The Five-Year Party (26 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Among the many tasks that colleges used to perform—in addition to teaching students how to think, solve problems, and gather knowledge—was helping adolescents mature into adults. It used to be that during their college years students gradually assumed more responsibility for their actions and learned what our society expected of them as the leaders of tomorrow. They gained a greater understanding of how a democracy works and developed a system of ethics and morals that would guide their decisions in the future. Sadly, this is yet another task that party schools and subprime colleges no longer perform.
Students who received high grades for substandard work, who were taught that it’s okay to break the rules and the law, and that their own pleasure was more important than being responsible, do not suddenly mature when they receive their diplomas. Instead, recent party college graduates have created an entirely new demographic group that refuses to grow up and attempts to extend the irresponsible party school lifestyle after graduation.
Sociologists have given this cohort various names, such as
adultolescents
and
twixters
, but they share similar characteristics. They live with their parents well into their thirties. They retain teenage interests in binge drinking, electronic toys, stylish clothing, and all-night parties. They work at a variety of dead-end jobs and switch employers often.
adultolescents
and
twixters
, but they share similar characteristics. They live with their parents well into their thirties. They retain teenage interests in binge drinking, electronic toys, stylish clothing, and all-night parties. They work at a variety of dead-end jobs and switch employers often.
Journalist Lev Grossman, who invented the term
twixters
, said they inhabit “a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them.”
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twixters
, said they inhabit “a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them.”
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Sociologists fear that the machinery that turns young people into responsible adults has broken down. Faced with a culture that seems to have no morality and a marketplace that seems to have no place for them, they simply drop out and continue the hedonistic lifestyle that they developed in college. Life is an endless party.
“Parents were baffled when their expensively educated, otherwise well-adjusted twenty-three-year-old children wound up sobbing in their old bedrooms, paralyzed by indecision,” wrote Grossman. Terri Apter, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England, said, “Legally, they’re adults, but they’re on the threshold, the doorway to adulthood, and they’re not going through it.”
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Developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett blames parents and a culture that planned out every step of these children’s lives, from playgroups, Little League, and ballet through high school and the pressure to get into the best college possible. The years after college graduation, he argues, are the first time these children were allowed to think about their own lives and choose what they want for themselves. What may look like incessant hedonism, he said, is really a time to sort out their lives before passing through the one-way door to adulthood. It’s not that they don’t take adulthood seriously, he notes, it’s that they take it too seriously.
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Party schools do nothing to prepare students for life after college and often contribute to the problem by giving students a very poor idea of how the world works. Any attempt to steer them in the right direction might encourage them to drop out and that goes against the prime directive: retention. Grossman said colleges are “seriously out of step with the real world in getting students ready to become workers in the post-college world.” As an example, he cites Matt Swann, who took six and a half years to graduate from the University of Georgia with a degree in something called “cognitive science.” Unable to find a job using his degree, he worked as a waiter and an insurance claims adjuster. “Kids used to go to college to get educated,” said Swann. “That’s what I did, which I think now was a bit naïve. Being smart after college doesn’t really mean anything. ‘Oh, good, you’re smart. Unfortunately your productivity’s shit, so we’re going to have to fire you.’”
To a generation facing unprecedented levels of debt, adulthood begins to look more and more like indentured servitude, where even those who make a decent salary have to give it all back to the banks, leaving little extra for the little luxuries that make life worth living. The degree that was supposed to be the key to success and give them an economic advantage has been diluted by the fact that nearly 70 percent of high school graduates now go on to college.
There are plenty of Americans like Kate Galantha, who spent seven years attending four colleges and graduating with a degree in “undeclared” before taking a dizzying collection of jobs as a nanny, a wedding photographer assistant, a flower shop clerk, and finally an assistant at a photo studio. Each job was in a different city.
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Others think the unwillingness to grow up springs from pop culture, which celebrates youth and disparages old age. Advertising and movies aimed at young people celebrate the wonderful aspects of being young, but life seems to disappear when you reach the age of thirty. Why should anyone want to get old and accept responsibility? From the perspective of a twenty-five-year-old, it can look a lot like death.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, author of the bestselling
Generation Me
, ties the failure of college graduates to grow up directly to the self-esteem movement that taught them early that they could excel at anything they wanted. “Sooner or later, however, everyone has to face reality and evaluate his or her abilities,” she said. Increasingly, for recent college grads, this day of reckoning can be put off until they reach the age of thirty, which, she said, many graduates told her is the year that adulthood begins.
Generation Me
, ties the failure of college graduates to grow up directly to the self-esteem movement that taught them early that they could excel at anything they wanted. “Sooner or later, however, everyone has to face reality and evaluate his or her abilities,” she said. Increasingly, for recent college grads, this day of reckoning can be put off until they reach the age of thirty, which, she said, many graduates told her is the year that adulthood begins.
“Twenty-somethings often take a while to realize that the ‘Be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do’ mantra of their childhoods is not attainable,” she said. They are unprepared for the realities of the workplace, which often leave them confused and hurt by the harsh realities of their jobs. It’s like a cruel joke, she said, that today’s grads were raised to expect comfort and riches, but the reality is that they “can barely afford a condo and a crappy heath care plan.”
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Psychologist Mel Levine, author of
Ready or Not, Here Life Comes
, calls the powerlessness that many college graduates feel in preparing for their first job
work-life unreadiness
. “Some emerging adults take longer to start up a stable work life than do others. Some never stop starting; they can’t move ahead toward a career because of repeated false starts or because they keep changing course. They start up and then they stall out.”
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Ready or Not, Here Life Comes
, calls the powerlessness that many college graduates feel in preparing for their first job
work-life unreadiness
. “Some emerging adults take longer to start up a stable work life than do others. Some never stop starting; they can’t move ahead toward a career because of repeated false starts or because they keep changing course. They start up and then they stall out.”
233
Colleges do such a poor job of matching majors to careers, he said, that many students are unable to connect what they know and what they love with a job that will pay them a decent living. They are unable to make the connection between their skills and what is valued in the marketplace.
“We are in the midst of an epidemic of work-life unreadiness because an alarming number of emerging adults are unable to find a good fit between their minds and their career directions. . . . Because they are not finding their way, they may feel as if they are going nowhere and have nowhere to go.”
Students who partied through high school and college are seeking the same kind of life after graduation, he said. “They just don’t want to pull away from their teens. They may go after more and more education, move back with their parents, postpone tough career choices, and yearn for the intense group companionship that buffered their adolescence. The effects on work-life readiness may be catastrophic.”
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7
How Parents Can Cancel the Five-Year Party
P
arents who have read this far have a right to feel outraged about what irresponsible party school administrators with their eyes on the bottom line have done to much of higher education in America. Although the parents of the nation’s 18,248,128
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college students may think there is nothing they can do about it, they actually have tremendous power to force colleges to make reforms. The tuition money they help pay is what makes the party school system work. If they threatened to withhold it, party school administrators would listen. Similarly, as a powerful block of taxpayers, parents can insist that legislators make the policy changes that would help shut down the five-year party and prevent colleges from charging an ever-higher price for less and less education.
arents who have read this far have a right to feel outraged about what irresponsible party school administrators with their eyes on the bottom line have done to much of higher education in America. Although the parents of the nation’s 18,248,128
235
college students may think there is nothing they can do about it, they actually have tremendous power to force colleges to make reforms. The tuition money they help pay is what makes the party school system work. If they threatened to withhold it, party school administrators would listen. Similarly, as a powerful block of taxpayers, parents can insist that legislators make the policy changes that would help shut down the five-year party and prevent colleges from charging an ever-higher price for less and less education.
One of the reasons the party school system has been able to get away with it for so long is the cloak of silence administrators have thrown over so much of what they do, which keeps parents who pay the bills from getting a good look of what they are getting for their money. Year after year, parents pay an ever-increasing price for something they desire but which, to a large extent, no longer exists at most third- and fourth-tier state colleges. Armed with the information in this book, however, parents and taxpayers can fight back and demand reforms. The parents who pick up the tab for the five-year party can, and should, threaten to cut off the funds and put college administrators on probation until they abandon the irresponsible policies of packing their classrooms with disengaged students and force them to make education their prime focus, as it once was.
What is needed is a reinvention of higher education from the top down to reaffirm its traditional mission to educate young people to be the leaders of tomorrow. There is, in fact, a budding back-to-basics movement within higher education; its goal is to create “no frills colleges” where overpaid Donald Trump wannabe administrators are given pink slips and the over-built and expensive country club campuses would be scrapped. Projections from the few places that are working on this idea are that tuition could be reduced by as much as 75 percent.
Colleges need to be told bluntly that they are in the education business, not the entertainment business, and that too much tuition money is being wasted on administrative salaries, gourmet food courts, luxury dorms, hot tubs, and climbing walls. Education standards need to be raised to a level that guarantees a rigorous educational program and the accreditation organizations need to get tough in enforcing standards. Frivolous courses that are long on fun but short on education should be cut and replaced with rigorous courses in the core subjects necessary to maintain our economy, our government, and even the future of our country. Before they are granted a degree, students need to pass a “value added” exam proving that they have actually secured the minimum amount of skills and knowledge required to be a leader of tomorrow.
Parents and taxpayers should vote with their checkbooks and no longer write blank checks to colleges without a thorough examination of what they are getting for their money. Taxpayers should demand transparency for all college policies and proof that colleges are providing as much education as they claim. This chapter details specific steps that you, as a parent and as a taxpayer, can take right now to protect your child and cancel the five-year party.
For one of my two children, the college decision was easy. She was reading books before she went to elementary school and was clearly an intellectual in training, always wanting to learn about things and asking questions about how things worked and why. She went to the University of Rochester, a college she selected after months of making visits and reading reviews, and graduated with honors. Following in the footsteps of her journalist father, she now works as a blogger for
U.S. News & World Report
and is a frequent guest on television talk shows. Finding a place in the world for her was easy and she did most of the work herself, following a clear vision of what she wanted to do in her life.
U.S. News & World Report
and is a frequent guest on television talk shows. Finding a place in the world for her was easy and she did most of the work herself, following a clear vision of what she wanted to do in her life.
For my son, however, finding his appropriate place in the world was not so easy. Early on it was clear he was not an intellectual. He did poorly in school in most subjects, was often frustrated when he was pushed by his parents, and always came out on the poor end when he was compared with his high achiever sister. It was pretty clear early on that he was not college material. Instead of accepting that, I continued to push him, which added to his frustrations and his sense that I was disappointed with him.
Tests showed that he was smart and he received great scores in math. He also had some talents that were hard to measure on tests. He had an infallible sense of direction and could give you specific directions to places he had been to only once years before. He was personable and well liked with lots of friends but usually kept his feelings to himself and it was never easy to figure out what kind of mood he was in or what he was thinking.
He spent a year at a community college but hated it and soon dropped out, much to my horror. He took a job as an orderly in a senior citizens home and was happy there, but it seemed like a boring career to me. Then, suddenly, he found his true calling, a career that made use of his talents and allowed him to make a successful living in a very unconventional way. He became a professional poker player. Today, he makes much more money than I do and works only a few days a month. His math skills, his poker face, and his excellent memory are all skills that he uses in his job and no one minds that he doesn’t have a diploma to hang on the wall.
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