College, as we think we know it before attending, is nothing more than the thirst-driven mirage leading us through the exhausting traverse of high school. It guides us through our teens to what is made out to be “the best four years of our lives.” Once we arrive, our own experiences inevitably fail to live up to the impossibly high standards that we have been conditioned to set. As a result, not only do we feel disappointed at having squandered the privilege of attending university, but we also feel at fault for wasting the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it took to send us there. Thus, we as a society must broaden the conversation about college and get real about the delusion that is the so-called “college experience.”
At the root of the issue lies inflated expectations — though misled may be a more apt descriptor. It is a peculiarly salient aspect of American culture to equate higher education almost purely with the supposed emotions that it engenders. From the moment we learn what college is, we are trained to associate it with unbearably positive experiences. The conversation, as I have understood it, tends to ignore the practical. Ask an adult about college, and the response rarely includes their GPA, their weekly schedule or what student organizations (if any) they joined. The discussion, rather, centers on parties attended, friends gained and memories made.
This disconnect is not random. For one, college applications have become notably more demanding in the past decades. Students, especially at highly-ranked institutions such as Tufts, now must be accustomed to prioritizing schoolwork, joining extracurricular activities and constantly working to boost resumes. Further, time is merciful to memories. Over time, we stifle the negative, leaving the positive to appear overwhelming and more proportional. Therefore, the adults in our lives have an unconscious bias that leads them to communicate only exceptionally favorable accounts of their own college years.
The alumni in our lives, however, are not the sole appointments of blame. Television, books, movies and social media inundate us with unrealistic and borderline illusory college content. Television and movies rely on dramatic and fictitious stories told in real settings (such as a college campus) because television is used by people to escape mundanity, not revel in even more of it. In short: Boring doesn’t sell. This concept is not reserved for college. Shows like HBO’s “Euphoria” glamorize the years before college, while shows like “Friends” idealize the years following. The difference lies in the context of the viewer. The depictions of addiction and sex in “Euphoria” are directed, at youngest, to those already in high school who can live vicariously and fictitiously through the program. “Friends” draws its appeal from distinctive and often unconventional characters, rather than from a romanticized portrayal of your thirties.
College depictions, however, live in a sweet spot: High schoolers engaging in college-centric media have received just enough conditioning from the adults in their lives and can conceptualize so few aspects of the college experience that they can take what they see at face value. What they see is constant partying, unrelenting romance and a resting emotion of contentment. They see “the best four years of their lives.”
Needless to say, college is a lot more than what we see on TV. What we don’t see is the struggle to make friends, where many of us have not had to immerse ourselves in a completely unfamiliar environment since entering high school, if ever. We see the universal enthusiasm to make new friends but not the intimidating nature of friend groups that seem to materialize in the very first hours of college. We don’t see the work that keeps us in our rooms or the library most nights and slowly eats away at our optimistic spirit. Most importantly, we don’t see how many people are going through the same thing.
Open communication is another vein of this issue that must be addressed. During the spring semester of my freshman year, I — like many of my classmates — considered the transfer option. I researched opportunities, talked with my family and even sent applications. I vocalized a variety of academic and social reasons to support my decision, but at the end of the day, they were all hyper-specific sources of discontent that I only unearthed after intense introspection. I say ‘sources’ because they all essentially contributed to the same overwhelming feeling: the feeling that I was having a worse time than those around me. While I cannot attest to the individual situation of most of the students here, I know now that my assumption was incorrect.
I have since talked about this openly to many of my peers, both at home and here. I found the same sentiments reverberated almost unanimously: People had trouble adjusting to new environments, found it difficult to balance the new workload and of course, thought that they too were faring more poorly than those around them.
Whether it was because of our parents, popular media or one of the infinite other factors that contributed to our preconceptions, so many of us first-year students thought that we should have been enjoying ourselves 100% of the time. Not only were we faced with the emotional struggle of adjusting to our entire lives undergoing change, but we were also thinking that we were doing something wrong, that we were squandering “the best four years of our lives.” It is therefore time for a change — a shift in the very way we talk about college.
