I graduated a year ago and this whole entire article just pissed me off. At the very beginning I was with the author. As a student you don't get to decide what you learn. Either take the class or don't but you can't expect a teacher to not use certain terminology for fear of offending someone.

Where this went off the rails is well pretty much everything after that. The author admits to it but you really can't compare college today with college in the 80's and 90's. They are two completely different beasts. Students walk around in pajamas all day during finals week because they are fucking tired. Finals are hard, comprehensive, and exhausting. That's always been true, but the difference is now you have finals on top of the 8 million extracurriculars you have to be involved in to actually get a job after graduation. Oh and that job that you have to work in order to you know actually pay for that 40K/year piece of paper. No one is working at the bookstore anymore and paying tuition with that.

Are you really complaining about making religious exceptions? If college is supposed to prepare you for the real world, guess what there I'm probably not working on a day of religious observance if I can help it. How ironic is it that a teacher of psychology is complaining about welcome events, recommended by psychologist as helping students adjust to a new environment? School is not a warzone but it can be traumatic for the unprepared. The amount of pressure you have being placed on kids today is utterly incomparable to what you may have dealt with in the past. It's great that you have been teaching for 12 years. Personally I spent 4 of my 5 years in uni working in student life as an RA in the dorms watching group of freshman after group of freshman get absolutely clobbered by their first and often second (where you get the sleeping in the library group) set of finals. HS doesn't prepare kids for college anymore That's not their fault, that's the system. Yet college can be such a high pressure environment that one bad finals week can literally derail the rest of your college career. It is not unusual for a kid to be sat down and "asked" to change majors or leave altogether after bombing a final. Not even the class but just the final.

And as far as the counselors? Having ~75% more people in college than in the 80's tends to make the old system a bit unwieldy. Maybe you enjoyed going from department to department to get basic information but it was a stupid system then that unfortunately still exists now at most places. All counselors do is give you a single person to talk to when you're inevitable sent back to some place you've already been. Counselors suck but actually making sure you on track to get your degree on time is not the simple process it used to be. Is there really something wrong with someone 17-22 having a resource on hand to make sure they aren't making what could very well end up being a 40K mistake if they have to stay an extra year because they took Bio A instead of Bio I (yes that has happened). Most adults have accountants for that same reason.

There are so many things wrong with the system and the authors choice, because it's the in-vogue thing to do, is blame the spoiled kids. The Ivy Leagues are not representative of all college, or even most colleges. And if this is the authors attitude he's part of the reasons kids need the many services available to them. I wish more students would take advantage of the services he mentions so I could stop seeing news of kids killing themselves over college so often.

End Rant