Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blog #3
With my topic, college student drinking, I hope to discuss how students and privatization relate. Students drink to avoid reality and it's interesting to see how privatization avoids reality as well. Privatization focuses on assumptions that students wish to pursue education in order to secure their future. I hope to also be able to discuss how drinking is considered a social event. People wish to have the college experience, which involves drinking, and they hope to make the most out of their purchase for a college degree. Privatization relates to my topic because drinking essentially is one of students' private interests. It also allows the students to escape reality, which is again supporting their private interests.
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I don't agree with the idea that both privatization and students avoid reality, and that is definitely not the way to connect the two. The big question that I think you need to ask is why, with higher costs and greater debt due to privatization, students would continue to drink at college, especially when we know that can negatively impact grades and performance. If competition for jobs is getting more fierce, and the risks of failing are greater than ever, then why would students engage in risky behaviors like drinking -- especially since privatization has increased the risks?
ReplyDeleteI do think you can argue that students "avoid reality," and drinking is part of that for many. Among the realities that students avoid are those involving how much they are paying for college and the debt they are taking on, and what the long-term risks of those debts might be. We know from "Price of Admission," for instance, that most students don't think about the costs but rely on their parents and others to do their thinking for them. Likely they are just in denial about finances. Those not in denial would be very nervous. For some, drinking is a way to avoid thinking about those things, or a way of self-medicating their stress over that. So it is possible that privatization could have the perverse effect of increasing drinking as a self-defense mechanism, even if a rather irrational one.
Meanwhile, you can also come at it from the administrator's perspective. Why do they tolerate drinking at many schools? Does a culture of college drinking impact academics? I think it does. And you can certainly make the case for stronger regulation: drinking is short-sighted, immediate gratification behavior that needs some regulation to curb, if we have the interests of students foremost in our minds. But, other than reactions to the occasional drinking death, you don't see much regulation -- you see tolerance and lax enforcement. There is even talk at some schools of selling beer at games. And some schools have notoriously weak enforcement policies regarding alcohol, which gives them a "party" rep. Is it possible that letting students get drunk serves the interests of those whose chief interest is the bottom line and not academics? That argument is made in Beer and Circus, where the author argues that schools use college culture and sports to distract students from the fact that they are getting a diminishing return on their education dollar. But it might go deeper than that. In Academically Adrift, the authors write: "Since the student rebellions of the 1960s, the extent to which collegiate life has embraced non-academic pursuits has likely been aided and abetted by college administrators and staff who have 'largely withdrawn from the oversight of manners and morals'" (14). Though the authors lay the blame on a sort of moral wishy-washiness and rising time of liberal permissiveness among administrators, I think it could also be argued that such moral permissiveness works perfectly with the desire to limit costs (entailed with enforcement) while improving marketing (perhaps a "party school" reputation can have added value).