It’s spring in Burlington and the last traces of snow are receding to the north side of buildings and shrubs. The breeze carries the aroma of wet earth and renewal. The University of Vermont is on spring break and the town is pleasantly empty. The students at Groovy UV may be the only college students in America who drink less on spring break than they do on campus.
According to a new study released by the Harvard School of Public Health, University of Vermont students are almost twice as likely as their peers to engage in binge drinking. Seventy-one percent of our scholars has five or more drinks in one sitting in the two weeks before they responded to the Harvard survey, as opposed to the 44 percent national average, and 43 percent of UVM students drink five or more in a sitting twice a week or more, as compared to 23 percent nationally.
UVM President Judith Ramaley, already reeling for national coverage of our hockey hazing scandal, said, “The college campus is essentially a symptom of a societal problem.” So there you have it. It’s society’s problem. You can’t blame UVM if our students are twice as social as college students elsewhere.
The faculty at UVM has not been particularly happy this winter, either. It seems there’s a new business in town that pays students to take copious notes during lectures, then sells those notes to students who failed to attend class. The entrepreneur who started this operation said it’s not designed to help students skip class, but to provide them with notes they might have otherwise missed if, say illness prevented them from attending class in person. Cirrhosis of the liver, perhaps, or delirium tremens.
The PhDs are unhappy because, for one thing, it’s not professionally fulfilling to lecture to an empty room, and more important, many professors discuss ongoing research in their lectures and they’re none too happy to have the results of their labor being reproduced for profit before they’ve had a chance to publish themselves.
Hazing, drunkenness, selling class notes – if I didn’t know better, I think this was the Ivy League. Thank goodness George W. wants to be our education president.
As distressing as all this is, none of these is in and of itself a problem. They’re all symptoms of a problem, symptoms of the same problem and while UVM may be going through a bad patch with these symptoms lately, I doubt the problem is limited to Vermont.
The problem is that students no longer attend college as scholars, but as consumers. Students, or their parents, pay tens of thousands of dollars to a university and the expectation is that after four years of good times, the student collects a diploma and heads out to look for work.
And to be honest, I can’t say I blame them. Students may look at college as a business transaction, but it was the schools that started the trend. If all the students at UVM suddenly decided to live on campus and attend all their classes, the school would have to begin an ambitious construction program. As it is, the administration seems content to admit anyone with sufficient financial resources and then lets students live off campus, spending their days on the ski slopes and their nights in the bars. The fewer classes and services you provide for the tuition you take in, the more you can send to the bottom line.
In every school, from kindergarten to post-doctoral studies, we really teach students by the manner in which we conduct ourselves. You can’t blame them if they learn too well.
University, Inc.
It’s spring in Burlington and the last traces of snow are receding to the north side of buildings and shrubs. The breeze carries the aroma of wet earth and renewal. The University of Vermont is on spring break and the town is pleasantly empty. The students at Groovy UV may be the only college students in America who drink less on spring break than they do on campus.
According to a new study released by the Harvard School of Public Health, University of Vermont students are almost twice as likely as their peers to engage in binge drinking. Seventy-one percent of our scholars has five or more drinks in one sitting in the two weeks before they responded to the Harvard survey, as opposed to the 44 percent national average, and 43 percent of UVM students drink five or more in a sitting twice a week or more, as compared to 23 percent nationally.
UVM President Judith Ramaley, already reeling for national coverage of our hockey hazing scandal, said, “The college campus is essentially a symptom of a societal problem.” So there you have it. It’s society’s problem. You can’t blame UVM if our students are twice as social as college students elsewhere.
The faculty at UVM has not been particularly happy this winter, either. It seems there’s a new business in town that pays students to take copious notes during lectures, then sells those notes to students who failed to attend class. The entrepreneur who started this operation said it’s not designed to help students skip class, but to provide them with notes they might have otherwise missed if, say illness prevented them from attending class in person. Cirrhosis of the liver, perhaps, or delirium tremens.
The PhDs are unhappy because, for one thing, it’s not professionally fulfilling to lecture to an empty room, and more important, many professors discuss ongoing research in their lectures and they’re none too happy to have the results of their labor being reproduced for profit before they’ve had a chance to publish themselves.
Hazing, drunkenness, selling class notes – if I didn’t know better, I think this was the Ivy League. Thank goodness George W. wants to be our education president.
As distressing as all this is, none of these is in and of itself a problem. They’re all symptoms of a problem, symptoms of the same problem and while UVM may be going through a bad patch with these symptoms lately, I doubt the problem is limited to Vermont.
The problem is that students no longer attend college as scholars, but as consumers. Students, or their parents, pay tens of thousands of dollars to a university and the expectation is that after four years of good times, the student collects a diploma and heads out to look for work.
And to be honest, I can’t say I blame them. Students may look at college as a business transaction, but it was the schools that started the trend. If all the students at UVM suddenly decided to live on campus and attend all their classes, the school would have to begin an ambitious construction program. As it is, the administration seems content to admit anyone with sufficient financial resources and then lets students live off campus, spending their days on the ski slopes and their nights in the bars. The fewer classes and services you provide for the tuition you take in, the more you can send to the bottom line.
In every school, from kindergarten to post-doctoral studies, we really teach students by the manner in which we conduct ourselves. You can’t blame them if they learn too well.