A great majority of our nine million college students are not in school because they want to be or because they want to learn. They are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be; because it´s the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without working at a job they don´t like; because Mother wanted them to go, or some other reason entirely irrelevant to the course of studies for which college is supposedly organized. As I crisscross the United States, I am dismayed to find that professors and administrators, when pressed for a candid opinion, estimate that no more than 25 percent of their students are turned on by classwork. For the rest, college is at best a social center or aging vat, and at worst a young folk´s home or even a prison that keeps them out of the mainstream of economic life for a few more years. What do YOU think?
