LAST MONTH THE Wall Street Journal reported on the apparent trend among freshmen to "keep their high school identities intact and actively resist entreaties from professors to expand their horizons." Citing English professor at Assumption College James M Lang's "The Myth of the First-Year Enlightenment," which featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, it appears that the intense first-year experience of mind-expansion may simply be a popularized notion of education from the past.
"What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily time management," writes Tim Clydesdale, professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey and author of "The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School." For his book, Clydesdale conducted two sets of interviews of a sample student group, ascertaining their values and sense of identity: the first set during the students' senior year of high school, and the second during their freshman year of college.
"In other words," Lang remarks of the study, "freshmen spend more of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental constraints and support...[determining] how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing."
At the heart of Lang and Clydesdale's suggestions is a certain lamentation, a sense of being no longer able to impart to students some profound change. "I dream of making a difference in student's lives-not just passing along skills that will help them write better business memos," Lang writes.
Indeed, the echoes of that typical, practically minded freshman can be heard among University of Michigan students. A survey seeking to ascertain Michigan freshmen's understanding of their own personal changes since high school cited an increased sense of independence outside of parental control as most notable. One respondent, noting major positive departures from her high school experience, shared her satisfaction in another practical improvement in her life, saying, "Here I have a good long paper probably every week, and I can crank out an essay in under an hour."
The language of many respondents seemed to confirm Lang and Clydesdale's ideas. Though many freshmen felt they had changed in important ways since high school, the words they used to described this change seemed interestingly conservative: levels of "commitment" and "responsibility" increased; they had become more "productive" and "mature;" they now have greater "strength" and stronger "goals;" they can better "fend" for themselves. This seems to be a language fit for the marketplace, or some Darwinian vision of social survival. It is a far cry from the near-spiritual enlightenment educators like Lang and Clydesdale expect to some degree among students.
Britanni Sonnenberg, an instructor of English 125 at the University, believes that such an idealistic image may be just that: an ideal, a myth, reflecting a "nostalgia for another time." Another survey respondent would seem to agree. "I think the decrease in change [among freshman] has more to do with the social climate we live in today. Unlike our parents' generation, we are not living in a world of drastic social change and turbulence," referencing the civil rights movement or cold war. "Today's social climate is very subdued in comparison," she added.
The ideal may be unrealistic, or perhaps this perceived difference just a generation wide speaks to something else: a fundamental change in a larger, societal understanding of just what college is or ought to be.
With a college degree becoming an increasingly necessary step in the process of employment, it is easy to see how a college education is viewed more and more as a kind of tool: a resource that is in some way deserved, rather than a privilege. More students taking college for granted, in combination with rising costs of an education, may cause universities to treat students more like customers to be satisfied. Topped off with larger class sizes, and there stands a recipe for distant, consumer-like relations between universities and students, and an increased professionalized competitiveness among students themselves.
This is a crucial change in the nature and function of college. In order to foster the kind of mind-expanding environment spoken of by Lang and Clydesdale, there must be some degree of vulnerability in an educational space: a student cannot truly change unless they are able or made to break down their previous beliefs or identities. We hear our parents speak of those professors who ripped essay after essay to shreds and tossed it back bleeding in red ink, but these are faint memories in an environment of all-around professional responsibility and comfortable distance. In college today, students may easily slip from first to fourth year with some squirming in light of material presented to them, but without any insistent, deep, and necessary revisions of mind.
Acknowledging some real change in today's educational climate, Lang seems resigned. He said that the average teenager, "cognitively sharp but quintessentially immune" are quintessential Americans.
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