I Went Back to College After 45 Years
How today’s college students are surprisingly different (and similar) to my own Boomer experience.
The first thing I noticed was they weren’t automatically deferential to the professor. They weren’t rude or disrespectful mind you, but direct and clear about what they thought, and why. When I was in college, some 45 years ago, I don’t remember it that way. In the mid-seventies most of us just sat there, took notes, and passively assumed the professor was right. The sixties were behind us and we were in the middle of an OPEC-triggered recession. Shut up, pass the course and pray you get a job.
Today’s students simply didn’t give ground based solely on assumptive reputation. I liked that, as the intervening years had convinced me any number of times that scriptwriter William Goldman was right when he said “Nobody knows anything…”
I was a 64-year-old sitting in the middle of about 30 or so undergraduates, in a class at a massive Big Ten university, very similar in enrollment size to my alma mater way back when. They ranged in age, I’d guess, from 19 to 21 or so. Mostly juniors and seniors. Very diverse ethnically. All of them were younger than my youngest kid.
I had met the professor before the initial class. He had to approve me to attend as part of a university program that placed people at the end of their careers trying to figure out their next act in juxtaposition with those just starting out their first act, purposefully mixing it up to see what we could learn from each other. When we met for coffee he stressed that I couldn’t just pontificate like a prototypical Boomer, but needed to pick and choose my spots, like any student in his class. “Don’t be a Dad”, he said.
Interestingly, as the semester progressed, he actually began to ignore his own advice, disproportionately calling on me in certain situations to add, as he said, color and perspective. Lots of this was his attempt to use my experience in US business (I worked in private enterprise for those 45 years) to counter student perceptions of what capitalism meant and how it really worked.
I disappointed him occasionally as I had more in common with student perceptions of the US economy than he expected. But I did add some clarity I think, particularly around the notion that capitalism in the US essentially has no heart, which is both its great strength (and it is a strength) as well as, obviously, its great weakness. Understand that and you can begin to make it work for you (knowing that a college degree from a great school as a point of working leverage is clearly a privilege we can’t all acquire). Maybe you could even attempt to change that heartlessness if you’re so inclined.
There was another difference, too. I didn’t get a sense that getting the “right job” was as important to them today as it was to me in the seventies. I saw my B.A. as a clear path to a job and then that typically American ride to consumptive glory afterward (not that I’d put it exactly that way at the time. I really didn’t know there were actual options, I guess. These students do.)
At least in this class getting that right job never really seemed the objective for being there. They appeared genuinely more interested in bigger things: where we were going as a society and why. And what they could do to mold it in different ways. Now, in all fairness, this wasn’t a class in the Business School, so not a representative sample perhaps. Nonetheless, I found this encouraging.
I will say several of them — with whom I worked on joint class projects — did ask me for resume advice and references after they graduated, so maybe it’s not really all that different. Cold reality does intervene from time to time, particularly when you graduate with a bunch of student loans. But I think that even as they got that first out-of-school job they came into them with a different set of expectations than I did. I hope so.
How were their experiences similar to mine? Figuring out how to be an adult in your early twenties is still a pretty universal experience it appears. What’s it mean to be a true friend? How do I find the right relationship with someone, and what does that entail? How do I define a code that guides my behavior?
Now, to be clear, I wasn’t a creepy, elderly voyeur inappropriately listening in on private conversations. But what was undeniable in their voluntary interactions with me on these topics (and I guess I was sort of a dispassionate Dad in these times) was how this need to figure out an initial path is inescapable. And, regrettably, how social media is distorting that search in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was 20. For that, they have my sympathy.
In short, I had a great time. And, based on my experience with these 30 students, I’m more than comfortable passing the torch on to them with a sense they’ll carry it with some insight and empathy I lacked at their age.
