There very little emphasis on encouraging budgeting techniques. What world other than college is not only your mortgage/rent, utilities, cable, and transportation paid for upfront (and not based on usage), but your food (board) is included as well? Even better, you can just pay it back later. Imagine trying to swing such a sweet deal after graduation with an apartment. Most graduate ready to be taken down by the double-sided sword of capitalism. (And few take the initiative to exploit it's use).

Well, actually, I would say that most students probably have a bit more broad experience than you're allowing here. I started college still living at my parent's house, and commuted to school. During college, I 1) got my first significant job, 2) got a checking account and a credit card for the first time, 3) moved out of my parent's house for the first time, 4) bought my first house, and 5) started working full-time for the first time. So during the college years I basically went from fully dependent on my parents to fully independent.

I would venture a guess that very few students spend all four years of college with full room and board in a dorm somewhere. Most move out into private housing at some point.

In that sense, I think college is good preparation for real life. Actually, I worked much harder during college than I have at anytime since, when you take into account classes, studying, and the jobs I had at the time.

... yet we're more segregated in our schools, cities, and our communities now than before 1954. Even in the most "diverse" schools, people (of all races) segregate themselves by how they sit in the classroom, in the caf, and in the dorms.

Communities more segregated than before 1954? I doubt that. That's certainly not the case here in Columbus, although like most cities here in the midwest, the majority of blacks live in the city limits while the whites tend to live in the suburbs. But the boundaries between "white neighborhoods" and "black neighborhoods" are blurred now, and a lot of neighborhoods are quite integrated, whereas there used to be sharp, easily discernable lines between black & white neighborhoods.

As far as people's personal associations, I can't argue that one. I played basketball with a group of friends the other night, 16 people, 16 white guys. The circle of people I play poker with locally here has a pretty representative mix of whites and blacks, but that's pretty much the exception rather than the rule in my life, and in most people's lives I suspect. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

I'm not saying to burn you diploma or to drop out, however I do believe that college isn't "the only answer" as some tout. Education is.

A motivated person could EASILY attend all the lectures in the big auditoriums at OSU without enrolling in classes. You can also go to the library and read all you want there. Even if you don't want to go thru that effort, you can learn just about as much as you want about anything, freely on the internet. School is 75% just enforcing discipline, really. A self-motivated person could easily self-educate to a high degree with no secondary education at all.

for a lot of reasons. I think there's a fair argument to be made that the type of education one gets in college is by nature narrower, and so it doesn't prepare one for the real world because it's aimed at developing more specialized skills. There's also a fair argument to be made that broader education, like liberal arts curricula, are aimed at developing 'the whole person' as a philosophical entity, but not necessarily a practical entity (we can get into a long discussion about whether those overlap or not).

But it seems your argument's a little different, that the experience of being in college doesn't necessarily match the experience of being in the world, and I'd agree - although I think there are both positives and negatives to that.

First, I think the experience is so different for people that it's hard to make across-the-board judgments: for most students, being away from home does force them to take a lot more control of their lives, whether it be on the smaller level (amazingly, I had people on my hall who'd never done their own laundry) or on the larger level (full control of their finances). The quintessential college freshman story is this: students with no life experience find themselves eating cold cereal for every meal, then eventually graduate to ramen (where the more experienced but poor students are already experts).

But you're right that some colleges are more full-package, so students don't have to worry about paying for food or board. In a way that does a disservice to its students, but it makes parents happy!

As for diversity, that's a complicated question: I can guarantee that some of my students at this majority-white institution are still facing more diversity here than they get at home, in their entirely monocultural neighborhoods. It's artificial diversity, but students do a lot outside the 'official' environment to compensate: they go out together, drink (illegally) together, and do a lot of things that would make the administration wilt, but which are absolutely necessary.

Sorry, I'm starting to ramble now. Interesting discussion, but as an academic, naturally, I could talk about this all day.

I've been thinking about this more and have some thoughts. First, I think you are using a narrow and frivolous definition of what is involved in preparing a student for "the Real World" (a.k.a., life after graduating). The primary purpose of advanced education is to develop intellectual skills including:

• Complex problem solving
• Critical thinking
• Information gathering
• Communication

These are incredibly useful in professional life, and even in our civic life (evaluating policy proposals and political candidates) and our personal lives (making decisions about health care or finances).

In addition, advanced education seeks to instill some broad general knowledge about the world. After all, the "real world" is the subject of the sciences, ranging from economics to physics. A basic knowledge of these sciences is helpful in handling real-life problems ranging from investments to fiddling with your car's electrical system.

Finally, there is the detailed knowledge and skills that students develop in their field of major study. This can be very useful on the job, but often has little use outside of specialized fields.

Those are the main benefits of college, and the benefits considered in this post are at most tangental, and often just irrelevant.

College is not the place to learn how to budget--college is much too expensive to waste time on learning such simple concepts. Really, a student should understand the basics of budgeting before coming to college, though the college lifestyle has the benefit of gradually increasing the student's control over his own finances.

Another side issue is the social experience of college. Universities are hyper-social environments. Relative to my time as an undergraduate, I had no social life before college or after college (and I went to a rather nerdy college!). At college I met a ton of people, and they were incredibly diverse. They were from all over America (and foreign countries), and there was much more racial/ethnic diversity than in my hometown.

I think that if you go to a university, you are guaranteed to meet more people and different people than if you had hung around your hometown. That's not to say that there aren't other ways to broaden your social horizons, but advanced education is by far the most common way that Americans do this. In my experience, most people who don't purusue advanced education just end up staying in their home towns without much experience of the wider world.

P.S. College typically does encourage students to develop time-budgeting skills, which are generally more important than financial budgeting. In addition to managing your classes (which meet at erratic times) and your homework (which is often 30-40 hours a week), many students also take jobs, both to cover expenses (text-books aren't cheap!) and to develop their skills. To top it of, there's the hyper-social environment with all of the extra-curricular clubs and activities...and students are given a prime opportunity to learn how to allocate their time.

In the end, a student won't get much out of college unless they are self-motivated, so we aren't doing ourselves any favors by treating it as The Way to get ahead (just get a degree), or just an extension of childhood  (just what people do after high school)