boasted similar qualifications: miniscule student-faculty ratios, extensive resources, "a strong sense of community" and so forth, and I pretty much thought they were all wonderful. Each argued for why we should apply to their institution in particular. What no one ever felt the need to argue was that we should want to go to college in the first place. But this hasn't always been the case.
In 2009, 70 percent of high school graduates went on to colleges and universities. In 1980, only 49 percent did. A little personal anecdote may help explain this phenomenon. When I first told my grandfather that I was coming to Dartmouth, his knee-jerk reaction was to say, "That's not a place I would have thought of any Jews going to in my time." Today, there are enough Jews on my floor alone to hold daily minyans.
As Louis Menand pointed out in his thought-provoking 2011 New Yorker article "Live and Learn," this trend applies to a myriad of groups previously excluded from the elite schools: "to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to non-whites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college." As Menand argues, the fact that these groups had previously been excluded from higher education was essential to the appeal of elite universities, "For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it not only financially but socially and personally."
If these circumstances have buoyed the number of college applicants in past years, they have also served as an impetus for students to make the most of their college experiences, to prove that their precious admissions were justified. I know that was the attitude of my own grandparents. By contrast, today, especially at an elite institution like Dartmouth, attending college always felt inevitable for many students, a fact that has some interesting consequences.
As a slew of recent books and articles attest, students today now spend significantly less time on school work than those in previous generations, perhaps because they lack the ambition to prove themselves that may have fueled their parents and grandparents. Additionally, society increasingly treats a college degree as a means to an end, signaling to students that the tasks of college are not inherently valuable.
However, considering attending college to be inevitable has a subtler psychological consequence as well. If you define the advent of adulthood as the time when one begins making autonomous decisions that irrevocably alter the course of one's life, the perception that college is obligatory may delay that transition for years.
If the decision to enroll is not ours but, say, our parents' or our schools' or our society's, we might not feel completely accountable for being here or for what we do here. In contrast to our predecessors, who, having struck out on their own, often had careers and families by this age or who decided to continue their educations against the odds we might feel like we're biding our time before our lives as adults actually start.
