The Five-Year Party (28 page)

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Ask how many of the college’s own professors send their children to school there.
In my visits to colleges around the country, I never ran into a single professor’s child at a subprime party school. All of these professors lived within driving distance and it would seem like a wonderful opportunity. However, the more these professors knew about the colleges that employed them, the more likely they were to send their children elsewhere. They knew what went on there and they didn’t want their children sexually abused in a fraternity house, getting their stomachs pumped for alcohol poisoning, or ending up with a valueless diploma.

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Ask students you pass on the campus if it’s a party school.
Believe me, they know, and they are usually proud of it. I have asked students this question at every college I have visited over the past three years. At party schools, students give you appreciative reviews of the party scene and will tell you how “awesome” it is. You could hear about the parties every night of the week if you wanted to spend the time to listen. If you asked a few more questions, you would find out that students “hardly have to do any work at all” and that “the teachers are really easy here. It’s like heaven for students here.” On the other hand, at places like the University of Virginia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or the University of Rochester, students insisted that it was not a party school or offered some qualifications like “we study hard and we party hard.” At party schools, studying is not part of the deal. If you get any kind of doubt or hesitation from students when you ask the party school question, you are probably on the right track.

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Go to the library computer lab and look over the shoulders of students to see what they are doing.
If it looks like research, intellectual inquiry, or even vague curiosity, that’s fine. But at subprime colleges, you are much more likely to find students playing video games, watching YouTube, downloading pornography, or looking at profiles on Facebook and MySpace.

At Florida A&M University at 10:51 A.M. on September 15, 2008, for example, a study by the student newspaper, the
Famuan
, found that fourteen out of twenty-seven computers on the second floor of Coleman Library were being used for Facebook or MySpace. Other students who wanted to use the computers for research found that none were available and complained to the library staff that the computers were being misused. At party schools, the noncomputer sections of libraries—the places where rows of books are shelved—are usually ghost towns, devoid of students.
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Ask the college for documentation about how many graduates have found work in fields related to their area of study.
A decade ago, it used to be routine for colleges to conduct an extensive survey of their alumni and post this information on their web pages. If you do a Google search, you can find these old surveys of graduates dating back to the mid-to-late 1990s. Many elite colleges still take these surveys but hardly any party schools do it anymore. Why? It must be terribly depressing for party school administrators to watch the number of unemployed and underemployed students climb relentlessly year after year. There are just too many film majors who couldn’t get jobs as documentary directors and too many theater majors working as waiters and clerks.

In my own experiment, performed by tracing former students through their Facebook pages, I found that fewer than 10 percent of the students who graduated with journalism degrees found work in anything even remotely connected with journalism or public relations. I found a lot more of my former students working as clerks or waitresses five and even ten years after graduation. Good colleges are proud of their graduates and should be happy to supply you with information about them if you ask. Just watch out that you don’t get overwhelmed with the 10 percent of excellent students who succeed despite the party school training. If you are shown a lot of profiles about specific students, ask about the averages.

 

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If the college offers you a student aid package, make sure you get the offer in writing and make sure it’s for all four years.
Many parents make the mistake of negotiating a beneficial aid package for their children, only to find that the offer only applies to the freshman year. This is a common enough problem that it has to be the result of a recognized policy. You can avoid this by asking about the other three years and adding it to the negotiated package. Make sure you get someone in the financial aid office to sign it.

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Ask to visit a classroom in operation.
Make sure this is a random choice and not a class that was set up by the college with a model teacher and honors students. You can tell a lot just by observing what is going on. What is the attitude of the students? Are they asking questions, contributing comments, and paying attention? Or are they text-messaging, chatting with each other, eating, or sleeping? Is the teacher connected with the students or is she just lecturing remotely without any interaction with the students? Does she ask questions? Does she ask for comments? Another thing to look out for is the teacher who is playing the role of stand-up comic or quiz show host. Is actual learning taking place or is this just an entertainment exercise? Are the students running around the room playing musical chairs while the professor asks questions? If learning looks like it is taking place, it probably is. If the students aren’t paying attention, they are most likely not learning anything.

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Ask the town police and people in the community what students are like.
Most party schools have areas around the campus that the local communities call “dead zones.” They are easy to spot because of the extremely run-down buildings with broken windows, grassless front yards, and mangled trees. There are often sofas in the front yards, beer kegs on the porches, and various forms of trash scattered throughout the neighborhood. These are high-crime neighborhoods with frequent assaults and arrests for underage drinking. The noise at night, even on weeknights, can be thunderous. These areas can become so overwhelmed with students that the parties spill out into the streets, blocking traffic. Conditions there are so bad that the students have driven away all of the non-students who used to live there, leading to further deterioration.

At my college, there were a number of these neighborhoods that were collectively known as “the ghetto.” The streets looked like something out of a third-world country or sections of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The area was obviously off-limits to housing inspectors. Students told me that the buildings were infested with rats, had holes in the floors, and that the staircases were unsafe. The college, of course, did nothing at all to combat the conditions there. They, too, looked the other way.

 

If you drive around the streets surrounding the campus, you are likely to come across these areas and you should take a good look. Is this the kind of place you want your child to spend a lot of time? Take a moment to get out of your car and chat with some of the local residents. Are there any residents who are not students? If so, ask them about the parties and how bad they are.

 

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Investigate the underground cyberspace party school network.
Some high school students search the internet specifically looking for the least demanding colleges that welcome slackers. Sites like
collegeconfidential.com
, studentsreview .com, and
vault.com
offer insider information and peer review ratings directly from the students who are currently in college. The main objective is to identify and reject the more academically rigorous schools in favor of the subprime party schools where little work is required. Current college enrollees explain the real state of affairs to high school students who are weighing their options and want to find out which colleges are really party schools.

The online ratings are radically different from those published in college guidebooks and are probably more honest. Prestigious schools with the best teachers and best programs, the ones that win high rankings in the published guides, are identified on the student-run websites so they can be avoided. They just demand too much hard work. What students who use these sites are looking for are easy classes, high grades for little work, no attendance policies, lots of fraternity parties, and little interference from administrators.

 

My college was described by “Handlebarsfsr,” a student on
ridemonkey.com
, as: “Like the #2 party school in the nation. That place is liquor central.” An anonymous freshman from my college posted on
studentreview.com
that she was “having the best time anyone could have.” The classes were undemanding, she reported, and she could hand in her assignments two or three weeks late without any penalty. “Every night there is something to do. Walk outside your building and you can hear the frat parties bumping. You need to learn to balance your drinking and work but not really all that much. The work load doesn’t ruin your life. You get it done and then you can go out, simple as that. The party nights to go out are Thursday and Saturday, the big parties where everyone you know is out, but other than that everyone goes out and it’s a blast. They don’t demand a lot from you and want you to have fun and get out and meet people instead of lock you in your room and make you study for hours upon hours. The place is definitely a party school so get ready to party. There are the kids who sleep in class and don’t do anything and those are the ones you see sleeping over at the frat parties because they couldn’t exactly make it back to their dorm.”
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Have your child sign a FERPA release form.
This will allow you to examine disciplinary records, health records, and education records that colleges normally keep secret. Although some colleges place these forms in the admission packets, other colleges deny that they even exist, so you may have to be persistent. This is the best way to make sure you are in the loop when something goes wrong, but don’t expect colleges to contact you. You need to check in every once in a while and if the college tries to stonewall you, produce the release form and demand access. Parents of students who died in college from alcohol poisoning told me they wished someone had told them about this.