From Louis M. Profeta, MD.
We need to encourage our kids to slow it down, to take a longer path to college, perhaps. Expose our kids to real education—the kind of education that comes with a W-2, a boss, getting up early and working late and interacting with people who can’t afford a higher education. Make them appreciate the life experiences that come with nailing a 2 x 4, washing dishes, wheeling people to X-ray, picking up garbage, answering telephones. Make them earn their spending money BEFORE college and decide on their own if they’d rather use it on alcohol, weed, a four-block Uber ride, or laundry and food.
I recommend the whole essay.
Amen.
so re-institute the draft
Better to let the young people themselves make the decisions, subject to:
“No college or university receiving federal funds shall matriculate anyone who has not reached the age of twenty years.”
Roughly only 20% of the US population that are of the correct ages are eligible to join the U.S. military.
Thank you.
Wow, one well argued paragraph that disregards three core findings in the social sciences:
1. The Nurture Assumption [Judith Rich Harris]: “We” [parents] will not succeed in attempts to “encourage”/”expose”/”make” them [young adult children] change behavior unless acting indirectly through their peers.
2. Coming Apart [Charles Murray]: I’m not sure that the cognitive class divergence is remedied by selective work experience nor do I think parents in the top two socioeconomic quintiles live in the right neighborhoods nor have the right social/professional networks to facilitate personal growth summer employment for their kids.
3. The Marshmallow Test: I haven’t thought about this until recently but university is a place where delayed gratification of adult indulgences (sex, alcohol, drugs, sleepless socializing, etc.) is put to the test. Ask yourself if living at home while attending university helps young adults build character or simply defers it until they are living on their own.
I have no issue with the identified problems limiting the potential of our best-and-brightest but I am highly skeptical of the efficacy of the proposed intervention(s).
Of course, if all their peers are making their own spending money and are forced out of the school bubble …
Luis M. Profeta is a very engaging writer. He’s fun to read and I learn something reading him. He writes with a mad dash into detail that’s intoxicating. Since he’s an ER doc he has a good perspective on all the things that can go wrong.
There’s definitely a problem with immature college students, but it’s worse than that.
When I read this it seems to me that he is dealing with people who don’t much like studying and coursework. The school aspect of college is too far removed from reality and real consequences. Students have lots of energy that goes elsewhere, because their time and energy has not been largely depleted by any demanding course of study.
Too much of the student energy (and status competition) goes into socializing with heavy drug use, and these days the particular chemicals and dosages can be quickly lethal. Students would be safer if the intoxicants were limited to (1) low THC-content marijuana of 30 years ago and (2) cheap beer. They wouldn’t be totally safe, but a bit safer. A lot of people learn to drink responsibly by sticking to beer and learning to titrate.
Having two beers too many is a minor issue so long as you are not driving or swimming. Vodka shots on an empty stomach when you don’t know yourself is much more dangerous.
I also don’t have the sense that most of these students have some self-governing mechanism. Adults go to bed so they can go to work the next day. Some of them actually have families. Who is counting on these students to do anything in particular?
If I were in charge, what would I do differently?
1. Make college hard enough that lots of time and energy goes into studying and working, leaving less time and energy for shenanigans.
2. Students need to feel responsible for specific other people who are counting on them–their parents, their siblings, their employers, their customers, somebody they are mentoring or training.
3. The lethality of street drugs these days is a real problem. I don’t know what the answer is to that one.
4. Sexual assault is a whole separate issue.
5. It sounds like the people the author is discussing don’t have good role models. The thought crossed my mind that this sounds far removed from a residential college a la Oxford or Cambridge where you start with sherry, sit around a table, eat with your colleagues (add wine), and there is an adult in the room who acts like an adult.
My understanding is that Telluride House is another example of adult behavior.
That’s all I got off the top of my head. Thanks for listening.
Interesting. It seems the solution to recreational intoxicants is the same anywhere on the scale from safe to dangerous; understanding dose and monitoring time. Do new drinkers only need a Directions-Card and a timer/clock to master responsible behavior? Maybe a phone app for Kling’s Homo Appiens.
I’ve never heard of Telluride House before. The description on Wikipedia reminded me of Deep Springs College which I learned about in David Hitz book “How to Castrate A Bull”. I wonder if the popularity of these character building institutions are due to the transformative nature of the curriculum/experience or due to their ability to attract highly effective people.
There is no doubt that the alumni think highly of their experience but I wonder if there is not an opportunity cost in spending time in a program assumed to be transformative at the expense of a program that is demonstrably transformative. How many older scientists believe that removing mandatory latin from school curriculums degraded the quality of younger scientists?
To make this more concrete, David Hitz supported firing/replacing NetApp co-founder and CEO Mike Malcolm saying to him at the time (according to his book) This is/was a pretty low character move, in my opinion, and it makes me wonder if Hitz would not have been better served taking the The Real-Time Programming course (CS452) that Mike Malcolm created instead of his time spent learning how to castrate bulls.
There is a serious scholarly history of Deep Springs College. It’s partly about the founder and partly about the college. Telluride Association and Deep Springs College were both founded by Lucien L. Nunn.
A link is here:
https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/the-electric-edge-of-academe/
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As I understand it, L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs College on a working cattle and alfalfa ranch in part because he was frustrated with the performance of traditionally trained engineers from the East Coast. L.L. Nunn was involved in power generation in the Intermountain West and thought he got better performance from selected local ranch kids that he trained himself.
Disclosure: I went to Deep Springs College in the mid-80s but did not overlap with Dave Hitz and have met him briefly once or twice during alumni reunions.
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Getting back to the more general point, there may be something to the adage that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Think of young men (and now women, too) in boot camp. (No, I’ve never gone through boot camp. Here’s my understanding.)
The training is intense and serious, performance standards exist, there is some mission statement (being useful to your unit in combat).
The easier college gets the more toxic the consequences, perhaps. At residential institutions you often have young people away from home for the first time in an unsupervised setting. I’m not certain that the coursework truly provides clear and immediate performance standards. The college students may or may not be kept busy. The mission statement is nebulous and more individualistic.
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Or, perhaps the stress-response relationship is non-linear–you can push college students too hard and make life too demanding, leading to burnout, breakdown, suicides, and an excessively high failure rate. But if college is not hard enough there may be too much time for shenanigans.
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Generally, I think it’s a challenge for older age cohorts to effectively socialize younger cohorts. It doesn’t just happen automatically. Also, the behavioral norms that are transmitted are not necessarily good ones.
Excellent, that is a happy coincidence that you attended Deep Springs College and have met Hitz in person. I don’t disagree with anything you said about hard work. What I probably didn’t emphasize enough is that many of the Co-Op programs at the University of Waterloo have many of the same real-world challenges/benefits of the Deep Springs approach but I’d argue much more relevant to each discipline.
So we both agree that these mixed real-world and academic experiences are far superior to unchallenging academic only curriculums. My question is whether the top notch co-op programs are more productive/beneficial in the STEM fields for highly motivated and highly intelligent students than the Deep Springs College program.
NetApp’s history described in Hitz’s book is ironically relevant to this question when one understands the technical strategy of the company and the relevance of Mike Malcolm’s Real-Time Programming course at UWaterloo to that strategy.
At the time of Mike Malcolm’s departure/ouster, his core contribution to NetApp was already complete. My aside is unimportant in the larger scheme of things other than to point out that I find Hitz’s book title and his “Pixie Dust” comment/chapter ironic but relevant to the topic at hand.
Thanks for your reply. I’m not sure what to say except that you certainly might be right and your point is a good one.
This thread may be exhausting itself. To move toward closure I’ll point out at that Deep Springs essentially provides a liberal arts curriculum (leaning toward philosophy and literature when I was there), and has tended to draw articulate intellectuals who like to demonstrate “verbal virtuosity.”
It’s about as far removed from practical as you can imagine, even though the students have responsibility for practical work. The “Isolation Policy” in which students are kept sequestered in an isolated desert valley (rather than making important friends at receptions in big cities) probably adds to that.
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The economist Thomas Sowell, in his writings on intellectuals, pointed out that there is a species of intellectuals who demonstrate “verbal virtuosity.” To paraphrase, he contrasts this with the practical world in which many people concern themselves largely with “mundane specifics.”
I would hypothesize that the USA has an oversupply of people who have honed a talent for verbal virtuosity. What shall we do with them all? Perhaps this has already been discussed on the blog.
(It’s hard to keep track as the posts progress. The blog indexing is not terrible, but often it’s hard for me to find old posts I’m looking for, which personally I find vexatious. Fortunately, a lot of us repeat ourselves. )
Thanks for the conversation!
I had a lot of low wage jobs when I was really young. I don’t think it taught me anything. I didn’t learn professional or cultural skills that would have helped me in my career. I didn’t learn to appreciate the lower orders (if anything dealing with them in such a context just shows you how disappointing they are).
That self control stuff was learned from my parents, or was part of my genes, or whatever. I don’t see how if I took an entire year of my life off to stock shelfs full time it would have done be any good. And quite frankly, the sort of people who stock shelfs full time are very irresponsible and did a bunch of drugs. That’s how you end up stocking shelfs full time!
For me the most important lesson low wage work does for a teenager is:
To understand how crappy the world treats low wage workers so they learn why they need a college degree.
It was the exact opposite for me, with the qualifier that these were physically demanding jobs (vs. cognitive, i.e. more Charles Murray’s Fishtown than Belmont) but they were well paying compared to other student jobs. A series of five summer jobs during my formative years were far more influential than the most poignant experiences in my professional career; at least they make for subjectively better allegories over drinks even for those with the same professional interests.
A series of six jobs not five. I seemed to have forgotten to at least count on my fingers if not type/write them out.
What I learned from low-wage jobs was that they were unpleasant, I couldn’t live very well on them, and I sure as hell didn’t want to do them for the rest of my life. If nothing else, they provided motivation to aspire to something better.
But I did learn how to work with my hands a bit, so it wasn’t as though I learned nothing concrete. This is fairly useful now that I’m a homeowner, actually.
I’ve never understood the cult-like devotion to their college, even decades later. I wonder how completely unaware of the world they were at 18 that college was so transforming. I was intellectually transformed by becoming educated, as in disciplined in intellect, regulated in emotions and established principles in Physics. But those years didn’t define my life as I grew up in high school. Perhaps I did it wrong.
I had worked since I was 14. I was always a reader pushing myself due to exposure to my brother during his college years seven years ahead of me. And like most of the students at my mostly commuter college, I had an active interest managing my education to pull myself out of poverty, i.e., in 1980, the Liberal Arts majors were not an option for someone wanting future income. Who knew Reagan would get the economy working after the 1970s experience we grew up with?
Working a couple of summers in construction provided the most powerful motivation to get back to school and study hard.
But they should still take a class now and then, hopefully without the classroom prison.
Bracing but I’m not really sold.
First, I’m not sure that spending the years of 18/19 hanging out with line cooks and day laborers means you’ll be exposed to fewer opportunities for bad choices than if you’re hanging out with fellow Introductory Micro students.
Second, my life experience has inclined me to believe that when it comes to drug and alcohol abuse, there’s a certain “chronicle of an addict foretold” quality to it. That is, by the age of 18, and likely much sooner, you’re either wired to be capable of self-regulation or not. If you’re not wired to be capable of managing dosage, then you need to be capable of abstention, and if you’re not, it’s only a matter of time before the opportunity for self-destruction presents itself. The lucky ones bounce when they hit bottom, and some find a way to break the cycle after that.
What the good doctor is talking about is to some degree focused on what I think is a tiny slice of people–the ones who succumb to accidental overdoses or similar things, as opposed to ills of chronic abuse. In my experience, most/all of these are as much a result of black-market dynamics as anything else. No one would choose crystal meth if coke was legal, and many/most people who die from Fentanyl poisonings thought they were taking something else.
Are non-college-attending 18-20 year olds less likely than college students to abuse alcohol and drugs? I would be surprised if that were the case. I thought that the myth that colleges are hotbeds of sexual assault has also been debunked, i.e., it turns out that non-college-attending women are more likely to be assaulted than college-attending women of the same age. I am also skeptical that book-smart-but-sheltered kids are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs than those that have lots of practical life experience working “menial” jobs. While they may not have been “well rounded”, the book nerds that I knew in college were not the troublemakers. Most of them have turned out ok too, by the way.