January 5, 2002

Briefcases of Money

M'ris is back from vacation, but she seems pretty swamped with going through the WIHA slush. I sent her a non-WIHA related email, and her response began like this:

Thanks for sending this e-mail along, but I'm afraid it's not for me. Aside from a passing mention, it had nothing to do with aliens, much less with hating them. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Oh. Sorry. You get into the zone, you know...

Speaking of M'ris, her January 4 journal entry is on college and niche marketing. Specifically, she's talking about her alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the fact that they are eliminating "J-term", which is a one-month term in January where you take one course. I'm not sure if J-term is unique to Gustavus, but it's got to be reasonably rare, anyway.

M'ris is not in favor of the ditching-of-the-J-term. She says, rightly, that it's good that the thousands of different colleges and universities in this country are so different from each other, and they should stay that way. The more niches that colleges manage to satisfy, the better for students.

That's all true. Although I've got one nit to pick: perhaps because I am not a Gustavus alum, I'm a bit confused about why J-term is so important for Gustavus's niche marketing. Clearly Gustavus has many many attributes that differentiate it from Harvey Mudd, BYU, Simon's Rock, Yale, Bob Jones, Duke, or Florida State... is J-term really all that high on the list? Maybe for some. I dunno.

Anyway, the real reason I brought this up was that M'ris does a spot-on job of describing the different types of college students. For the heck of it, here's my take on the subject:

The Three Types of College Students

• Type A (The University as Glorified Summer Camp): The most common type. This student is there because he is a member of the middle or upper class, and in this country the rite of passage for staying in the middle class is going to college. Other than that, he isn't quite sure why he's there, other than Mom and Dad are paying. You can spot these folks easily enough: they are those who wax poetic about "The College Experience", who drone on about how "the most important things I learned weren't in the classroom". A self-fulfilling prophecy -- after all, you weren't in class after the first week, were you?

  It's unfortunate that we in the United States have chosen college as our rite of passage to middle class adulthood. Couldn't we choose a less expensive ritual? Or at least a less time-consuming one. For example, maybe the kids could link arms in a circle around a bonfire while their parents stand behind them, symbolically tossing briefcases of twenty dollar bills into the blaze.

• Type B (The University as My Ticket Up (or Out)): The next most common type. This student knows why she's going to college. She knows that for some reason, you need a bachelor's degree in this country. And she's going to get one -- and if she has to jump through hoops and put up with frippery that has nothing to do with her major, so be it.

  Many type B students are older people going back to college, first- or second- generation immigrants, or from low-income backgrounds. They are most heavily concentrated in pre-med, law, business, and engineering. Unlike their more slothful Type A colleagues, Type B students are hyper-aware of grades and finances.

• Type C (The University as Palace of Learning): By far the rarest type. The Type C student is the kind of student that colleges like to claim that they serve in their glossy brochures. Type C students go to college because they actually like learning. Some of these pathetic throwbacks love only one field, such as physics; others are true polymaths who drink up literature, history, theater, chemistry... you name it.

  Although the number of Type C students is small, the group is still big enough (and academically monomanaical enough) to produce a distressingly large supply of professors. This has lead to exponential growth in the number of academic papers and books produced, which many pundits falsely equate with exponential growth in human knowledge. The oversupply of Ph.Ds sometimes even forces the metastasis of yet more colleges and universities, thus exacerbating the problem.

Different institutions have different ratios of Types A-to-B-to-C. For example, Harvey Mudd was about 30-40-30, while UCSB (which I view as more typical) is more like 70-25-5. At a place like The University of Phoenix, the ratio might be 5-85-10. There's a lot of variation, but I'm pretty sure that overall, C < B << A.

Here's my modest proposal: Each school would shoot for having most of its students in one column. The Type Cs would go to fancy-schmantzy academic liberal arts schools, like Swarthmore. The Type Bs would go to trade schools or engineering schools, like MIT. And the Type As would go to pure party schools, like Stanford. We could even explicitly label schools as A, B, or C, to help high school students choose.

The benefits are clear. Happier students. No more stupid debates over football interfering with academics. No more pre-meds whining about having to take Physics and English Lit. No more worrying about whether your kid is getting the education he or she needs.

And just think how much more honest those glossy brochures and alumni magazines would be. Anyway, just a thought.