Reasons for college should include more than parties

Welcome back, and for some of you, just welcome.

College is starting again and so it’s a good opportunity to talk about why we're here in the first place.

The student body is larger than ever this year, a few lecture halls short of 40,000. But what the heck are that many people doing in this one place? What makes so many people in this country choose college over diving into Real Life right away?

There's an increased emphasis on education in American society, and a larger college population will eventually produce a much more educated American society. Unless it doesn’t.

Call me cynical, but there are a lot of reasons that 95 percent of us came here, and none of them even rhyme with self-improvement.

THE MTV REASON

There are those who came here because they believe that college is an endless succession of cheap lite beer and meaningless sex that stops but once a year to go on Spring Break for more of the same. This is the reason you see on each episode of MTV's "Undressed" or in movies as recent as "American Pie 2," and "Road Trip" back to "PCU" and the granddaddy of them all, "Animal House."

How much of that image of college is college and how much is Hollywood?

The sad truth is that art may be more accurately representing life every year. The more students come for the party and get that party, and then go back home and tell their siblings and younger friends of the party, the more and more this group grows.

This is a dangerous group to let represent college students as a whole. When it looks as if undergraduates don't care about learning, well, what's the point in teaching them? If you're a professor, why not just worry about your research and let the TAs handle them? If you're an administrator, why bother caring about these hooligans' rights? After all, they could give a damn about the job you do, just so long as the final isn't too hard and there's always another keg.

THE PARTY IS NOT ENOUGH

For those who aren't here just for the parties and sex, college promises an unrealistically perfect future. Classes are just a four-year succession of hoops, which, when successfully navigated, provide a diploma. And that diploma is a sort of miracle guarantee of a successful and wealthy future. In our society's haste to make us all college "edurmacated," life without a degree is filled with unhappiness and starvation while life with one is free of worries except which room your butler will sleep in.

How realistic can this perception be? There are thousands upon thousands of college students in this country. Though only a blessed few are getting Purdue diplomas; well, the economy can't support even that many millionaires. A college diploma is not a guarantee, it may increase the odds some in your favor, but it does not protect you from poverty or unhappiness.

COLLEGE? GEE, ONLY IF I HAVE TO

And a higher and higher number of students are going to college not for that extra bit of education above the average Joe but because they went to high school and now they're obligated to go see "High School 2: Son of High School."

We are told that if we do not attend college, any college, we will have no success and find only unhappiness in our lives. Not that most of us mind going anyway. It's like your parents forcing you to go to Mardi Gras.

But as private universities become as mandatory as public high school, they suffer the same weaknesses that public high schools suffer. The need to cater to even the lowest intelligence denominator, and even the allegation of any sort of grade inflation have permanently scarred the college experience.

Those reasons can all be good reasons. Sex and booze and fun are wonderful things. Like it or not, the pursuit of money spins the world on its axis. And in mediocre times like these, we could do a lot worse than being encouraged to go to college.

So if any of those are the reason you came here, don't fret. Just don't let them be the reasons you stay here or come back semester after semester.

Four years of nothing but party is like four years of chocolate cake for breakfast. The first few days, maybe even the first few months, are delicious - the most fabulous unregulated cake-eating breakfasts of your life. But its gonna burn out sooner or later, and you're gonna have coasted through to your diploma and learned nothing from the journey.

If you don't learn to construct a sort of stable ability to be happy by yourself, communicate with the opposite sex beyond the pursuit of coitus, and live with only a trickle of income (that isn't handed to you by parents or relatives), Real Life's gonna kick you in your teeth and proceed to stomp your face into a bloody mishmash.

Since you’re here anyway and you've either already paid a truckful of money or will spend most of your adult life paying truckfuls of money because you came here, you need to figure out what the college experience is going to be for you. Things may be shifting toward a learning-free college experience, but that doesn’t mean it has to be.

Tom McHenry is a junior in the School of Liberal Arts. He can be reached at opinions@purdue.edu.

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