Does college delay real world maturity?
 

Obviously this applies more to the "traditional" student.

But I was wondering if colege actually delays a kind of real world maturity and social sophistication.

If you graduate high school and go straight to a normal four year college it will have meant you went froma very sheltered experience to another sheltered experience. Its almost like being insitutionalized . . . add graduate school and it might be 4 more years until your life takes off into the real world.

The people around you are artifically limited both by age and to a certain degree experiences.

I have noticed on Greekchat that a lot of people speak in terms of "shoulds" as if life has these concrete rules that have to be obeyed. As if things are black and white.


And then I notice some of the people that have been around just shaking their head to it. I have go to run or I would post some examples . . .

Echo Boomer
 

James,


You made me think of an interesting article that I read recently about the Echo Boomer generation - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in646890.shtml


Excerpts:

The largest generation of young people since the '60s is beginning to come of age. They're called "echo boomers" because they're the genetic offspring and demographic echo of their parents, the baby boomers.

Born between 1982 and 1995, there are nearly 80 million of them.
The oldest are barely out of college, and the youngest are still in grade school. And whether you call them "echo boomers," "Generation Y" or "millenials," they already make up nearly one-third of the U.S. population.


From when they were toddlers, they have been belted into car seats, and driven off to some form of organized group activity. After graduating from "Gymboree" and "Mommy and Me," they have been shuttled to play dates and soccer practice, with barely a day off, by parents who've felt their kids needed structure, and a sense of mission.

"They have been heavily programmed. The kids who have had soccer Monday, Kung Fu Tuesday, religious classes Wednesday, clarinet lessons Thursday. Whose whole lives have really been based on what some adult tells them to do," says Levine.

"This is a generation that has long aimed to please. They've wanted to please their parents, their friends, their teachers, their college admissions officers."



Howe thinks they are more like their grandparents, the great World War II generation -- more interested in building things up than tearing them down.

"When you ask kids, 'What do you most hope to achieve there?' Where they used to say, 'I wanna be No. 1. I wanna be the best,' increasingly they're saying, 'I wanna be an effective member of the team. I wanna do everything that's required of me,'" says Howe.


"They are more protected," says Howe. "They regard themselves as collectively special, because of the time in which they were raised."

Why do they consider themselves special?

"Because they came along at a time when we started re-valuing kids. During the '60s and '70s, the frontier of reproductive medicine was contraception," says Howe. "During the '80s and beyond, it's been fertility and scouring the world to find orphan kids that we can adopt. ...The culture looked down on kids. Now it wants kids; it celebrates them."

Echo boomers are the most watched-over generation in history. Most have never ridden a bike without a helmet, ridden in a car without a seat belt, or eaten in a cafeteria that serves peanut butter.

"Sometimes, they don't know what to do if they're just left outside and you say, 'Well, just do something by yourself for a while,'" says Howe. "They'll look around stunned. You know, 'What are we supposed to do now?'"

They're hovered over by what college administrators call "helicopter parents." Protected and polished, they are trophy children in every sense of the word.

"Everyone is above average in our generation," says Summers.

"Everybody gets a trophy at the end of the year. It's something you're used to," adds Gissing. "And you have the rows of trophies lined up on your windowsill, or whatever."

"Parents feel as if they're holding onto a piece of Baccarat crystal or something that could somehow shatter at any point," says Levine. "And so parents really have a sense their kids are fragile. And parents therefore are protecting them, inflating their egos. Massaging them, fighting their battles for them."

Levine, who is considered one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, is now researching a book on young people entering their 20s. He is concerned that groupthink is stifling initiative. And because they have always been rewarded for participation, not achievement, they don't have a strong sense what they are good at and what they're not.

For instance, when a young person shows up for work at his or her first job, what do they expect and what are they finding?

"They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they're doing," says Levine.

"[They expect] that they're gonna be allowed to rise to the top quickly. That they're gonna get all the credit they need for everything they do. And boy, are they naive. Totally naive, in terms of what's really gonna happen."

Levine says that is not the only part of their cultural conditioning that's going to require an adjustment in the workplace.

"I talked to the CEO of a major corporation recently and I said, 'What characterizes your youngest employees nowadays?'" says Levine. "And he said, 'There's one major thing.' He said, 'They can't think long-range. Everything has to be immediate, like a video game. And they have a lot of trouble sort of doing things in a stepwise fashion, delaying gratification. Really reflecting as they go along.' I think that's new."

Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels.

But this may be something that, for now, echo boomers can deal with.
"What would you call your generation?" Buckingham asked Scott, one of her focus group participants.

"Perfect," he says, laughing.

I can kind of understand that. Instant gratification and the entire idea that my generation feels like it's....special.

Just from my experiences in my fraternity, in ROTC, in classes etc. Kids just expect things to 'work out'...and when it doesn't they fall apart. I've been around kids in all walks that when they want to do something or when they lead something they just expect everyone around them to jump in and help or do it for them.

i've always lived life as "the worst will happen", so I dont thnk college delayed maturity.

Of course the facts that I started my freshman year of HS living in a boarding house 100mi from my parents and then finished my sophomore year in an apartment 150 miles from my parents- might have had something to do in assisting that.

I would tend to agree that college delays maturity.

I would tend to agree as well. In my opinion, too, since college is a money-making institution, they do not prepare college students for the realities out there when they do graduate (ie. a flooded job market, no, you will not walk into a CEO position with a BA degree or even a Master's in many instances, etc.). I say this too because I wasn't prepared in this area.

TxAPhi,
Once again, you rock! GREAT ARTICLE!

I SOOOO see the annoyance of the "helicopter parents"! No, Little Jimmy is NOT going to get a trophy JUST for participating...These kids aren't taught to lose gracefully. That is an underrated skill. You WEREN'T THE BEST! DEAL! And work harder...No one wants to WORK HARDER!

It seems as if they want things to come now, if not yesterday. The parents feel as if their children piss and isht platinum...

Personal responsibility and humility seem to be things of the past!

Of course college delays "real world maturity." That's what's so great about it! Who wants to be a hardened, jaded, world-weary person by their 21st birthday? Not me! I look at myself and the kids I graduated with who didn't go to school and got married at 18, and I'm thinking, "Whoa...glad I didn't go down that road"...because now those people have multiple kids, way too much responsibility, and they've never experienced anything except their hometown. College is a good thing!

A few years ago, The Atlantic Monthly wrote a good article about "The Organization Kid," which was a direct response to the famous William Whyte study "The Organization Man." Basically, kids in college 3-4 years ago (they used Princeton as an example) grew up so used to being overprogrammed that they rarely get into things about which they're passionate. There's not much experimentation or exploration of new interests...and to some extent, that's completely true.

One of the examples they used was the "joined-at-the-hip" relationship where there's not much or any love between the two participants. Where even our older siblings' college experiences were characterized by one or two serious relationships and a lot of dating around--we're more likely to have one serious relationship that begins in the first weeks or months of college and ends around graduation.

Interestingly, the article TxAPhi posted is sort of up for debate, especially in the community in which I work. There's little to no empirical data to support it, and it's an amazingly superficial and stereotypical reading of such a massive sample size, in spite of one of the pillars of this reading coming in the form of 'don't read a book by its cover' - the whole 'now even virgins have green hair and tattoos' phenomenon. It's a mishmash of contradictions, right up to studies showing more and more social conservatism among youth.

Some have gone so far as to imply that there is some reverse-engineering of the biases of older generations going on in the studying and especially reporting.

As far as college - of course it's insulating, just as any other self-contained group of people would be. Even joining a trade union would have this effect, it just wouldn't encompass your social circle. Since college is now fully a 'lifestyle' for those in it (or just barely out), I'd say it's definitely a retardant to maturity. I can say this, because I still giggle at poop jokes, denoting my massive immaturity.

Amen!

Does college delay real world maturity? Hell yes! But....So what? We have the rest of our lives to be "adults" especially that our life expectancy is longer. These times should be cherished.

I completely agree. Who cares about maturity? You'll probably have at least 40 years of being mature after college, so what's the rush?

College absolutely delays real world maturity. It's like last night when I was at the bars...I mean for the most part there are very few places outside a college town in which thousands of people are out getting just totally wasted on a thursday night. You can't do that in the real world (or so I've been told ;) )

bump

Thanks!!!

Excellent question!

Do Colleges Prepare Students of the after college life? No. They teach Robotic people. Go to class, study, get grades and graduate.

Are they prepared for the after college life, of course not.

When I went to work for R H Macy, I had to go through a retraining on what I had studied along with all of the rest of the new people. We were hired for one reason only, we were in the learning mode of college.

Now, is it not true, that is where the GLOs come in to focus for the finer things of after college education? Oh, say social functioning, running a small business of officership, accounting, recruitment, social functions, ECT?

I learned things such as this is what Business Recruiters are looking for. GPA, and running or being a member of a GLO.

So, I guess there is a very valuable reason GLOs are looked at at least the first time they get a job.:)