College: It's Just Not as Important Anymore

When the World Wide Web was coined and publicly introduced to the world on a grand scale in the early nineties, it was the kind of cultural juggernaut that would render and control aspects of almost any other subculture. Of course, American culture in itself was a web of exciting opportunity-An intricate amalgam of what we had not experienced and bolstered what we yearned to experience. In the "old days," you had to go out into the world to seek the information you desired. When you were younger, if you wanted to cut your teeth on some of those colossi of the adult elite, you couldn't simply point and click your way to enlightenment; you had to earn your fangs through the rigors of social symmetry. And what better place to equip yourself with a new armament of knowledge than the classic college experience-an almost trademarked phrase that is almost accentuated with the promise of maturity and success. In this country at least, college was where you were destined to shirk off the shackles of high school and truly learn a thing or two about how those wiser heads were cooler heads.

It was also where you might have met more of your own kind-that is, those eclectic "others" who seemingly crawled from unplumbed depths to keep you company in those moments of solitude on-campus. Oh yes, that was one of the excellent perks of the experience, too. The fact that your trip out-of-state could possibly mean sharing a beer with great minds that think alike is probably one of the best things to consider when you're packing up and shipping out. (And on a bright side, if you had grown up in a strict conservative household, this would be your first alcoholic beverage, too.)

Unfortunately, a myriad of cultural and economic changes have stunted whatever excitement used to be paramount for teenagers (myself included.) We're just not living in the same era where going to university was a mystical oasis of exposure to unknown elements. Granted, I still feel like there's a scientific touch to what I'm going through-not a day goes by without that irrational feeling of being watched like a specimen about to be dissected with sharp instruments of condescending madmen-but the majority of my own daydreaming is spent wondering what is being accomplished here, what could not be done elsewhere-and perhaps with more flexibility. In today's case of college, there are more "what now?" questions with an apprehensive tone than uttered with one of genuine anticipation.

The most obvious thing I was concerned with was the realism of how the informative impact of college has been outsourced to other mediums. As aforementioned, the Internet and its digital kin have done their part in downsizing other areas of information; maybe even casting a long shadow on every other facility of free thinking. After many decades of cutting-edge technology, what used to be a "sole source" of knowledge is now prepackaged and pre-opinionated; almost shrink-wrapped for the modern man to digest and recreate in slightly modified diction. The gleaming halls of universities can be taken as the auxiliary source now that the Internet has taken up the job of satiating the intellectual's appetite for knowledge. This is an age of "now," where everyone needs it now and can't be bothered to force-feed themselves the whole portion. As we move forward in time, eventually we won't pay as much attention to professors and their beliefs as much, and we may lose out on a greater treasure. While it is admirable that we can gain instant access to otherwise rare tomes of information, many are shirking their course material and instead prefer to fill themselves with the half-baked philosophies found on mass-market sites like Wikipedia or CliffsNotes.

Besides the technological aspect that was not present in the days of yore, we can count on a more saturated social climate in college. Being already exposed to various memes and trends thanks to the rise of interactivity in television, internet use, and cellular phones, you probably won't find anything out of the ordinary on campus that you couldn't in your high school. Fads and ideologies travel quickly, and climb every ladder of society. We are now more familiar with what is hip and hot with every age group, and you won't need to visit your college to discover it. Just log on to some random comedy site, or turn on your tube to provide yourself with an overabundance of amusing little facts and figures. While it took months or even years to create yourself in the 70's, you can undergo a metamorphosis in under fifteen minutes if you have the right connections today. Goths, punks, and gangsters don't faze me because I see them everywhere. You can go to the mall to get that kind of cultural experience. It doesn't take a campus to teach about American lifestyle-and its underbelly-anymore.

We might owe the common boredom to those facts; but we also owe any feelings of scholastic doubt to the fiscal economic situation going on today. In the past, a college degree was much more impressive than it is today; and there aren't as many jobs to be filled, either. What happens when you study your whole college career for an occupation that is not advisable to seek? And yet, it is a natural impetus to study what we most enjoy, or what we are successful at. But if we can't make a living out of it, what's the use in bleeding money for it? Couldn't you find one of those alternate jobs without the weight of a degree, anyway? The push to earn a degree-even in a field where a job is not a guarantee-is one of the greatest detractions from experiencing the worthwhile-yet expensive-college quest for merit and self-enrichment.

And it might be because of this that the attitude isn't as cracked up as it seems. Sure, you get some students who are manning the six-gun with tenacity-but there are also a lot of kids who are a few bullets short of a full chamber. Without those bullets, you can't fire away at the opportunities that may eventually present themselves; and without a good eye, you're not going to recognize those opportunities when they coast along.

We're in short supply of gunslingers; it's a state of quick-draw that's painfully slow on the uptake. While there's an art to a six-shooter, nobody is willing to learn it when there are simple, cumbersome rockets of bored minutiae being loaded hundreds at a time. Just as when the American frontier and those spaghetti showdowns disappeared epochs ago, we may have lost the real charm and intriguing nature of college learning. Not necessarily being a product of consequence of people, it's more like an eventful rite of passage when people are simply finding more ways to discover who they are without the academic, economic, and social hustle of college.