From Pine View Farm

Off to College? 0

Chris Satullo had an interesting piece in Sunday’s local rag on what he sees as problems with the college admissions process. He was not looking at how colleges process paperwork; rather he was looking at it from a societal perspective. This item, in particular, caught my eye:

2. Students feel too pressured to make the perfect choice.They’re young. They change. That should be OK. The American Council on Education estimates only 40 percent of students graduate within six years from the college they first entered. One in five transfers. Two-thirds change their major. These choices we press on petrified teenagers aren’t be-alls-and-end-alls. They’re shots in the dark that are easy to get wrong, but the mistakes aren’t fatal.

I have often questioned the wisdom of expecting students to choose a major in their freshman year. It’s certainly okay if someone knows what he or she wants to do.

I knew one person like that: His career goal was to write/edit for the Washington Post. Every move he made in college and after college was directed at that ambition, and, eventually, he succeeded.

But I suspect that most 18-year olds have only the haziest notion of what they want to do with the lives, and circumstances will change those notions.

Heck, when I went off to school, I was confident I wanted to be lawyer. Meeting some law students changed that; they were much too uptight for me.

Rather, I ended up in a profession (training and development) that I didn’t even know was a profession until after I had graduated and joined the world of work.

From another standpoint, I am struck by his citing the statistic that only “only 40 percent of students graduate within six years . . . .”

Two of my kids attended the local state university. When they entered, they were told that five years was the normal time for completing a bachelor’s degree.

The credit-hours they needed to finish were no more than I needed in the old days at a “four-year” college, and I went to a pretty good school. When I went to school, the standard was five courses a semester. They were counseled that four courses a semester was a normal course load. That two fewer courses a year. Two x four = eight courses to finish the fifth year.

I always wondered, when did four years stretch into five? And I always thought, quite cynically, when the university wanted to get an extra year’s room, board, tuition, and fees out of students pursuing a four-year degree.

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