The College Experience: Now Customizable

As I walked around Old Dominion University, I felt like I was back in the Fall of 2019. There were students on the streets and in the student center and in the local shops; I was no longer “the lonely graduate student” on an empty campus. While there are many anecdotes of college students joining the full-time workforce instead of attending classes online, evidence shows that traditional college enrollment has remained fairly stable. They have presumably been living with their parents while attending online class. Thus, while dormitories and dining halls remained available during the pandemic, they had been empty save for a small number of non-traditional students. At ODU, the Spring 2021 semester was conducted in a hybrid format. In addition to the essential lab and practical courses for nursing students that were never cancelled, in-person seats were made available in many other undergraduate classes. 

So even when the opportunity presented itself, many of the youngest adult generation passed on "The College Experience". This college generation has better sensibility in avoiding frivolous expenditures. Tuition and expense estimators are now placed prominently on each state university's website. Understanding the effects of automation on entry-level white-collar work, this generation is more realistic about life expectations than those who attended in the early 2000s' campus amenities boom.

“The College Experience” for millennials was not built in a vacuum. As they were born in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a widespread feeling that moral and professional underachievement racked society from top to bottom, from the corporate boardroom’s tolerance of workplace inefficiency, to the high school dropout. Books like A Nation At Risk were published, and programs such as No Child Left Behind, and Common Core were implemented. These were good decades for the professional middle class, but would their children fall from grace?

A concatenation of data did offer a model for intergenerational middle-class replication: The only sensible way to succeed in life was to attend college for four consecutive years, while living on or near campus with peers. This assumption was built into the Post-9/11 GI Bill of 2008, giving extra benefits to veterans participating in the traditional “College Experience”. In addition to ostentatious amenities like indoor water parks, the university had become a city in itself, replete with administrators and counselors; paid for primarily by student debt. This in turn led to young graduates expecting comprehensive workplace amenities and luxury apartments in a time of corporate restructuring.    

As the perceived struggles of young college graduates permeated the media, resentment grew against ivory-tower professors and administrators. Populists, in both major parties, sought to replace “The College Experience” with low-cost community-centered colleges, a few large campuses with good football teams, and massive online open classrooms (MOOCs). The Ivy League and the professional-managerial elite would be banished from positions of authority. I hesitate to call this the “conservative” model of higher education, because it was the early 20^th century Progressives who advocated for vocational and practical instruction at high schools and colleges. In Europe and Asia, students attending barebone but competent colleges engage in the local community for housing and social needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a break from the perceived path to success, and a reassessment of how young adults are shaped in America. The “College Experience” was very formulaic, and assumed a student’s unbridled control of their future. As late as 1973 in the US, mandatory military service affected where, when, and even in what subjects a college student would study. While students today have more choice in how to spend their pandemic semesters; as online students, trade apprentices or volunteers; the academic interruption of COVID-19 will bring an end to the cookie-cutter resume.     

 

(Enrollment Information: It’s Time to Worry About College Enrollment Declines Among Black Students - Center for American Progress)