The quintessential college experience

The allure and what it actually tells us about modern living

Indiana University, Sample Gates

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Indiana University has one of the most stunningly beautiful campuses around. The university is my alma mater, so I admit to being a bit biased, but if you visit the campus, you would be hard pressed to deny its beauty. All but three buildings were constructed using limestone, sweeping meadows and wooded paths dot the campus, and a small creek (the Jordan River) runs the length of the campus. The Sample Gates—the "entrance" to the university—is surrounded by cream and crimson flowers, the signature colors of the university, as is much of the campus, with tulips in the spring being the most iconic. The gates attract novice and professional photographers alike year round, but a line forms to capture the beauty of the quintessential college campus on graduation day. 

One day, during my tenure at Indiana University (IU) as a graduate student, while I was hanging around the Sample Gates, I was approached by a family with the common request to snap a photo. I obliged, and then the parents of the soon-to-be IU student started gushing about the beauty of the campus. I agreed with them and thought to myself, "yes, but at a cost." The beauty itself costs (I can't even imagine how much the university shells out for grounds keeping), but so does the "college experience" that IU offers. Certainly, one can get a great education at IU, but often the draw is Greek life, the sports teams, and nightlife on Kirkwood—the party.

Some people describe the "college experience" as an opportunity to meet new people, often from different backgrounds, study and debate topics they had not previously considered, and live on one's own away from their parents for the first time. But what comes to most people's minds when they hear the phrase is partying—drinking at tailgates, house parties, and frat parties.

The party may be fun at the time, but many students pay a price for it, whether financially, socially, or both.

Paying for the Party is a book about how college maintains social inequality. I read it in graduate school, and the findings really resonated with me. The book details an ethnographic study conducted at a flagship state university, which the researchers refer to as "Midwestern University," but it's well known at IU that the study took place at IU. The year of research was 2004-2005, my senior year, thus I am all-to-familiar with the problems they describe. 

The study illuminates the role that cultural and social capital play in ensuring that women persist through IU, and other colleges like it, advance themselves, and find good jobs upon graduation. The researchers outline different pathways that students take: the mobility, professional, or party pathway. They found that the party pathway often derails young women with low cultural and social capital from the tracks to social mobility and economic success. When too much time is absorbed by partying, for instance, students choose easy majors from the get-go or switch from more challenging majors, like those offered in IU's competitive business school, to easier, business-lite majors, such as tourism, sports management, telecommunications, or apparel merchandising, offered by less competitive schools within the university. These easier majors leave more time for partying while giving the illusion that graduates will be equally prepared to get a marketing job, for example, whether they went through the business school or telecommunications (now referred to as the media) school. 

For a woman from a high-status family, one with connections to the industry the woman is interested in, switching to an easy major is not as big of a deal. But women with low cultural and social capital often graduate without the ability to enter a similarly prestigious, high-paying career in their field of study.

Amid all the nights spent at frat parties and days spent tailgating, the party pathway is destructive to young women in other ways. It often leads to regrettable one-night stands, dysfunctional romantic relationships, if one is secured, and a misunderstanding about how to land a worthy partner that will lead to a long-lasting relationship.  

My initial response upon finishing Paying for the Party, and thinking about my own college experience, was to dismantle the party pathway. But the university is complicit in the problems it creates. To be sure, they publicly advertise their academic achievements and career-success promises over beer pong at tailgates, but they are sure to include Greek life and nightlife in their sales pitch to visiting students. Alumni love reminiscing about their college experience and give money to keep it going, often returning to campus to relive those glory days. IU, nor other universities notorious for their party scene, won't give up this money-making aspects of the college experience so easily.

Even if the party pathway were to be abolished, there's a bigger dilemma to ponder: Why is it that so many alumni consider their college years to be their glory days, even if their grades, relationships, and job prospects suffered as a result of taking the party pathway? And why do people who didn't go to a four-year residential university feel like they missed out on something life-changing in the form of the college experience? My conclusion: young people are desperate for a sense of community and a feeling of belonging, and campus life fills that void, even if the means through which it does so are ultimately destructive.

Life after college is consumed by one's career and other obligations that prevent them from creating strong bonds and embedding themselves within a community in ways that they were able to while attending a residential school. Certainly, this is not the case for everyone. Many people have no problem finding their place in a tight-knit group of peers after college, or in absence of college. Churches and membership to social clubs offer such spaces, but they are vanishingly rare in many people's lives, as Robert Putnam detailed in his book Bowling Alone. Even the comforts of extended family life have diminished as relatives move further away from each other.

Sebastian Junger, in his book Tribe, brilliantly illustrates how modern society has deprived humans of communal bonds, which we are instinctively wired to crave, that provide a sense of belonging and purpose. He details why soldiers and citizens who suffered through war miss it once they have returned home or conflicts have been resolved. They don't miss the violence and carnage, of course. They miss feeling a part of a group that they must defend and who will defend them, and they miss the intimate bonds developed among their comrades. He also describes the allure of tribal societies among those living in technologically developed or industrialized societies: they offer a sense of purpose and belonging to a community that is absent from production- and consumer-focused modernity.

The college experience doesn't neatly map onto the experiences of those living in a tribal society or through a war, but in many respects it does produce a similar sense of belonging to a tribe. Greek life being the most relevant example. Members of fraternities and sororities at universities like IU typically live with their brothers and sisters, as fellow members are called, and go through rituals together, which produce a sense of dedication to each other. Hazing practices are routinely criticized, and often rightly so, but members of fraternities will taut the less destructive aspects as integral to the creation of strong bonds among members.

The partying aspect of the college experience is indicative of current American culture; it's not the only means through which a sense of belonging can be manufactured. How residential life is structured can also play a role in generating a sense of belonging. IU's living-learning residence hall, Collins, is an example of how students can bond over shared academic and civic goals. Schools that are formed around a philosophy, such as institutions with a strong connection to a religion, also offer a means for students to develop strong bonds with peers. In each of these and other related cases, students are experiencing a sense of community that will likely dissipate once they leave campus.

Although I think the problems that the party pathway creates for young people should be shouted from the rooftops and often, I am under no illusion that it will fade out of existence anytime soon. That iteration of the college experience is too ingrained into society at the moment to think otherwise. But what needs to be more frequently discussed is why people cling onto their memories of those party days long after graduating. Something is missing from their post-college lives, and maybe it was even missing from their pre-college lives. The crisis of purpose, declining civil society participation, and diminishing time and opportunities for community-building is plaguing modern-day living in the US, as well as other nations and societies. We need to repair this problem in a way that doesn't involve self-destructive college behavior and replicate that feeling in day-to-day life.