Paying for the Party

I haven’t read the book, which sounds very interesting, especially since I’m now at the university it’s about.

Two things to think about. One is that the major alternative mode of college management of social life, prominent at rich institutions both SLACs and R1s, involves (a) basically 100% on-campus living, (b) official oversight of widespread violation of local drug and alchohol laws, and (c) substantially higher academic standards. This is what you see at Swarthmore or Harvard, for example. It’s not clear to me that this model is compatible with either the scale of public flagship universities, or their governance by state legislatures. It certainly lessens the problems described here, but it doesn’t, for example, eliminate excessive partying or sexual assault (see all the stories about Dartmouth, for example).

The second point is that in some ways, these problems all stem from the decision as of the 70s to treat college students much more like adults with the demise of in loco parentis. I think this points both to the a real tension here (do your students want the reduction in their autonomy that this would entail? That’s a real question, btw.) and to some reasons why fixing this might be problematic. Do you think that giving administrators more power to shape students choices would be used to empower students, or to require things that we’d be even more unhappy about. Certainly in loco parentis was very problematic, and mostly died because the students worked to kill it.

The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates … a party pathway through college, which works reasonably well for students who come from very privileged backgrounds. The facilitatory methods include: reasonably scrupulous enforcement of alcohol bans in the dorms (thus enhancing the capacity of the fraternities to monopolize control of illegal drinking …); providing easy majors which affluent students can take which won’t interfere with their partying, and which will lead to jobs for them, because they have connections in the media or the leisure industries… ; and assigning students to dorms based on choice….

So the “party pathway” works “reasonably well” for certain affluent students b.c they get degrees and jobs; but it also does not work reasonably well for them inasmuch as they spend an inordinate amt of time drinking and partying, take easy courses, and thus presumably don’t get much out of their four years in the way of education (however defined), except perhaps learning how to hold liquor and navigate social scenes (which cd admittedly be useful skills, but still…). So, looked at from a certain vantage point, the ‘party pathway’ doesn’t work for well for anyone; it just works even worse for the non-affluent who get caught up in it. The OP doesn’t really address the issue of how to change the situation, though maybe the book does.

Here are a few ideas on changing the situation. Most are unlikely in the current environment. :)

1. Banning fraternities/sororities. One only needs to read the recent long article in the Atlantic, or the articles about Dartmouth, to see that they are a malign force. This is basically impossible.

2. Treating alcohol abuse on campus (and elsewhere, honestly) like a major public health problem, akin to heroin use. This would be hard to do without actually banning it.

3. End big-time college sports, including all athletic scholarships.

4. Stop treating crimes committed on campus (drug use, sexual assault, underage drinking, violence, property damage) as matters for the college to handle, and instead treat them like crimes they way they would be if the perpetrators were not enrolled in college.

This would be a pretty whole-sale restructuring of college life at a place like IU.

To weigh in limitedly, and from a position of great ignorance, I do wonder how the mechanisms of this work. How the partying *specifically* harms outcomes.
Is it the toll that comes from drinking and partying excessively (the hangovers, missed assignments, overslept classes etc) that starts eating into their grades ? Or is it more ‘the company they keep’ (ie the group they hang around in are more likely to take weaker courses, skive off etc)
I’m not sure how the authors approached the study, but was there a realistic counterfactual whereby the women from working class backgrounds did substantially ‘better’ (not the word I’d use but .. ) minus the partying ? Or is this still a story of elite social networks, entrenched inequality etc ?

This might be something specific to US college drinking culture, (or the university system in general) but I’m not sure how the partying itself could turn out to be *the main cause* of post college social immobility in anything but a few cases ?

The premise that college students are inevitably and, in some sense, involuntarily swept up in the party scene seems dubious. College students are intelligent adults who are capable of making grown-up decisions. Unfortunately sometimes these decisions are bad ones.

Of course the fact that the frat boys can party for four years, graduate with a C average, and still get good jobs thanks to the parents’ connections is an outrage, but that is the class system for you, and there are bigger outrages than that, such as what happens to working class people who don’t even get to go to college, much less a flagship state U.

Finally, a question: why do these Greek fraternities/sororities on college campuses have so much power? Are they separate legal entities, financially independent of the universities, like the Oxbridge colleges?

Tabasco, no one said anything was involuntarily anything. The point made was that universities facilitate bad things. Even intelligent adults can do bad things under bad incentive schemes, especially when the immediate costs are low and the immediate benefits high.

MSM: Yes, I’m at IU, and yes, I’ve seen Breaking Away, which is great. Growing up in a very different college town, Lewiston Maine, I’ve seen lots of town gown relations, mostly from the gown side, since my parents were professors.

At my age, I read this: “a group of 7 seniors…” And immediately think of a group of retirees for a run…

Other than that, it sounds a lot like the SLAC I attended in the 1960s. Which suggests that way, way too little has changed since then.

I wonder how these books would compare with something like Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy, and how these academics’ conclusions would compare with his. (I’ve read excerpts from Kirn’s book but not the whole thing.) He certainly would agree with the suggestion that it’s better to go to a less well regarded local school than to reach for a much better reputation farther from one’s reach. Or with fictional accounts, especially those written by recent graduates.

And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d guess those even a little older than me would be surprised by the changes caused when the drinking age was raised to 21. The transition, with the sudden shift in expectation and reality, was slightly painful, and definitely strengthened the influence of the fraternities (there were no sororities yet). It simply became impossible for anyone except a fraternity to have a party, and even frat parties were frequently “invitation only,” which allowed them to follow different rules. The OP suggests we’ve shifted from “it’s absurd this would affect social life that much, can’t people have a good time without alcohol?” to “it’s a shame poor kids can’t drink without consequences and maybe they shouldn’t participate in campus social life if they want to prepare for an adult career.”

Coincidentally, earlier today my husband and I were discussing private school for our daughter, which we aren’t considering but which was brought up in conversation by another person, and whether “making contacts” was a reasonable-to-expect benefit. The OP, I think, suggests not. (Did either of us make contacts, at an Ivy and a top-5o research univ., respectively? Not really, though he made friends with fellow college sports fans from different backgrounds, some local to the area where we eventually lived and some near where he grew up, which affected our social life for the better.)

“College students are intelligent adults who are capable of making grown-up decisions

Wrong and wrong. And wrong.

LFC, this NYTimes article discusses how you can tell that it’s IU: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/elizabeth-a-armstrong-on-her-book-paying-for-the-party.html

As for your suggestion: (a) it’s in some ways accomplished by the existence of frat houses, (b) it’s hard because people genuinely have friends who have different social lives, (c) the enormous scale of many dorms, like the ones I can see out my window, work against this, and (d) influence is probably most significant among first year students, for whom this plan can’t really work.

Sam T-H @25
Thanks for the link (and reply).

From OP: “The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party pathway through college, which works reasonably well for students who come from very privileged backgrounds.”

How is partying the reason for the inequality? Sounds like the problem is the existing inequality we have today – those who arrive with great connections don’t have to go to school to learn anything. If rich kids party at college instead of getting an education, but still do well due to connections that land them jobs, sounds like it’s connections, not education, that matters in today’s market. Unclear how changing university party rules will help those without connections.

[My alma mater, a small, liberal arts private college, is battling the fraternity/sorority issue and losing. Alums are withdrawing financial support, outraged that their social organizations would be hindered/limited in any way by the college that provided them their education.]

Matt @28. “Which are the party majors?”

I’ve found them naming names. Interior design, fashion merchandising, sport broadcasting, a major called “tourism, hospitality and event planning” and communications are singled out as the soft majors. This is compared to “practical majors like teaching or nursing that produced real jobs straight out of college”.

http://m.deseretnews.com/article/865590056/Paying-for-the-party-How-a-major-university-failed-and-derailed-its-freshmen.html

Where do Art history, Latin American studies, fine arts, philosophy fit in? Well, they don’t. To be fair though, while the crowd here view degrees in fashion, media, design and the like with total contempt, and only view professional degrees in teaching, nursing and accountancy with marginally less contempt, the arts, literature and philosophy have a lot more in common with the first group in terms of career patterns.

It is very interesting that the sociologists criticise people using a fashion degree and connections to get a job in leisure industries. It isn’t as if degrees in art, english, philosophy, law etc aren’t notoriously variable in returns depending on whether connections can be used to lever you into jobs in galleries, journalism, law, etc. I suppose there are some subjects you can pick on, and some you can’t.

What is the agenda of this book? Just curious. Please note that the Deseret review of this book (link provided by Abe Faria @ 31) has this quote:

“‘These schools lure in lots of kids who are not that interested in college and offer lots of weak majors that appeal to these kids,” said George Leef, a fellow at the North Carolina-based Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. ‘But then what? Lots of them end up working at Starbucks or Enterprise Rent a Car.’ He notes that Enterprise prides itself on hiring college graduates to do something that a well-trained high school graduate could do, and doesn’t pay them much better, providing a ready if dispiriting outlet for graduates in soft majors and low GPAs.'”

The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is funded by North Carolina’s current budget director, Art Pope – who inherited wealth and who loathes public education. As a key policy maker, he’s doing what he can to dismantle the UNC-system. Curious that the Deseret reporter sought out a Pope-funded source for this article.

Harry, you say, The majors they criticize are presented, and turned to, as being a pathway to a career. It’s not as if hospitality management science is a growing field of academic research, which should be pursued only by undergraduates hoping to write a Ph.D. dissertation on how to prevent guests stealing towels, and then teach for the rest of their life. If it doesn’t lead to careers, really, what is the university doing teaching it? If it’s just a way for hotel owners to get their kids fake credentials without doing a lot of work, why is the university providing them this service? (I daresay it also flatters the university’s idea that all knowledge is its province, if in this case it weren’t so ridiculous.) But maybe the book explains this.

Treating alcohol abuse on campus (and elsewhere, honestly) like a major public health problem, akin to heroin use.

The alternative and admittedly unlikely hypothetical would be to campaign for a reduction of the drinking age to 18, have supervised on-campus facilities and relatively strict policies regarding off-campus drinking. British universities are not exactly temples of sobriety, but the large metropolitan institutions have similar student numbers to large American public universities and don’t have the same horror stories associated with the Greek system. You certainly don’t have people falling out of windows in Leeds and Edinburgh every weekend.

Well, I am at last on “break.” And getting old enough to roll my trousers. And I was just going through some old family stuff and thinking, gee, Belle would understand this shit.

And also thinking about my wondrous here and now student youngins whose papers on the Iliad I long to read, and dread reading (I’d rather be doing, I dunno, something else, like tending to my own real older youngins more — these occupy me endlessly, of course — or just sleeping more, or keeping up with friends, or replying to that dear letter from my mother’s friend who still lives, in her 90’s now — always a lovely lady to me: I remember her as a beautiful woman/mother even an adolescent girl recognized to be. well, SEXY).

I really look forward to reading the link. Paying for the Party is what we all do.

It sounds similar to the Dutch situation. Though, different from what Colin says above, it’s not driven here by truly hereditarily rich students, there just are enough of them and they tend to be somewhat low-key.

The driving group are students from well to do families who would still need an important job to become like that themselves. Typically their family also went to the local equivalent of fraternities. They know the system in advance, and their parents know it so they can tell when the partying is truly getting out to hand.

Quite some jobs( like at prestigious law firms) are drenched by fraternity culture, so partying at the cost of grades can be a net benefit to your career. But if you are new to system, that balance is hard to find. Often impossible, if you are not very skilled at social emulation. If you do the attitude wrong, it’s worse than not doing it at all.

I have seen it act as trap for people who like the parties and the promise of social climbing, but who do not quite grasp how the class difference is going to affect them. So a few years later they have debts, bad grades, and they’re still not really in the in-crowd.

…to make a really satisfying meal for the rest of us. Sorry, I began reading the thread at the bottom, before I’d read your full comment.

nick s–when I used to pick my way along the pavements stepping carefully between pools of vomit and prostrate university students in London, it did not seem to me obviously better than the US system in any way. Worse, possibly, or a near tie. I can imagine that Leeds does not have a lot of windows, and in Edinburgh they’re not high off the ground. But the kids lying on the pavement may as well have fallen from them. The drinking culture in UK universities struck me as deeply, deeply pathological.

nick s: That’s what I was getting at up thread, about how things work at wealthier places, especially small liberal-arts colleges. However, I don’t know if it would work at a place with either the size or the demographics of a large public flagship. Also, it seems unlikely that the state legislature would be happy.

I read this book, or maybe I should say read about half and skimmed the rest, last fall on someone’s recommendation – it is a good read. The reason I put it down was, at least in my view, the narrative didn’t seem to assign much responsibility to the student for making bad decisions and seemed to ascribe most of the ‘fault’ to some combination of wealth inequality and bad university policy. As LFC noted above, the authors didn’t seem to rebuke the rich kids for squandering their opportunity since it was gonna work out ok for them, they only seemed to chastice the ‘poor’ kids for lacking the wisdom to see the consequences in trying to pull off the same thing.

Kids make bad decisions in college – its just a fact. As Harry noted @5, kids with resources can get the (sometimes literal) ‘get out of jail free’ card, kids with fewer resources don’t and can’t. I struggle to see how this is the university’s problem. In most cases the university has made an investment in the less-well off kids in the form of grants, aid etc. Suggesting that they then reduce temptation so that the kid doesn’t squander the opportunity seems a bit much.

It doesn’t make for good reading, but there is also a sizeable tranche of kids at this school (and most others) who aren’t at the frat parties and do stick to the hard majors and who win good jobs on their skills and pay back their loans etc. – but of course that doesn’t sell books.

In my experience you can counsel a kid till you are blue to choose a challenging major, take stretch courses and not party their face off but an 18-21 year old is gonna do what they’re gonna do. The motivation doesn’t come from more rules or less fraternities.

Re the hotel / hospitality degrees:

At my university (Cornell), the hotel management degree is essentially an undergraduate business degree. Students take courses in marketing, finance, accounting, and so forth. About a 1/3 of graduates go on to work in the hospitality industry. A nontrivial proportion of the remainder go on to get MBA degrees. And, yes, a fair chunk of the incoming students have family connections in the hospitality industry.

I don’t know if this is true at IU, but at Cornell, the “hotelies”, as they are called, are denigrated by other students for their lack of intellectualism. (I’ve heard extremely insensitive jokes about which of Cornell’s many bridges the hotelies jump off when they are feeling overwhelmed by classes: real majors jump off the 100′ bridge, hotelies jump off the 6′ bridge in Ho Plaza.) My impression is that a disproportionate number of them wind up in sororities and fraternities.

As for this question:

Setting aside whether it’s a fake or real credential, the answer is pretty simple: hotel schools bring in money. They tend to have a large and wealthy donor base — Cornell has strong ties to the Marriott family, for example. And, there are more than enough high school seniors who are willing to pay top tuition dollar to get a pre-business degree from a well-known school.

As for why parents want to send their kids there if they are spending more time partying than studying, part of the point of Paying for the Party is that kids from wealthy or upper-middle class backgrounds tend to view the four (five, really) years of college as a life stage to which they are entitled, and which is as much about social growth and having fun as it is about gaining job skills. The credential offers legitimacy when they get out, but in the end, it’s the social capital and network connections that sort graduates of the hospitality and fashion majors into good jobs and bad jobs within the industry. So, yes, it is all about incoming inequality, and how college — ostensibly, the great leveler — reproduces those inequalities.

The “serious” degrees are not any better for lower class students. Whos going to get through the first one or two years without getting tested out in an environment where at least 60% have to go? Sure not the laziest students or the ones with the worst aptitude. No, its the ones who are not stressed about it, because they know they can afford to fail.

The flaws of in loco parentis do not necessitate an either/or choice that 18-19yos are actually mature and responsible.

That said, what we get at the typical big school is neither. If it were policed as well as a town the same size, a fair number of students would go off to jail every year. But they are “customers.” Can’t have that.

I have an 18yo bound for Ole Miss this fall, so I take some interest in this subject. The frats are a huge part of marketing U of Miss., and won’t ever be reined in for just that reason: the school needs them, and I’m quite sure the Greeks know it.

College students, whether or not they are “grown up,” should be treated, basically, as
adults in terms of rights (and responsibilities), but should be given guidance and an environment that does not facilitate or create incentives for bad decisions.

Why just infantilise students when there are people who don’t make it to college you could patronise?

Better a college ‘facilitates’ drinking and drug use than snitches students to the police. Are those outside college and with criminal records really so better off?

“Surely there’s some middle ground between “every dorm a vomitorium,” and “every dorm a monastery”?”

Indeed. I am not THAT far away from my undergraduate experience and I remember it very fondly. There were parties and nights out and hungover morning classes. There was also studying, learning and working hard. I think a university experience should, in a perfect world, have both.

” If it were policed as well as a town the same size, a fair number of students would go off to jail every year.”

I am not sure why MPA @ 56 thinks I meant “for minor offenses.”

I think a university experience should, in a perfect world, have both.

I very much agree — though the idea of a “university experience” is also an unevenly available framework. Working-class kids, kids/families going into debt because they are counting on college as the pathway to upward mobility are not approaching university education as a time/place of experience/experimentation. Affluent kids can afford “the college experience” — that is, per the OP, they can absorb some of the opportunity costs of goofing off and screwing up to some extent. Kids who are looking to college for upward class mobility can’t afford to allow themselves much freedom, whether that’s the freedom to choose a “non-practical” major or the freedom to blow off a class or two and skate by. When they do make those choices, it costs them more in lost opportunities than it costs their affluent/well-connected peers.

So maybe it’s a good thing that the dorm-room inspection teams are doing their sweeps at public universities (if this is, in fact, common — I don’t know). Maybe most parents would be glad/relieved to know that no shenanigans shall be allowed in the dorms! But I find it unsettling. Compliance and conformity to rules/expectations are lessons today’s college students — especially aspirant students from the working class — have already mastered. The dorm room inspection crew adds something else to the mix: the lesson that institutional affiliation entails an utter lack of privacy. I suppose that lesson, too, is essential for employment. Part of today’s “college experience,” I guess.

Harry — You write that the book captures “the culture of a large public university well.” I’d be interested to hear whether you think the fact that these universities are public plays much of a role in explaining what’s going on? Are big, private universities oriented towards athletics and fraternities and sororities — places like Notre Dame, USC, and Duke — very different from these LFPs in facilitating a party pathway through college for the privileged?

big, private universities oriented towards athletics and fraternities and sororities …

and relatively wealthy students.

I’d reckon that the difference between here maps to in-state vs out-of-state students, thanks to lottery grants and in-state tuition discounts. Places like Athens or Tuscaloosa remain an uncomfortable amalgam of “finishing school of their respective states’ institutional class” and “best academic option for high achievers from lower-class backgrounds”. Only 15% of enrolled students at Duke are NC residents, while UNC in Chapel Hill has an 18% cap on non-NC residents.

I think a major contributing factor as to how we got to the point of party schools and entitled students has to do with the rising cost of education. Because students are taking out huge loans, they aren’t, usually, responsible for paying for their education while they are there. When I was in school (and yes, I know I sound old – I am), I paid my own way. This meant that I was paying to be in classes, and if I skipped them, or failed them, then I was wasting my money and time. I think if more students could work their way through schools, they might be less inclined to party themselves into oblivion.

@bianca steele 64 — Why would/should a city kid be discouraged from studying animal husbandry as an undergrad? Is that just because it’s vocational (like hotel management, etc.) or because it’s something with which they have no prior experience?

L.D.:
Because it’s vocational, and the job it leads to isn’t something you can really just start on in college. And unlike hotels, farms aren’t a growing part of the economy, so as far as I know there isn’t any recruiting pathway that would plausibly take 21 year olds with no farming experience into a job on a farm. Is there? If there was, I suppose someone who really decided to throw themselves into farming and found extracurricular and off-campus activities related to farming might have a chance.

But that’s speculation anyway, I don’t know whether hospital management is thought of something like the traditional agricultural majors. It doesn’t seem very similar to me.

LFC @67 I’ve been reading this thread with fascination – my experience was the opposite of yours. In the UK during the 60s and (in my case) the 70s our university fees were paid for, and most students received a maintenance grant. The grant was means-tested, but it enabled many working and lower-middle class kids to go to university. However, if one failed, then one was thrown out, and resits were at the student’s own expense.

But university wasn’t open to all, as it is in some countries. There was a limited number of places, which were allocated competitively on the basis of results in public examinations. This still applies now, even though free tuition and maintainance grants are a thing of the past. Many more kids go to university, and borrow heavily for the (much more doubtful) privilege. There is a cynical view than many are merely being conned into paying to keep themselves of the unemployment register for a few years.

My generation had it all, but we allowed Tony Blair’s government to pull the ladder up behind us. The system in my day encouraged a public service ethos amongst many of us. The much greater expense involved today inevitably encourages a more selfish attitude.

a drink fuelled post apocalyptic London where survivors step over the corpses of vomit covered 18 year olds is a little OTT

probably, but it was an amusing comment if nothing else ;)

Bianca, thanks for the reply. I guess I probably think of most college majors these days as vocational — or most undergrad majors at my institution, anyhow. I don’t recall offhand who has more majors, the business school or the school of engineering. I suppose someone might quibble about engineering being a “vocational” degree, but it seems so to me — as opposed to, say, a degree in the natural sciences or math or something like that. In any case, most undergrads seem to be choosing vocational majors.

Still, if there were an urban/suburban kid who got a bee in his/her bonnet to study agriculture, with no prior experience, I guess I’d look at that as one of those exploratory/experimental choices that can be part of the “college experience.” I suppose the sage advice in a case like this might be, “If you’re going to choose a vocational major, then major in engineering, because your odds of getting a job are better.” But something like animal husbandry might at least offer a non-bookish college kid from a non-farming background something different, something extraordinary. Maybe an extraordinarily bad choice of majors? But as long as it’s not an issue of going into huge debt, it seems that there could be worse things than majoring in ag science or animal husbandry or something like that.

I am shocked, shocked to learn that there is partying in this party dorm…

Seriously, it isn’t hard to imagine how universities can make this partying situation a little better. Just imagine, if you are a university, that your sole mission is to educate people. Everything you do should follow from that.

-Make the education prospective students will receive the forefront of your university’s sales pitch
-Tie official activities to academic performance
-bar academically underperforming students from attending athletic events (or other officially recognized university events and activities)
-enforce existing statutes on academic performance of greek organizations or even (!!) raise them
-do not promote greek life in any official capacity
-give free books to students with a 3.0 gpa or higher
-disband athletic teams whose participants underperform some designated standard
-fund meaningful social and cultural opportunities for honors programs and the like
-shower deans list or honors students with accolades, money, other opportunities

…and so on. I’m not sure “partying” is like a major problem for colleges, per se. It’s just if students want to party, make sure they know they have other priorities.

Universities are institutions, you know, they can do that.

LFC @73 – I do apologise :)

MPAVictoria @75 … I take your point, but Blair did things, like introduce loans instead of grants, which Thatcher didn’t dare do. He not only continued many of her policies, but also did some of the Tories’ dirty work for them. And most of the Labour Party in parliament rolled over and played dead, or started chanting “Four legs good – two legs better”!

Sigh :(

From what I’ve seen, plenty of city types – or small townies – want to be vets, which is, for many, merely a higher social status animal husbandry. Why shouldn’t people want to move to a different environment from that in which they were brought up? I’m sure people from Birmingham have “run away to sea”!

A good agricultural college will provide a fusion between the academic and vocational. For example, one of the world’s leading statistical software packages, Genstat, was originally developed by the Lawes Agricultural Trust at Rothamsted a world class research institution.

I teach at “where fun comes to die,” but, alas, we are turning up the burner on Greek life and recruiting a less masochistically self-selected student body. The changes are already turning up in the increased number of noise complaint calls to the police. But hey, our rankings are up!

And behind it all is the erosion of the common core – giving in, step by step, to the idea that the purpose of education is employment. Why did we allow vocational school to become a black mark? Wouldn’t we (the national we, lets say) be better off if people who wanted to enter a particular job could get efficient, specialized training for success in that occupation? I wouldn’t have a job, of course …

Main street muse: It’s an ethnographic study of a women’s floor in a party dorm. The authors make no claims that their study is representative of men, or of women in geek dorms, or of women in schools that aren’t similar to flagship public universities in conservative states in the Midwest.

Bianca: “It seems the authors blame poor grades on poor choices due to partying, or on poor parental foresight in letting girls know what preparation they’ll need to excel in college. This seems to let high schools and universities both off the hook.” Well … no. The authors are sociologists, and as sociologists, they are constitutionally unable to talk about choices without also talking about the social and institutional constraints that affect choices. (In fact, the senior author is an organizational sociologist, not an educational sociologist.)

In PftP, the authors devote quite a bit of space to discussing how university organizational structures (e.g. majors, absence of mentoring for working class students other than a handful of academically exceptional freshmen) and policies (e.g., alcohol) contribute to class-specific outcomes. They don’t talk much about high schools or parents, presumably because high school administrators and parents weren’t in their data set.

(No, I’m not one of the authors of PftP. I’ve read it, though.)

I don’t quite see how Bianca could have concluded that the authors of Paying for the Party were letting the university in question off the hook, since Harry B. in the OP says explicitly:

The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party pathway through college…

That doesn’t sound like letting the university off the hook to me. Krippendorf’s reference to “the social and institutional constraints that affect choices,” in which sociologists (and social scientists more generally) are usually interested, is another way of putting the point that was made in the OP.

LFC: See my reply to krippendorf, above. Harry’s focusing on one chapter in this post, the one about the divide between middle and upper-middle class girls, which makes sense because it’s the one most directly related to the party culture, but there are two or three other chapter. The one I was thinking of was about the divide between poor and lower-middle class girls, or between girls from schools that sent lots of graduates to the flagship and schools where it was very rare for someone to end up there.

That should read “maybe they’ve established this, in a part I haven’t read”–it’s getting late for me and I was typing quickly.

Back when I was a freshman at a fairly large public school I stayed in the (co-ed) dorm that was simultaneously both the partyingist of the party dorms and the geekiest of the geek dorms on the campus, not to mention also the richest of the rich-kid dorms.

Campus politics was dominated by avowed leftists. These leftists who dominated the political scene on campus sided overwhelmingly with the party kid faction against the geeks. They treated any effort by the geeks to shift the running of the place in a more geek-amenable direction as a deliberate ploy by plutocrats to protect the privileges of the wealthy. And this was not merely an opinion of theirs – they treated it as so obvious as to not require justification. The student-run newspaper would use the idea that a student could be found doing things like studying in the computer lab after dark on a weekday as a kind of shorthand for the fact that they belong to the class of evil overlords.

(By “geeks” above I mean “academically serious students”, not necessarily genius level intelligences. At least in the second paragraph).

Is there a lesson here relevant to the OP? I’m not sure (the main lesson I got from this was that campus leftists can sometimes be totally fake leftists, but that would be a whole different can of worms).

Three quick points, not related to the discussion so far, but to the OP
1. Harry, I recall you mentioning in your last post that you weren’t a great teacher. I’m going to call bullshit on that —not-great teachers don’t get those types of e-mails from their students

2. Are you aware the the This American Life on party schools? http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/396/1-party-school

3. (because everyone is thinking it): What, no Charlotte Simmons???

Harry, thanks for the reply. That makes sense. It’s just that, personally, I might find it hard to say some of those things and not be challenged, whether by people thinking I was letting others or myself off the hook, or by people assuming I was in fact blaming them. But that’s probably just me and in part a consequence of too much time worrying what people are saying on the Internet.

adam.smith:
The Big U actually has a student-government type girl caught by mistake on a quasi-sorority floor, but Neal Stephenson isn’t well regarded in these parts. (It’s his first novel and that shows, though he evokes the 1980s campus and a weird-world version of “Boston U as total system” nicely. Also, after being drugged against her will, after making enemies of the sorority girls, and raped by their frat-boy overlords, she starts carrying a gun in a version of the “girl gets tough” scenario. And then there’s the insane D&D sysadmin and the ethnically coded maintenance workers and the drug-fueled cult of the weird-world Citgo sign and a bit of violent aggression- acting-out against the university. So not to everyone’s taste.)

I like Prep, which is obviously about high school, but it shows how, after she finished college, she felt about the initiation into the upper classes she got at private school, and what was important about what she learned there (academically as well as socially). I also thought it was depressing that she apparently didn’t learn anything she thought was negative about that world.

There might be another one I’m not remembering at the moment.

Alex @ 84:

The beginning of the black mark for vocational schools came a little over a century ago, when Charles Eliot of Harvard invented the sequence. Henceforth, people who wanted to become lawyers had to have an college degree before going to Law School, rather than bypassing college and going there directly, as had been the custom. This constraint was also added to medical school.

After that, the prestige ladder did its work through the 1940s, with other universities copying the Harvard model (and the colleges only too happy to support such a thing.)

And after that, for the 30 years following the end of WWII, the generalized transition to managerial or professional logic everywhere in American society, coupled with a willingness by the states to subsidize that shift to a degree unseen before or since, meant that expanding the role of colleges and universities into many forms of job training was simply a matter of taking the dollars being thrown at us.

And now, 40 years after the Golden Age began to recede, we’ve realized what’s gone missing. We used to be members of institutions that could, by keeping our expenses low and taking only the money our students could afford to pay, run ourselves more or less as we judged fit. Now, with our expenses growing at 7% a year and most of the tab underwritten in one way or another by tax dollars, and with 9 our of 10 of our students saying that they are getting an education so they can get a job, we work for other people.

I do not believe we will be able to reverse this change. The larger the percentage of your funding that comes from governments whose rationale is the production of a useful workforce, the likelier it is that your institution will be the vocational school, transformed by the demands of the people who fund us and thus have significant leverage over our collective fates.

Isn’t nostalgia for wasted youth a marvelous privilege.

Bianca @90 RE vets and animal husbandry: there’s probably a cultural difference between Britain and the US here. Popular perception of vets here was greatly influenced but the long-running and oft-repeated TV series All Creatures Great And Small, which left no doubt that being able to have an arm up the rear-end of a cow was one of the professional skills required. UK Vets schools are phenomenally difficult to get in to: money won’t buy you a place; you need both top grades and perceived aptitude. My friend’s boy, now at vet school, did work-experience with a local vet with a big pet-practice, but also helped with lambing on a farm about ten miles away. UK students are old enough to drink at 18, but he’s being worked so hard that, although life isn’t monastic, there is relatively little time for partying.

Of course, aspiring Masters Of The Universe don’t waste their time on anything so practical. THE course for them is PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford. David Cameron, The Miliband brothers and (too) many other UK politicians are products of this school. To be fair, Miliband E then went on to take an M.Sc in Economics from LSE. The daughter of another friend once expressed an interest in PPE. I commented that it was a course for those who wanted to be able to boss other people about, without acquiring a useful skill themselves. Her dad’s reply was “Perfect for xxxx then!” (But when she got a bit older she changed her mind and went for Modern Languages instead.)

I think MPA was the closest to the truth way up thread somewhere.This dichotomy people are pushing seems bizzare to me, either you’re partying endlessly with the uber rich or you’re waiting in line for the giro with two pounds in your back pocket and rent to pay.
There is a middle ground here that I’d imagine most people live on.

hix 51: “Whos going to get through the first one or two years without getting tested out in an environment where at least 60% have to go?”

This is a thread about American colleges. Here, students don’t get ausgesiebt or ausgetestet. Students are paying customers, after all!

Its not just economic pressure, TM — there are questions about the quality of the institutions they attend, too. No, PftP doesn’t discuss this, it is very focussed on the somewhat selective end. They do note that of the working class women in the dorm, those who succeeded in their goals were those who transferred to regional campuses, not those who stayed; this goes against the now-conventional wisdom that you should attend the most selective institution that will take you (discussed here: https://crookedtimber.org/2009/09/15/crossing-the-finish-line-undermatching/); but they offer explanations that are plausible about why the general finding may still be right.

Today’s comment from a student in my office: “there are students whose parents put $50 on their cards every week. I mean, what is that? How come so many people here are so rich?”

LeeAnn @106 You post reminded me that the late, great (at least IMHO) John Kenneth Galbraith got his first degree from Ontario Agricultural College – in Animal Husbandry.

At 6’8″ tall, he was, literally as well as metaphorically, a giant of a man! :)

On vet jobs in the US- my understanding is that very few people go in to large animal medicine these days. There are jobs for people who want to do it, but it’s much physically harder, in worse conditions (cold, the middle of the night, etc.) and sometimes dangerous- getting kicked by a horse or the like. My impression is that the money can be somewhat better for being a “pet vet”, but that it’s mostly the fact that you can live in the city, have more regular hours, and work in much more comfortable conditions that leads most people to that. (It’s also possible that more people going in to vet medicine just like cats and dogs than horses, cows, sheep, etc., but I’m not sure that’s the main thing, compared to the other factors.)

Medoc’s point about coke use isn’t discussed (at least, I don;t remember it, I lent the book to a student so it is not to hand) in the book. It was, however, more than hinted at by the sorority member in our group (of whom I can say, pretty confidently, that if she herself is a significant user, I am a monkey’s uncle).

harry 111: “Its not just economic pressure, TM — there are questions about the quality of the institutions they attend, too. No, PftP doesn’t discuss this, it is very focussed on the somewhat selective end.”

Well the graduation rates cited are 57 percent at public institutions, 65 percent at private nonprofit institutions. My understanding was that this was not an elite institution. “the quality of the institutions they attend” – but how is that not related to economic pressure? The lower income students attend “lower quality” institutions, whatever that means (the figures above don’t even include community colleges, which have graduation rates below 40%). I would just reiterate that the correlation between graduation rates and SES seems not to get as much attention as it deserves.

My guess would be that economic pressure directly or indirectly explains most of it. Why do students drop out? Because the classes were too hard? I think that is rarely the reason. In my experience (ok anecdotal), a student who manages to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops required, to come up with the tuition every semester, and to show up in class most of the time will not fail academically. However if you have to work two shifts to make ends meet, you may not be able to clear these hurdles. Isn’t that the elephant in the room?

What’s in it for colleges to “facilitate (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party pathway through college?” What gains are felt by the university that strategically offers this party path instead of good advisors? [I am relatively new to the university setting and find it a rather odd universe in many respects.]

Cranky @ 122 – this circular arrangement seems at odds with the thesis of Paying for the Party – partying all the time inhibits the poorer students – the ones without connections – from getting jobs that will enable them to contribute to their alma mater. Seems an odd strategy for universities – to strategically engage in a party pathway that keeps a sector of alumni out of work.

Tm, I admit to describing a far too German scenario (which is not representative for every high status/secure professional career degrees either). The model should still work, paying customers or not. When students perceive more pressure to perform one way or another, the psychological burden is higher for lower class students. The described risk to graduate late with high tuition fees will get that done almost as good as the risk to get kicked out for bad performance. Objective hard tests are not necessarily the only reason in the German scenario either. Scaring students more or less subtile and organicational chaos can also achieve high failure rates.

Or as a particular highlight, one could tell students that certain topics will not be part of the test, write the test almost exclusively about that topic and then sue a student who complains about it for sexual harassment.

Harry – I absolutely want to read this book – thanks for the recommendation. I am new to the university universe, after a lifetime in the private sector – it’s a very strange place (to me). I really enjoy working with my students but feel that far too many of them come to college unprepared for the rigors of the world. It’s been an eye-opening experience to say the least.

More successful, oddly, were the women who left the flagship university for far less prestigious regional campuses that turned out to be free from the distractions of partying and social hierarchy, where they were able to shift to practical majors like teaching or nursing that produced real jobs straight out of college. “We assumed that they were washed out,” Armstrong said. “But as we kept talking to them we realized most had transferred to four-year branch campuses and kind of got back on track.” It took longer for these transfers to graduate, but they had less debt and better employability than those of similar profiles who stayed.

From the Deseret News article. Well duh. So the question that should occupy everyone’s mind is why this is not common knowledge BEFORE these students spend a year or two racking up student loans at the prestigious university? Why do parents (who know their kids better than anyone) let their kids go off to the wrong school in the first place? That falls on our society that tells us “sure take out the $100k in student loans to study communications,” it falls on the guidance system at high schools that doesn’t advise kids properly, and it falls on parents who don’t know what they should be looking for in a school and don’t take the time to learn. These kids are dumb impressionable consumers that are being sold a bill of goods that a prestigious university with a good football team and nice Frat Row is the place to go.

AZSunDevil:
I disagree with your implication that a student should/must know what he or she wants to do (in terms of job/career) before going to college. You write: if you send your kid to live in a dorm, live on campus, join a frat/sorority and they are not self motivated, self disciplined, and don’t know what they want to be when they graduate, you are just plain stupid.

Ok, but these three things — “not self motivated, [not] self disciplined, and don’t know what they want to be when they graduate” — do not necessarily go together. A student can be very self-motivated and self-disciplined and not have the slightest f***ing idea what he/she wants “to be” after graduation. One unfortunate consequence of the rise in tuitions and debt etc over the last decades is that many students now probably have less willingness/opportunity to explore various courses/paths/etc before deciding on one.

Also, this:
Keep them close to home and ensure that they get their degree and help them choose a useful major.
You are implying that a “useful” major is one that will lead to directly to employment. But what if a kid does not want to study something very practical like Computer Information Systems? What if a someone is interested in, I don’t know, physics or history or literature or languages or anthropology or sociology or music or etc etc etc? I guess your answer to that person would be: Tough sh*t; you don’t have the luxury to do any of that in a difficult job mkt. (So they go into something they hate, loathe, and despise; find a job; and proceed to be miserable for the rest of their lives. I’m exaggerating, of course, for the sake of making a point.)