helicopter parents

I'm feeling frustrated by the seemingly ever-declining quality of this country's higher education system. In my day-to-day interactions with college students, I'd say that maybe one student out of twenty is bright enough to calculate four times eight in under two minutes. Okay, that's not fair. They could probably do it in one minute. If they had a piece of paper and a calculator.

These kids are dull and slow, in both their thoughts and movements. They seem to have such trouble managing their personal and academic lives, and in the inevitable event that they screw up, their parents hop right on the phone to go to battle for the rectification of their children's preventable mistakes. Failed a test? Missed the deadline to withdraw from a course you're failing? Screwed up your schedule by not visiting an advisor? It's okay! Just have your mommy call and bitch until someone gives in!

Last week a father told me on the phone that if we didn't let his son drop a class (it was April 26, and the deadline to drop a class was March 7), that we would be responsible for ruining his son's and his family's lives. Yes, he missed a well-advertised deadline, but it's not his fault, you see. No one e-mailed him to tell him the deadline. No one held his hand when he crossed the street. No one told him a bedtime story or warmed up his bottle.

I've been feeling for a long time that the quality of an undergraduate education is declining, and I think that's in large part due to the fact that college is just what everyone does after high school now. If you don't go straight to college after high school, there's a murmur that something is wrong with you. Too many 18-year-olds don't want to go to school; they just want to get away from their parents and party. The institution that was created to increase the intellect of society seems to be losing grip on demonstrating to students what all this "higher education" business is about. I think a bachelor's degree is worth far less today than it was worth, say, 30 years ago, because college isn't the rigorous experience it should be, and it seems like just about anyone can get a degree nowadays.

Maybe I just spend too much time with an infuriating age group.