Drop out if ye want, all ye who enter here

Arizona Daily Wildcat Brad Senning

By Brad Senning
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 3, 1997
On August 26, the Wildcat reported that 18% of students graduate in 4 years and less than half graduate in 6 years. Lynne Tronsdale, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education, stated that the UA loses the majority of students after their freshman year. The news of this should, of course, raise a banner of admonition much like Dante's "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Yet the powers who office on the top-most floors of our administration building would have future freshmen believe the new Integrated Instructional Facility, to be completed in the year 2000, will chain them here. All these freshmen, lost children in a field of indifference, will be saved by this Holden Caulfield-like catcher in the center of campus.

The administration, like the tobacco industry, fights a battle against attrition. Every year, they lose customers. Every year, they must burnish their image, promote their product, and intensify recruitment to make up for a rolling consumer base. Our Joe Camel-like mascot Wilbur-the-Wildcat adorns, in cartoon colors, recruitment posters and pamphlets. The objective is to get students hooked, give them Wildcat Fever, and hope they don't feel the pea of their own self-doubt under the tower of ever-softer mattresses.

Why are reluctant students ­ who are prone to drop out ­ going to school anyway? This question is addressed in an essay by Caroline Bird entitled "College Is a Waste of Time and Money."

Colleges have honed their aim at today's target market, the graduating high-school student. "Many institutions," Bird writes, "have begun to use hard-sell, Madison-Avenue techniques to attract students. They sell college like soap, promoting features they think students want...," such as innovative programs, research opportunities, a President committed to undergraduate education, a new instructional facility designed to aid marginal freshmen.

Meanwhile, Bird informs us, the majority of college students aren't in school willingly, nor do they want to learn. They are pressured by parents and counselors and peers. They attend school because it's fashionable ­ all their friends are doing it. College is reputed to be "fun," full of hazy keg-parties and sexual explorations. The alternatives ­ working a 9-5 job, joining the military, or checking into the nearest homeless shelter ­ are mostly unappealing. College is a 4- to 6-year vacation to those who aren't in it for the education. It is a holding-pattern between adolescence and adulthood, with parents or tax-payers footing the bill.

Today's college student feels like she has to be somewhere, why not Here? University recruiters prey on this ambivalence. They sell apathetic students on "the college experience," then erect freshman retention programs to keep them on the mouse-wheel. College administrators are like the opportunists of Dante's hell, "who in life were neither for good nor evil but only for themselves." To the UA, these freshmen are walking pockets of revenue. The new IIF building is a "Field of Dreams" solution, promising "if you build it..." the freshmen will come, and stay.

Yet some of these freshmen should realize they made the wrong decision by coming here.

"If an infant could speak," Freud states, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, "he would no doubt pronounce the act of sucking at his mother's breast by far the most important in his life." Eventually, the babe has to give up this object and substitute his thumb. Then the child has to learn there is a time and place for evacuating his bowels.

Students, if we grant them a voice and space to project their desires, can decide this shit for themselves. If they don't want to stay, they were probably beguiled into believing college is the only option after high-school. Let the student (or former student) follow her bliss. As Shakespeare said, "No profit grows where no pleasure is taken." Dropping out could be the first responsible act in an ultimately responsible life Let them read Chaucer on their own, or learn business on the job, or paint murals without the "humph" of a professor behind their backs. "In brief," continues Shakespeare's admonition, "study what you most affect."

Brad Senning is a senior majoring in American literature and creative writing.