OneSTDV (“Stan”) has a good post followed by a good discussion when it comes to college choices. He weighs the importance of location (not important), size (important, bigger is better), social life (get drunk, make friends quickly), and academic prestige (overrated).

Here are a few contributions I have on the subject:

Honors College: He’s absolutely right about the honors college. Bar none that was the best decision I made prior to enrolling at Southern Tech University. The classes were far better and more interesting. Most importantly, though, was the social aspect of it all. Honors dorms. Somewhere between a third and a quarter of my classes were honors classes and somewhere around 100% of the college mates I still keep in touch with were fellow honors students.

One person in the comment section told people to beware of honors colleges as “Political Correctness Factories” and another said “Even crappy state schools like Arizona State have hundreds of National Merit scholars.” In the case of ASU and the like, yes they have many National Merit Scholars. Want to know where you are most likely to find them? Which dorms you are most likely to live with them in?

This advice is particularly pertinent if you’re going to college where you’re going to be on the right side of the bell curve. Southern Tech is a good, but not great, university. But I would say that the average SoTech Honors College person is going to be brighter than the average student at much better universities. I’m not saying that there weren’t some people that snuck in (given my academic profile, I may have been one of them), but it’s a reasonably good way to have some of the benefits of a more selective and expensive university without the drawbacks.

Location/Region: Steve Sailer of all people actually makes a really good point: Region matters. If you have the money, it might really be worth your while to go off to school in the part of the country where you would prefer to live. The connections will be important. I find it noteworthy that a lot of people I met at Sotech who were from out of state settled down in Colosse.

Male/Female Ratio: The first commenter says this is important. Peter says that it’s not because they’ll all sleep with alphas anyway. The dial leans towards Peter on this one, though not because of the Alpha Beta Theory. I think that more important than gender ratios is culture. Schools that heavily skew towards males tends to fall into one of two categories: Agricultural and Techie.

The thing you have to worry about with an ag college (typically non-urban land-grant universities usually named Something State University) is not so much the gender ratio but the culture attached to it. A sort of conservative culture where men are men and nerds are weenies. Even if the numerical odds are not stacked against you (and many of these colleges have reached parity) the culture may well be. Investigate.

Techie schools are going to have the odds stacked even worse against you and a lot of the paltry female population will be Asian (and no Asian-American). However, while for those girls that remain the odds are good the goods are odd as they say. It’s not all that hard to come across as considerably better adjusted than a lot of your peers. It’s sort of like how anime conventions used to have terrible male-female ratios and yet my friends and I each had some measure of success at one. It wasn’t about ratios, it was about competition. We showered. They didn’t. We won.

Likewise, schools with really good male-female ratios can be no good at all. If you go to a wealthy private school, you can run into a situation like this:

It also reminds me of a particular private university in Colosse, Gulf Christian University, known for its snobby women who only date rich men. There’s an email joke that makes the rounds every couple of years that lists jokey complaints from attendees of all of the local universities in the form of “What I want to know is…”. GCU’s entry was something along the lines of “What I want to know is why in a university that is 75% female it’s the other 25% that can never get laid!”

GCU is not a very religious school except for its name, so it’s not that if you’re wondering. If you don’t have what the women at a particular college are going to be looking for, it doesn’t matter how much the numbers slide in your favor. I think it’s also the case at many schools with more female than male students you’re going to have a lot of the females being older women going back to school.

Size: I agree with OneSDTV on this one. Bigger is generally better. I think this is particular true for nerds and less conventional people. If you’re the type of person that can fit in anywhere, it doesn’t make as much of a difference. But I think there are generally more upsides and fewer downsides to a larger school. And even if you discount socialization, if you go to a small school with a really good X Program, what happens if you change majors?

Making friends after freshman year: My experience contradicts Stan on this one. The friends I made in college were spread out over years. If you live in the dorms, college isn’t like high school where you’re surrounded mostly by people in the same grade as you. Every year a new load of freshman roll up into the dorms and you can make friends with them (and that’s excluding transfers). My former roommate Hubert dated a Freshman in each of his first three year at Southern Tech. My ex-roommates Dennis and Karl were below me. Hubert himself was ahead of me. It’s a lot more flexible.

That being said, making friends is one reason why it’s less desirable to spend two years at community college and then transfer in. Stan is not totally wrong. It’s best to get settled and hit the ground running. You’re not doomed if you don’t, but having to jump in halfway into your college career is not preferable.

Academia: This is kind of a tricky topic and I suspect it varies from one situation to the next. My impression in the northeast is that where you went to school matters a great deal more than where it does in Delosa, where I am from. And California may be another place where it has such a clear demarcation between the have (University of California at _) and have not (Cal State – _) universities. And people that are wanting to enter extremely competitive fields. I also would not forego a chance to go to a bona fide Ivy League school. Other than that, though, I agree with Stan. Particularly with the “Honors College” caveat.

Interestingly the data on this is a bit conflicting. Black Sea points to a study that suggests that people that could have gone to an Ivy League school but didn’t ended up just as well. Superdestroyer points to another that says that’s not the case. I’ll have to look closer into this.

A while back, Web lamented the state of our current schools:

The incoming admissions staff at the University of Waterloo have a problem with what they are seeing from their prospective students. Articles like these have been fairly common in the past fifteen years or so, and a backlash against some of the worst methods of teaching (especially the “whole language” nonsense and the idea of “open plan” schools) is slowly taking root.

I can’t speak for whole learning and open learning, both of which I am skeptical of, but some “experimental teaching methods” can actually be quite effective in smaller, closed environments. Particularly high-trust environments. The same applies for schools that don’t grade students, unschooling, and a host of other things that excited educators.

However, quick and obvious problems can appear when you try to do these things large-scale. It’s similar to the way that homeschooling lends itself to methodology that wouldn’t work in classrooms where the teacher doesn’t have intimate knowledge of all of the students and the differences in development in students can be quite profound. In other words, there are plans that can be extremely effective one-on-one that can get completely lost in a classroom.

A lot of pilot programs fall into this trap. The pilot programs work because you have a limited number of students often self-selected by involved parents being taught by teachers self-selected to the program. So impressive numbers can be turned in at first, but then when you try to get other teachers that aren’t on-board teaching students of uninvolved parents, the kids end up much further behind than they would be with a more standard curriculum.

Further, some of these methods were never actually successful in the first place. Or rather, they were successful because you had motivated teachers and motivated parents motivating their children and not because of the particular teaching style involved.

I’m a pretty big fan of charter schools and the like where you can try new and different things particularly for those parents and teachers that want to be involved with it. When it comes to the general student population, though, I am something of a traditionalist with those somewhat boring lesson plans, icky standardized tests, and even a degree of rote memorization.

The problem with these methods is that they are often ill-suited to two groups: the intelligent and the education enthusiast (ie those that like learning for the sake of learning). The problem is that the educational establishment consists primarily of these people*. They find themselves thinking “School would have been cooler and much more interesting if we’d done X” when what they mean is “School would have been cooler for people like me if we’d done X.” These people are outliers and they can be wrong to begin with if what they hated about school was actually somewhat effective.

It’s sort of like college. College, as they say, is not for everybody. A lot of people, particularly among Sigmoids and on the right more generally, want to delineate by intelligence. I think that’s only part of the equation, however. The other part is temperament. There are some really intelligent people that just don’t have the temperament for college. They lack a broad, abstract thirst for knowledge. They don’t enjoy learning for the sake of learning. They got by and did well in K-12 simply because there were simple metrics to meet. The more intelligent they are, the less they even had to try.

But college success is determined less by metrics (though those obviously count, too) and more by enthusiasm. This was why I did better in college while my ex-girlfriend Julianne, just as intelligent as me, struggled. She was and is uninterested in how the world works and school for her was all about metrics. She had no enthusiasm, so she did what she always did which was the minimal amount required. Gauging the minimum required in college is much more difficult at the college level than the high school level and it’s harder to self-correct because by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late. An honors student in high school, she flunked out of three colleges.

People like me, meanwhile, were made for college. In High School, it was drilled into me that college was going to be this extraordinarily challenging place where you were going to get flushed out if you didn’t really try. This concerned me because I didn’t really try in high school. But once I got to college, I did really well. The places where I struggled tended to be the ones where the classroom structure was more like high school. The places where I excelled were the ones where I had enthusiasm and the studying took care of itself.

I think that the education experts tend to be more like me. They look back at their earlier learning experiences with a sense of loss because they didn’t like it and often didn’t even realize they enjoyed learning (for the sake of learning) until they got into a more free-ranging environment in college. So they ask themselves, “What can I do to make sure the next generation doesn’t dislike school as much as I did?” and come up with all sorts of wacky answers. Wacky answers that sometimes would have worked for them, sometimes would not have, but don’t carry over to the general population.

This is where I think charter schools and homeschooling and other more experimental methods can come into play. If you take a class full of intelligent people, they may succeed in either a metrics-based or more open learning environment, but they will enjoy the latter more and it will often better position them to keep learning as they get older. But it can be a disaster when it comes to the general population where, the more open the environment and less metrics-based the environment, the less they really have to do. And the less they will do.

Gradeless education is perhaps the best example of this. Taking the focus away from grades in a high-trust environment can be a godsend. It removes a grand distraction and lets kids focus on learning. This assumes, of course, that kids want to learn. I think that this is often more true than the pessimists suspect, but it really isn’t the case with most young people. So grades are the only way to get them to learn. So they don’t learn. Learning by duress (under threat of a bad grade if they don’t) may not be ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

Standardized tests are another issue along these lines. There really is no argument against standardized testing that does not also apply to grading students on teacher or textbook derived tests. Standardized tests can and do get in the way of teaching and learning, but without any sort of metric you are giving teachers the same sorts of incentives you’re giving students if you don’t grade them. Some will teach no matter what, but a whole lot will do what’s required of them. That, by the way, would be essentially nothing.

A recent study by Teach For America did an analysis of what makes a great teacher and determined. While the goal was to figure out how to “make” more great teachers, the conclusions they came to are really things that only the most highly motivated people will do. Without metrics, there is little motivation for anybody but the enthusiastic. Enthusiasm on the part of teachers should not be and cannot be assumed. We should give great teachers the lattitude they need to do their job, but that should take place in charter schools and perhaps vouchered private schools or there should be a way to measure their progress against those of the average teacher with more structured requirements placed on their classrooms.

If there is no way that we can fairly measure their effectiveness, then they need to be placed somewhere that parents have a choice of whether or not they want their kids taught by an unaccountable but possibly fantastic teacher. For those parents that do not have a choice in where to send their kids, however, I think that the system has to assume that teachers will primarily respond to whatever incentives they have. That means you need incentives. If not standardized tests, then at least something other than the teachers’ and administration’s assurances that the kids are being taught.

I am a systems guy and have a general preference for systems that don’t rely on exceptional or internally-driven individuals and don’t rely on subjective evaluations drawn up by people with a vested interest in the reported outcome. If implementing such a system ties the hands of would-be outstanding teachers, I think that’s a fair price to pay for motivating the internally unmotivated. You’re typically going to get a lot more of the latter than the former.

That’s one of the things that impresses me about the Direct Instruction method, which unlike other teaching fads proposes (a) system-based, non-feel good solutions and (b) posts results that appear to be scalable because (c) they don’t rely on exceptional instructors. It’s that last part that makes people dislike the system. One of the common responses is that if you take autonomy away from the teacher you’re just going to get bad teachers. In my view, if you create a system good enough that the quality of the teacher doesn’t matter as much, it can still be a positive experience.

I realize that sort of thing is not for everybody and great teachers and un-metric kids may not particularly excel in that environment. That’s where charter schools and the like come in to play. Within reasonable limitations, provided that the parents want to send their kids there and the teachers want to be there, I really don’t see a problem loosening the reins. For everybody else: Systems, systems, systems. Even if it’s a system that I would have hated growing up.

* – Say what you will about the average intelligence of the average public school teacher, those that stick to education theory and become influential enough to set education policy are a different breed and do qualify as intelligent individuals. What could be argued, though, that what they have in intelligence can be negated and reversed by a lack of common sense and lack of interest in grounded thought and empiricism.

One of the things some people are wondering about the Phoebe Prince case is where her friends were in all of this. The papers mention that she had some. Why didn’t they stick up for her? Do something for her?

This, to me, misunderstands the Third Dynamic of Unpopularity: When you’re unpopular, even your friends don’t have your back in any meaningful sense.

There was an unspoken rule among my friends that if one of us being targeted by Bully X, the main concern of the other friends is to try to stay as invisible as possible. It sounds cold, I know. But by and large it’s the only reasonable course of action. Standing up for your friend does not help them. Even taking the bullet meant for him doesn’t mean anything when they’ve got a loaded gun. They’ll get back to them as soon as they’re done with you.

I think I objected to this ethos at first. Why the hell was my friend just sitting there while this bully was being so mean to me? It wasn’t until the situations were reversed that I realized why. Just because I was getting crap did not mean that he needed to be getting it, too. Besides, he was getting it from people that didn’t know me. As his friend, the maximum preservation of his invisibility (at less cost to me than the alternative would be to him) was a generous act on my part.

Other than directly standing up to bullies, the main alternative would be to alert someone who can do something. That still contains the same drawbacks as personal involvement if they find out who tattled. Plus, before the administrator can do anything, they would need to talk to the victim of the bullying. That puts them on the spot. Either they say nothing and the issue dies (except that you’ve exposed yourself to the liability of Bully X finding out) or they say something and it’s just the same as if they went to the administration themselves. That enlarges the target on their back and if that’s what they had wanted to do they would have done it their own dang selves. All you did was remove the choice. Yes, they have the choice of saying nothing, but they could still be liable if Bully X finds out that they were even talking to administrator just to lie and deny that bullying was taken place.

Bullies are not reasonable. They are not typically justified in doing what they do. They don’t respect alliances between outcasts. If you fight back, they don’t care 1/100 as much as you do that you will both get suspended. They don’t care if you didn’t actually do what they think you mighta done. Once they notice you and decide who you are to them (a target), that’s all she wrote. The only way I ever found out of it is rank bribery and that only works with some.

In a long discussion with Phi about the whole Phoebe Prince mess, the subject of friendships in the lower echelons of high school popularity. He commented that when he was younger he had friendships but no group of friends. It’s a distinction that I hadn’t actually put a whole lot of thought into. Thinking about my own experience, it’s not exactly true for me, but it’s at least as true or not.

I didn’t have a dearth of friends. I was fortunate to go to a school with over 4,000 students where simply numbers suggested that you would find someone you were compatible with. I actually did better than that, having at least someone I was friendly with in each class. Sometimes a group of people. Were they friends? Not exactly. But we were at least friendly acquaintances. Don’t get me wrong, I had genuine friends, too. Not a large number, but I never really wanted a large number.

And there were sort of groups. There was a group of us that would get to school at an ungawdly hour of the morning so that we could get a good parking space. My best friend Clint also had some friends that I was very friendly with. Andrea Carmine and that gang. But these were casual and makeshift groups and while I was friendly with them, with the exception of The Early Bird Club, the connection was pretty weak and through a bilateral friendship. I was friends with one of them and so I got to know them. The only way it would go beyond that is if I had a class with them and I rarely did (it was, after all, a school of 4,000). Never a group big enough and close enough that I would have a natural destination when entering a classroom or the lunchroom or whatever.

So when it came to actual groups, I was not hugely successful. Unless I had an ambassador conduits like Clint or Andrea, I had a lot of trouble breaking in. It’s pretty frustrating to look back on. Mostly because I really had no one but myself to blame. I didn’t have the social confidence yet I would eventually acquire. I lacked drive. I was a little too comfortable by myself.

Beyond that, I also failed to realize how to lay groundwork for group activities. I never participated in any extracurricular activities. I disliked Mayne High School with a passion and didn’t want to contribute to it in the slightest. I didn’t fully realize the social implications of that. Further, I segregated myself by declining to be in honors classes. I lost touch with a whole lot of the friendships I had made before the tracking began. I retouched base with them at the High School Reunion and was reminded of what I had missed out on. Besides honors students, the most natural fit was oddly band. It was Clint’s friends from band that I got along with the most. The problem was that I wasn’t the least bit musical.

I have a lot of regrets about my socialization in high school. I see so many missed opportunities. Since making friends was difficult, since I had more robust social life apart from the school, and since I didn’t need a whole lot of friends most of the time, I just didn’t extend the effort I could have. Most of the time this didn’t matter, but I look back and shake my head at the times it did. Most particularly, I had no one to sit with at lunch. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but it seemed that every semester I would end up tossed with the 1/3 of the school that I didn’t know. That’s a mild exaggeration as I did have a couple good semesters with Clint and I made do a couple other semesters, but when there are 1,300 people in the cafeteria at any given lunch period, there’s no excuse for ever sitting alone. Or having to sit with a group of people that you really don’t like but are there.

All of this made it so strange that at my high school reunion, I ended up sitting at a random table, introducing myself to a group of people that I didn’t know, and made three friends. When we parted ways I told them that I wish I had known them back in the day. My bad.

When I was growing up, there was the annual ritual of buying school supplies. They included the typical things such as pencils and papers. The big buy, however, was the binder. Each year we got one because they only lasted a year. They actually lasted less than a year, but we made do with the misaligned claws and torn pockets because we couldn’t convince our parents to buy a new one in March. And we didn’t want to. By that time we usually got attached to it. It was the one school supply that was also a fashion statement. I can’t remember what the girls got as they did not yet exist to me until about the fourth grade, but the boys would get He-Man or Thundercats or Batman or something like it and it defined us.

In the fourth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Nelson that I had such a crush on that I faked bad vision in order to get attention from her. Just about all the boys had crushes on her. Best. Behaved. Class. Ever.

Anyhow, that year my binder fell apart before the fall semester was even over. I probably could have convinced Mom to get me a new one, but either I feared I would get in trouble or I decided to get creative. So what I did was take all of the binders from years past, take some duct tape to them, and create the Mega-Binder. Actually, I created two because I had so many. I gave the second to my neighbor and periodic friend Toby Crowell. He was as excited as I was about having the two biggest binders in school.

We showed the binders to everybody in sight and they all thought it was pretty cool. At least the boys did, and their opinions were the one that counted. At some point a couple days in I showed Mrs. Nelson. Normally one of the nicest, kindest, warmest teachers I ever had… she blew a gasket. Before I knew it she was screaming at me in front of the whole class about how of course she had noticed it and had been biting her tongue but if I really wanted to know what she thought about it she thought that it was an absolutely grotesque example of our wasteful consumer society and of class inequality where some boys would buy five binders and tear them apart while there were young boys in this country that couldn’t even afford one good binder.

I didn’t really understand what the inequality between our elementary school classes had much to do with anything and as far as I knew everybody could afford school supplies. I didn’t really understand what she was talking about at all except for that she was obviously real mad about something some class was doing wrong. What I really didn’t understand was that she didn’t understand that they were used and otherwise discarded binders save for the fact that I couldn’t bear to throw anything away because it seemed so wasteful. Not able to understand much of anything, I just tried not to cry. I can’t recall how successful I was or was not.

The binder never saw the light of day again. Toby had heard what happened and he threw his out. I couldn’t, though. It seemed wasteful.

One of my earliest crushes was to a girl named Clementine Giovanni. Clementine was a tall, slender girl that was really pretty for a fifth grader in the eyes of a fifth grader. She was the first girl I ever asked to “go with me” and, of course, the first girl to shoot me down.

Mom, ever-present and all-knowing, knew about all of this despite my never having told her. I know that she knows because she would tell other people about it. This girl that I had a crush on that {in Mom’s mocking tone} didn’t even know [I] was alive! Fortunately, she didn’t tell people of this until I was well good and past it. Even so, I felt the need to object.

“Mau-aummmm… she knew I was alive. She just didn’t care…”

That was an exaggeration. She knew I was alive and moreso than any of the other rejections I got before I ever got a yes, she was really nice about it. I made it kinda easy on her, slipping a note into her desk and accepting, without confrontation the little note that she wrote back. I didn’t even ask if she would go out with me when she was no longer going out with the guy she was going out with, even though that was a standard question at the time. Not sure we talked after that. Not sure we talked before that. I was that kind of nerd. The only girl I could easily talk to was one that I didn’t find very cute and girl classmates whose moms were friends with my mom. My Mom didn’t know Clementine’s parents very well, which of course made Mom’s ability to know everything all the more eerie.

The guy that she was going out with at the time was a dude named Grick. Grick actually confronted me about it, though not in a very confrontational way. I don’t think they lasted long. He was kind of a nerd himself. We would later be on friendly terms and probably would have been friends if we’d had any classes together. He was the closest thing I had to a friend on my junior high basketball team because we were collectively the non-jock jocks. Clementine herself went on to be quite popular, quite beautiful, and on drill team.

Clementine added me as a friend on Facebook not long after I joined up. She looks almost exactly the same now as she did in high school, which come to think of it is very close to how she looked in elementary school. She has one of those faces and a featureless figure. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t married because she struck me as the type to be married shortly after college. She’s engaged now. Anyway, part of me wants to print out a copy of the friend invitation and send it to Mom.

“See. I told you so!”

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

— Community poem based on the original Candidate for a Pullet Surprise, by Mark Eckman and Jerrold Zar.

The incoming admissions staff at the University of Waterloo have a problem with what they are seeing from their prospective students. Articles like these have been fairly common in the past fifteen years or so, and a backlash against some of the worst methods of teaching (especially the “whole language” nonsense and the idea of “open plan” schools) is slowly taking root.

Too little, too late? Can this be turned around? Working in my department at SoTech, where we “educate” the next generation of teachers, I am occasionally frightened by what I see. It is an open secret that our students are an average of 20 IQ points lower than the IQ of the next lowest-performing college. Our professors regularly give grades of B, or even A, to projects that would have been given a failing mark when I was in the fourth grade. One required test for the students, supposedly meant to ensure that the curricula for a grade-school position have been memorized to a sufficent degree, is passed by students “brute-forcing it”. To wit, they repeat the test some dozen times or more (there is no limit on how many attempts one may have, save that it may only be taken once per day and costs a set fee per attempt at the SoTech Testing Center), entering in random answers to multiple-choice questions until they eke out a “passing” grade once. “Prole Twang”, as Sheila would call it, abounds not only in hallway conversations but in classroom presentations. In the case of two african-american professors (who oddly enough carry bachelors’ degrees in “african-american studies”), it is actively encouraged.

It has been said that “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The more time I examine the fields of teaching, and the more time I see the students passing through these doors, the more frightened I become that this could be true. It is a statement that many would take to be rude and demeaning. There are many good teachers employed in the world. At the same time, there are any number of people who entered the field of teaching because they believed it to be easy. There are a large number who entered the field because they lacked the mental acuity for other professions. Sadly, since “promotion” in the field of teaching is largely about being given older students (kindergarten/preeschool teachers are “promoted” to 1st/2nd grade, 1st/2nd grade teachers “promoted” to 3rd/4th grade, and so on) and the system mostly revolves around the idea of “tenure”, by which a teacher who has been in a system for a number of years can either be promoted or not, but never fired, the field has worked itself into the situation we have today: a large number of people expected to educate middle-school or high-school children about more advanced grammatical, mathematical, or higher reasoning concepts are the very people who repeatedly proved their inability to grasp the very same concepts throughout their own educational career.

It is one thing to have a teacher who cannot understand basic geometry, but can still teach a kindergartener how to count to twelve. It is quite another to find out that, fifteen years later, this same teacher is now somehow teaching a trigonometry class because they have, through the magic of seniority and tenure, managed to “fail upwards” to teaching the ninth or tenth grade.

US News has a list of ways not to study. These are things that I wish I had thought of when I was in college. I didn’t do nearly as much studying as I should have. This one in particular stood out:

Many students think if only they found the perfect place to study, studying would be easy. So they spend inordinate amounts of time scouting and trying out various locales—first their dorm room, then the coffee shop, then the library, then the grass, etc. Such elaborate “setup” time can be a major time waster, and even worse, can make you feel that you can’t study unless you are in your ideal study spot. Better idea? Find a reasonably quiet place and just get started. You’ll get more comfortable as you get going.

In the Southern Tech University Library, they had these little study closets. For $50 a semester, you could rent one out. It was a closet-sized chamber in the library tower where you had a desk, peace and quiet, and not much else.

I have attention span issues and it was always pretty difficult to get me to stay on-task when there were always so many other things I can do. Some semesters in the dorm I had a non-computer desk specifically for reading and studying. But with my roommate Hubert around and frequently entertaining, it was a bit of a challenge to stay focused. When Saresh and Dennis joined us in our four-person setup, it became even harder. Then again, we did have a separate room that was generally quiet, so I can’t use that as too much of an excuse.

In retrospect, I wish I had rented out a library closet. Keeping me away from instant messenger, the TV shows that Hubert and Dennis would watch, and so on could have been invaluable. And unlike the Quiet Room in our four-person digs, I couldn’t easily switch back and forth whenever I “needed a break”. I wasn’t a bad studier when I had little else to do but study, but the world is full of distractions.

Of course, the problem with the library closets now is that as far as I know there is no Internet support and more and more studying requires having the Internet around or at least a computer. I guess these days the latter is not a problem because laptops have become so ubiquitous, but unless Sotech has implemented and stepped up WiFi support, that limits the closet utility (assuming that the closets are still there).

Though I am no longer in school and no longer need to study, I still find that I have difficulty getting work done in my play area. I wrote my most recent novel mostly at a coffeehouse and on our kitchen table. I’m not even sure I could do the latter now that we have wireless networking. On the other hand, wireless networking has lead to me doing most of my computing on a laptop on a sofa. At this point, perhaps my computer console is dry enough that I could use it for writing. What would be perfect is a closet that I could rent somewhere. It would have to be cheaper than the coffeehouse.

That college costs now more than ever is a much-discussed topic. There are a lot of reasons for this. The student loan industry increasing demand, for instance, and larger and larger segments of the job market requiring degrees for positions even when the nature of the position does not necessarily warrant it. People can spend $50-100k just to jump through some hoops just so that they can tell potential employers that they jumped through some hoops. Budget-strapped states also often find that they have less money laying around that they can kick in to reduce tuition.

One of the causes of the rising tide of expense, though, is that the goalposts of “the college experience” are ever-moving.

When I was attending Southern Tech University, there were basically three sets of dorms.

• The Old Houses (aka the Polyhedron) was a group of old, smaller dormitories with suites that share bathrooms reserved primarily for honors students and athletes.
• The Sauron Center was two towers with significantly smaller rooms and hall bathrooms.
• Lastly, there was Sotech Plaza, apartment-style dorms intended primarily for graduate students.
• There was a fourth set called Southern Pines, much like Sotech Plaza, but the cash-strapped university handed it over to private developers.

When I was a student, the plan was to expand the Sauron Towers from two to four. The University made it a priority to get more students living on campus and the Towers were very space-efficient as far as that goes. While I was attending, the plan shifted to adding only one tower, then two short towers, then scotched altogether.

Since then, they’ve been adding more and more dormitories at the upper end of things to accompany the Pines and the Plaza. Cynics believe that they are doing this because this type of housing brings in the most revenue. Boosters say that in order to attract the best students you have to have the nicest facilities. If a student has the option of staying at Sauron North or some posh digs at Delosa Western University, they’re going to choose the latter. And if they’re looking primarily to save money, they’re not necessarily the students that the university is most enthusiastic about anyway.

But what seems clear is that among middle class parents, for all of the complaints about the rising costs of college, a whole lot of them want these nicer dorms. They want their kids to go to the school with the extravagant football program and the super-duper fitness center. In short, a lot of parents are paying more for college because they want the kinds of things that extra money buys.

This, of course, leads to an arms race for these students. Southern Tech wants to compete with the University of Delosa for students. Delosa Polytechnic wants to compete with Southern Tech for students while Sotech absolutely, positively does not want to be lumped with Del Poly. Before parents know it, their options are to send their kid to a university with aspirations (and the expenses that come along with it) or resign themselves to sending their kid to colleges without the profiles that these schools have. Southern Tech University East (“Stuie“) is a very affordable college in the Southern Tech system, but a degree from Stuie won’t carry as much weight and you’re less likely to meet the kinds of people there that are going to help your career.

I’m not sure what can be done about this. Some suggest that curbing the availability of student loans would be a start. I’m not positive that will help all that much, though. Most of the people driving these costs upwards are the ones that can afford to go to college without the student loans. The result would be that college would become less affordable, which on one hand may be a good thing for would-be Comparative Folk Dancing majors and people without the intelligence or wherewithal to graduate, but would be a bad thing for those that are trying to move up the economic ladder and have the talent and drive to do so.

Inspiration: Are Pricey Dorms 10 Times Better? Housing options offer the easiest way to cut college costs (USN&WR)

My first close friend of the female persuasion was Andrea Carmine. It was sort of an accident how I became friends with her. Well, it asn’t an accident at all. It was a failed attempt at manipulation.

We were in the same theater class and I developed a crush on her friend Charlene Kopfer. Charlene was tied to Andrea at the hip. Andrea was pretty outgoing and we had a connection in that we both knew a girl named Patty Charles. so I befriended Andrea to get access to Charlene.

Does that ever work? Not for me.

Andrea and I had a surprising amount of chemistry. Her outgoingness and my reservedness complemented one another quite well. It didn’t take long for rumors to start. Almost entirely among people that didn’t like people like us.

When we had to pair off for duets in theater class, I was of course hoping to be paired off with Charlene. However, since she I had yet to get past Andrea to her, it Charlene ended up partnered with Janet, another girl to sort of join our group of four. Andrea and I were spectacular together, earning the only standing ovation from the teacher.

This is unrelated to most of the story, but there was a case where the four of us were going to rehearse outside of school at Charlene’s house. Charlene’s mother was very protective and was uncomfortable with her having “a boy” over (even if there were going to be three girls). Charlene comforted her mother by saying that I was a conservatively dressed kid that drove a minivan for goodness sakes. Mrs. Kopfer was convinced.

At the time, I had longish hair. I’m not sure that Charlene knew this because because I typically saw her in the morning when it was wetted down. And even outside of the mornings, I typically kept it close to my head and tucked away. And while I did drive a minivan to school and to a lot of other places, that was because my folks were uncomfortable with leaving our convertible in a parking lot. On weekends, though, I generally drove the convertible. I have sensitive eyes, so I typically wear sunglasses. And I have a leather jacket. And when I drive the convertible, my otherwise well-placed partially-long hair gets pretty wildly disordered. So when I showed up at their doorstep, Mrs. Kopfer saw a tall, wild-haired hooligan with a leather jacket and sunglasses hop out of a convertible. Charlene was pretty upset with me, which was the most emotion I’d gotten out of her at that point.

Then came the next round of duets and this time I got partnered off with Charlene. It was a disaster. Charlene was completely uninterested in rehearsing at all. She was uninterested in doing much of anything except talking to Andrea and Janet. That she was romantically uninterested in me would be an understatement.

That was fine, though, because my interest in her was dwindling, too. She was quite immature, still hovering a junior high mentality. She never learned her lines and when we finally did our presentation I had to feed her almost every line. She got a “C” for failing to remember her lines. I got a “B-” for failing to feed her the lines with sufficient subtlety.

Unattracted to Andrea and feeling a particular contempt for Charlene, I eventually asked out Janet. She somewhat graciously declined.