This blog is overrated.

Those pampered, entitled, adultolescent college students are at it again! According to a new study reported in the Times, “When male students enrolled in four-year universities, levels of drinking, property theft and unstructured socializing with friends increased and surpassed rates for their less-educated male peers.” Oh no, not unstructured socializing! The culprit: not having to “grow up” quickly enough. “College delays entry into adult roles like marriage, parenting and full-time work.”

And of course, the title is “College Students Behaving Badly,” even though the results apply only to men. If the research had shown that only women students commit more criminal acts, one can imagine the ensuing “Co-eds Gone Wild” headlines.

A commenter points out that the Times often publishes stories “glorifying the fun and excitement of being in one’s atmosphere and enjoying times with good company” when it involves chic middle-aged Hamptonites in their newly remodeled kitchens. “But when undergraduates engage in a little bit of fun it’s suddenly socially deviant behavior?” Blog writer Tara Parker-Pope responds hilariously, “A dinner party with friends is structured socializing. That’s very different from the ‘hanging out’ culture of many college frat boys.” Not if you’re a dinner party animal!

An otherwise interesting Times story about tuition-free Berea College in Kentucky contains this pampered-college-student howler: “[U]nlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls.”

At least reporter Tamar Lewin is willing to consider football teams as a pricey amenity. But coed dorms? Are those somehow more expensive than the single-sex kind? And while I’ve heard of at least one college installing a climbing wall in its athletic center, no evidence is presented that “most” schools with large endowments have them, let alone hot tubs.

This is what happens when academic non-scientists attempt to write about “geeks.” Here Scott McLemee describes the thesis of the new book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, written by an anthropologist:

[T]he whole process of creating and distributing free software is itself, to borrow a programming term, recursive.

Per the OED, recursivity involves “a repeated procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until … a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result.”

Something like that dynamic – the combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback – is found in geekdom’s approach to collaboration and evaluation.

What’s recursive about a development process that involves a “combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback”? Why isn’t it just iterative? The book is described as “an effort to analyze the source code, so to speak, of geekdom itself”; it’s enough to make you wish that “geekdom” were proprietary.

Thoughts on the economics professor who sat in an office full of rotting food watching porn and e-mailing a friend about his strategies to seduce a “totally dumb” student whose “little girl set of mannerisms” appealed to him (”find out her weaknesses, flatter her, and then dig out more info to use to my advantage later”) and about his thing for the “teen girls who work at the thrift and dollar stores he frequents”):

1. Ick.
2. I’m surprised this violates university policy if there’s no evidence or complaint that he actually carried out any sexual harassment.
3. ICK.

Inside’s Higher Ed’s “Mama PhD” blog, a recent and somewhat dubious addition to the site,
today stirs up vaccination fears and expounds on the dangers of “sodium laurel [sic] sulfate.” The sources: unnamed “news reports” and a friend’s blog, respectively. “I read in another friend’s phenomenal blog (facebook reconnection again) about how she found sodium laurel sulfate in her face scrub and how it is not only a possible carcinogen but lends to the killing of marine life as well.”

Inside Higher Ed, if you’re not familiar with it, is home to many cranky academics who like to bemoan their students’ tendency to cite lazily or not at all.

As an undergrad, I lived on campus all four years, as did just about all of my classmates. So it was a bit of a culture shock to go to grad school at Michigan, where there is an odd social stigma against living in the dorms past freshman year. As a sophomore, you’re supposed to move off-campus as soon as you can, into a most likely dilapidated, slumlord-owned Ann Arbor house with seven of your best friends that you leased 11 months in advance. (Nine months now, since a new law was passed.) And grad dorms? Forget about it, unless you’re a parent or an international student who has to arrange housing in a hurry. I had a number of theories about who might have an interest in perpetuating this attitude. The university, for one; Michigan has just started building their first new dorm since the 70’s. And, of course, the landlords. Even if no one actually moves back to the dorms, just the idea that they’re a viable option could make student tenants better negotiators. When living on campus no longer marks you as a loser, there’s less pressure to sign the first lease that comes along.

So it’s encouraging that students may be starting to realize that living right near their classes in a large community of students with a nonsleazy nonprofit landlord might not be such a bad deal after all.

“Merit aid still king,” reports Inside Higher Ed. In order to be “king”, you’d think that merit aid would have to make up at least, oh, 51 percent of all grants given, but instead it’s more like 28 percent. Monarchy isn’t what it used to be.

But why shouldn’t it be 0 percent? After all, colleges have these formulas that perfectly account for every possible family financial circumstance, and families are always willing and able to pay exactly the contribution calculated. Unlike merit scholarships, need-based aid “might help needy students enroll in college who might not otherwise, instead of merely changing the enrollment patterns of those who could still otherwise afford a college education.” In other words, if a really excellent student can’t afford, say, Washington University (which, unlike the very highest-ranked colleges, still offers unfashionable merit aid), he can still go to community college. College is college, right?

This is the kind of thinking that makes analysts quote official unemployment statistics as a meaningful indicator. A laid-off engineer who’s now working at Home Depot part-time? Employed. The economy’s doing fine! Of course, at least most people will sympathize with the downsized tech worker. But the brilliant student who’s stuck at community college or a less-selective state school? What’s the problem? Are you implying that some colleges are better than others? You elitist!

There’s too much nonsense in this Ivy-bashing essay from The American Scholar to dismantle it all in detail. It’s especially telling, though, how the author starts out promoting trendy ideas about “different intelligences” (”social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite”) only to end up tsk-tsking pityingly at students who socialize with each other too often and in ways of which he doesn’t approve, at the expense of the profound solitude necessary for the true intellectual life:

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.

Well, maybe there are different social intelligences. Did he ever think of that?

What’s the difference between a “classic college town”, a “college friendly city” and a “college centered city”? You won’t get many clear answers from this befuddling Inside Higher Ed story. Madison and Boston are somehow both exemplars of the third category, while Ann Arbor fits into the first, a group characterized by “dive bars and bookstores and movie theaters that still charge less than a meal.” A movie ticket in Ann Arbor does indeed cost less than a meal in Ann Arbor.

There’s not a lot new here. Academics want to move to “your usual suspects of hot cities to live: New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Austin” (although, as pointed out in the comments, they often have very little choice.) This has been the case for a long time. Long enough, anyway, that if your job is compiling a best-cities list every year, you might almost be inclined to start touting Provo and Boise just to break up the monotony. Or at least to transfer the monotony to anyone credulous enough to take your rankings seriously.

Now that I can finally get to all the non-A2-related blogging I’ve been meaning to do for a while, it’s about time to tackle this New York Times piece about the stress of college admissions. I’ve written before about the idea that the college admissions process is exceptionally competitive, discouraging and unfair, and this story is pretty much the same as the ones they were running six years ago. One concerned education lecturer frets, “some of these kids have had college on the brain since sixth or seventh grade or even earlier. When you have that kind of stress over that kind of time, that’s where it starts to worry us.” Sure, if “stress” = “profoundly comforting knowledge that there is something beyond high school.”

Don’t forget — students trying to get into college are overworked and unnecessarily traumatized by an unforgiving system. Students already in college are entitled, pampered brats.

The best part is the breathless lede, though:

As the frenzied admissions season winds to a close, many students finally know where they will be attending college in the fall.

But there remains a troubling question: how much damage was done along the way?

You might be forgiven for thinking that the only sources of stress in high school are academic in nature. But I would probably start a story about high school trauma more like this:

As the frenzied school year winds to a close, many students finally know who made the football team, which girls are total sluts and how to fit a nerd easily in a standard locker.

BUT HOW MUCH DAMAGE WAS DONE ALONG THE WAY?