The average college student today

Scriptorium Philosophia ^ | 25 Mar 2025 | Hilarius Bookbinder

[FlingWingFlyer]

I’ve heard a lot of complaints from pizza place managers who say the damn student loan deadbeats keep stealing their tablecloths and using them for hats and masks at their terrorist rallies.

[joe fonebone]

And the few that complain were listed as a foreign agent by the fib...
I complained when my children went to school.
It was intentionally made difficult to get any results.
I did get some, but for the most part I was listed as a “troublemaker” and my kids paid the price.
Both sad and pathetic.
One thing I did accomplish..
The elementary school had a “sinko de mayo”? celebration, and the parents were all invited.
The school did a bang up job.
I was chatting with the principal and said...
“Nice celebration you guys put on here, but do you do for our veterans, you know, the people who fought and died so you all had the freedom to put on this show”?

Well, on Veterans day the school put on a great celebration, and even had kids writing letters to the soldiers overseas.
Sometimes, a word said at the right time can get results.

[Alberta's Child]

Your post goes right to the heart of what’s happening here. Over the last 100+ years we have seen a transformation of the U.S. university through several different stages:

1. The Education Stage: This goes back to the time when the purpose of a college education was to mold a young person into a mature adult with a well-rounded base of knowledge. Lawyers understood mathematics, accountants had an appreciation of history, and engineers knew quite a bit about the law.

2. The Specialization Stage: College degrees were designed to train professionals in specialized areas of expertise that had gotten increasingly complex over time. College courses outside the major area of study became nothing more than a boring annoyance for many students.

3. The Business Stage: Colleges are now nothing more than business enterprises designed to generate revenue and employ marginal people in jobs where they don’t have to compete with others who are more intelligent and capable than they are. Intelligence and aptitude among the students is optional. They are just customers who are willing to pay exorbitant sums of money without any regard for what they’re getting — like a moron who walks into a car dealership and wants to buy a 10 year old Honda Civic for the price of a Lamborghini.

[millenial4freedom]

no sympathy for this professor. his colleagues in the admissions department bend over backwards to eliminate the ‘racist’ SAT so they can admit more ‘diverse’ students...meaning they willingly admit and give financial aid to students who shouldn’t be there instead of hard-working middle-class asians and whites (who are ineligible for 95%+ of all scholarships)...it’s a racket that’s been in place for far too long and I will not reserve ANY sympathy for any academic who complains of academic incompetence until colorblind admissions are restored.

[equaviator]

I think it makes the case for raising the minimum ages for POTUS, House, Senate, etc., not to mention term limits.

[millenial4freedom]

would be nice if your colleagues in the admissions department actually admit students based on test scores and grades rather than what their skin color is and whether they can dribble a ball...maybe that’s part of the problem?

[Getready]

They will be slaves doing menial tasks. As long as they get fed and have free time to vegetate on entertainment they will happily age and die as slaves.
IMHO

[millenial4freedom]

The federal government should END student loans and Pell Grants

100%, but remember, you have a lot of 'anti-profit' and 'anti-capitalist' professors like Liz Warren and Robert Reich who make high six-figure salaries for their grueling 20hr/week gigs because of these student loans and pell grant...there's a whole army of lobbyists ready to protect their precious gigs.

[rlmorel]

"...It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all..."

I have come to see the ubiquity of smart phones (and I have one too, and post on FR as well, so...I am not a Luddite) as a great danger to humanity. I am inclined to be guilty of the same kind of behavior and I consciously avoid it. In a discussion, where there is a question none of us knows the answer to, I will, like many seniors pull out my phone to get the answer rather than let my brain stew on what that particular thing is that I cannot remember. I know if I let it go, I may remember it two minutes later or two days later, but patience has never been my strong point.

The problem is that people are tied in all the time, everywhere, and the behavioral changes in our culture linked to that (being tied in all the time) are extremely bad, IMO. I had written this:

---

I was one of the last people that I knew who got a cell phone. It is odd for two reasons; first, I was one of the first people in my crowd to actually get on the Internet and have a computer, and secondly, the type of job I held required me to be in phone contact with the hospital.

I held off getting a cell phone, because I was waiting until there was a device that could do all the things I wanted in one package (all the usual, music, cell phone, PDA…)

But what finally drove me to get a cell phone was the fact that payphones became almost nonexistent. It's about an 18 mile drive to work for me, and I knew where every payphone was along the way, and I do mean every single one of them, including the ones inside stores, that kind of thing. So, the cell phone has made my life much, much easier in that respect. When I get paged, I don't have to accelerate my car to get to the next payphone.

And let's face it: having a smart phone with an Internet connection is just amazing.

Flashlight. Calculator. Alarm and timer. Tides. Sunrise/Sunset. GPS. Camera. Video. Web browser. You have a huge amount of human knowledge available to you.

When you need to know that word, that one word that is evading you and driving you crazy, you can look it up. If you need to know an address, you can find it almost instantly. I have an application that, when I hear a bird, I can record its song and it tells me what kind of bird it is. If I need to know what that bright spot in the sky at night is, I can tell if it is Jupiter or Saturn

I am an aviation enthusiast. If a plane flies overhead, I can say "Siri, Planes overhead" and it tells me the make, model, airline, and direction of every plane within about 70 miles

If I want to see what temperature I should cook pork to, I can get that in seconds. If I want to replace some component in my car, there is almost always a video out there showing you in detail how to do it. The days of using the damned Chilton manual with its dog-eared and grease-stained (or missing) pages are gone...mostly. And so on.

I have always been a huge early adopter and technology advocate. But over the last 10-15 years, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong, I was enthusiastic without considering the possible negatives.

It isn't just going to breakfast at a hotel and seeing an entire family, all on their phones at the same time, nobody talking.

It isn't the obsessive practice of watching a car you pass (that is a bit too close to your lane) with your hand on the horn, seeing if the person is talking on their phone and not watching their lane.

It isn't getting together with people you haven't seen in a while, and having several of them constantly looking at their phones, or unable to stop texting.

It is the constant feeling that people just aren't there. They are somewhere else, anywhere else, and not in the moment.

My wife and I were driving home from Boston a couple of years ago, and a particular event stuck with me. It was a wonderful early spring evening, and we were crossing over the Massachusetts Turnpike at the end of Newbury Street near the Tower Records building (now defunct)

As we passed the Tower Records building, there were perhaps 30 people standing there, probably waiting for a bus. Every single one of them stood with one palm up cradling a phone, their anonymous faces reflecting the faint light of their phone as they gazed down at it. Their heads were all inclined at the same angle. They could have been mannequins. All of them nearly completely motionless in a trance-like state of immobility.

Just gazing down.

What really struck me in a sad and negative way was...it was a beautiful night. You know that time of night when the sun has gone down, and the horizon has that orange, to pink to cobalt blue gradation, and the trees, not yet bearing leaves, are starkly silhouetted in black against that beautiful sky? That time of night. To the left, the giant Citgo sign was lit up, doing its characteristic light show. (The sky looked exactly like this):


There was so much going on. So much beauty. So much life. So much happening. But these 30 people were completely and totally oblivious to it all. They saw nothing but that rectangular screen in their hand.

There was something very, very sad about that, and it has stuck with me.

Because of this, I am very observant of this, and it bothers me to see people, in groups, who should be interacting with each other, instead, all heads down looking at a phone, scrolling and typing.

---

I saw this cartoon some years ago titled: "If the Titanic Sank Today", and I thought it was hilarious:

In my life, I have perhaps 5 pictures of myself before the age of 10. There are people now who have pictures and video of them exiting the birth canal as they are born, all the way up to today.

There are people who I believe, have never seen anything significant with their own eyes. Everything is through the prism of a smartphone camera.

I was on an airline some time ago, and a heated discussion was taking place between a woman and a flight attendant, and all around me, there was a smartphone at the end of a hand protruding above the line of seats, each phone displaying on its visible screen to me, the drama acting out in real life. It was completely creepy.

Like the novel "Fahrenheit 451" where the guy is running through the streets to escape, seeing his picture on video screens and hearing his name and location being broadcast everywhere, as heads poke out of windows to look for him.

Not that far from reality now...actually, it already is in most respects.

I love GPS and finding the spelling of a word instantly, but...the downside of this technology in the hands of people who wish us ill is sobering.

[millenial4freedom]

yes. the author of this article should put some blame on his colleagues in the admissions department.

[Getready]

....and the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made...

[Remole]

I taught at a private small university for more than 35 years. I retired JUST when AI arrived. For my final semester, I taught and evaluated students as if it were the 1910’s — everything that I would grade had to be produced, by hand, in the classroom in front of me.

Also, once the smartphone entered the picture, I reverted to teaching strategies of long-ago 2004. I forbade their presence in the classroom; I allowed, on rare occasions, for students to leave the room to take or to receive a phone call.

My objective, often, was to create a classroom environment where the students were being assessed constantly, even in minor ways. I walked around the room, I asked questions, I spoke their names, I posed ridiculous hypotheticals just to rile them up.

I feel that I retired just in time.

[PfromHoGro]

LOL! Thanks & bookmarked.

[Getready]

The depiction of people in their right minds while in a subfreezing liquid is falsely portrayed so often.
The “cold-shock” response is hyperventilation, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure.(All due to body attempt to raise temp). Many drown while inhaling water during hyperventilation. People with cardiac issues will suffer or die while their heart races to develop heat. Blood pressure increases (to keep heat in the body core) also lead to cardiovascular collapse.
Nevertheless, that picture you posted hits the nail on the head! Smart phone addicted morons till the last breath.

[comebacknewt]

That definitely is part of it.

The vast majority of colleges don’t even require a standardized test for admission any more.

“Culturally biased”, they say.

[rlmorel]

LOL, of course-I was in the Navy up in the Arctic, and I was told that if I got blown over the side, I would be dead in under a minute before a helicopter picked me up, an that was sobering.

But yes-you got the joke. People now have video of themselves sliding out of the birth canal and seemingly every minute going forward from that! Having video as they go under is an obvious next step!

[rlmorel]

Of course-I know I am not the only one who feels that way...

[Political Junkie Too]

Young people have figured out that the government doesn't care about them, society doesn't care about them, schools don't care about them, and businesses don't care about them. And why should anyone really "care"?

I think you're oh, so close to the heart of the issue.

If I am accurately recalling my own college days, it wasn't that they didn't care about you; it was that it wasn't their job to care about you.

I remember being told that going to college was about learning to care for one's self, to learn responsibility, to develop the discipline to set and keep to a schedule, to learn how to prioritize important tasks over distractions. Nobody was going to dress us and make us go to school, we were expected to learn those "adult" skills by ourselves, and get the education that was the purpose of going to college in the first place.

To your point about K-12 teachers, I made that same observation. Today, the lower schools coddle the children and tell them all that they're special, that trying, not achieving, is what's important. The kids quickly learn that just showing up is what matters because everyone gets the same result regardless of the effort. By the time they get to college, they are woefully unprepared for the individual existence that they're expected to lead until they get married and have children.

The part of the article that you quote about "the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages" becomes out of reach because they fail at their studies, the curricula becomes dumbed down, and the exit college with no job prospects and crushing student debt.

Then they rage against the society that doesn't care about them.

-PJ

[FamiliarFace]

Several years ago, I started hearing the phrase, “adulting is hard!” from 20 and 30 year olds.

It made me sick to hear them say that.

[cpdiii]

Both my degrees are in science, geology and pharmacy. Both are rigorous courses and we had no time for left wing propaganda.