Campus Tours Tomorrow

I have to give campus tours tomorrow and I have been taking some time to reflect on what I can do to accustom these new students to the campus. I guess I would like to be able to say that you can really get anywhere from OCC. I want to be able to tell them that OCC is not a place for fuckups, people too poor to afford real college, or a high school that lets you smoke on breaks. But it is.

And it is really all of that. Most of the people I meet with tomorrow are not going to turn their lives around and go onto the Ivy Leagues. Many of them will drop out, fail remedial courses, and give up on a situation they see as a hopeless dead end. And I think this really highlights the failure of the liberal arts education system.

merriam-webster.com defines the liberal arts as:

2 : college or university studies (as language, philosophy, literature, abstract science) intended to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop general intellectual capacities (as reason and judgment) as opposed to professional or vocational skills.

Of course I doubt that many students in college would see their education in this sort of way. To them, a college education is their ticket to four-years of your parents paying for you to booze and fuck, after which you come out with a piece of paper allowing you to be paid more than your non-college educated peers. This essentially reduces the college education to little more than a pay to play extortion system. $50,000 in tuition dollars and you come out with a certification indicating you have been educated.

So what do I tell these kids? Do I tell them that the MACRAO transfer agreement is not actually followed by the two largest universities in the state? Do I tell them that to most universities, transfers are still treated as second rate in comparision to incoming freshman? I will have to think of something.