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redbetta
Guest
There were a lot of girls on my floor that lived off microwave food. I still can’t believe people my age still eat Pop Tarts.
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Javan
Guest
Pop Tarts can be gotten out of a vending machine and can be eaten straight from the pouch if desired. I don’t eat them, but it doesn’t surprise me that they are still popular among college students. They’re convenient and easy to eat while studying/working on assignments.
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PLinz
Guest
That’s correct.
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PLinz
Guest
It should be noted that IQ correlates with number of sexual partners - higher IQ, fewer partners. The amount of math in a major also correlates with the percentage of virgins who graduate in that major - more math, fewer partners. Overall, though, the research suggests that smarter people have fewer sexual partners.
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HouseArrest
Guest
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Xantippe
Guest
I turned that up, too, as I was poking around.
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EasterJoy
Guest
Dorm life is like living in a fish bowl. Being invited back to a dorm room is just a little more enticing than being invited to a room in someone’s parents’ basement. It’s only acceptable if you have the same living conditions.Oh, there’s lots of women like that too, or at least there were when I was in graduate school. And yes, I was one of them.I didn’t even have my own microwave until after my first year. I was way too busy with coursework and lab research to even think about wasting precious free time on things like food preparation! (I managed to do laundry once every week or so, and I wore a new pair of underwear everyday, so that counts, right?!)
I lived at home for the entirety of my undergraduate education due to wanting to save on costs and not get stuck sharing a room with a complete stranger, but really, one didn’t need to live in a dorm to take part in ‘hook ups’. There were usually plenty of people with apartments who were willing to make their bedrooms available for their friends as long as they were given advance notice.
And yes, the students who live, eat, and breathe academics don’t tend to put a lot of time or resources into their private lives, including nutrition. The trade-off happens with exercise, too. It’s a bad bargain, but lots of us have done it.
I forget that women’s liberation liberated more young women to fail to learn home-keeping skills, rather than freeing the young men to learn it.
Even among those who probably could do better, there are people who see college as the phase of life when one is free to eat all the Pop Tarts one wants just as surely as some think it is the time one can drink oneself blind any time one wants and have all the meaningless sex one wants. It is their chance to prove their parents and their boundaries were all wrong. The results are predictable, but some people will not consent to learn life’s lessons except by the hard way.
The sad thing is that the dorms used to be a place where there was still some adult boundaries in place, for those who weren’t quite ready to live on their own. As far as I know, only the universities that have kept to a strict student code of conduct (including in dorms) and attract students precisely because they still have those expectations still feel they can afford to require that.
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pensmama87
Guest
My husband adores PopTarts. When I was in my couponing heyday, I regularly bought them for him when they were a good price. It’s not exactly what I thought “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” meant, but it worked.
He is actually quite a good cook, too, though he was afraid of cracking eggs until a couple of years ago.
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Allegra
Guest
I don’t think living in the dorm or not influences whether or not a person participates in the hook up culture.
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Allegra
Guest
Mr. Allegra loves poptarts too. His favorite are the pumpkin spice ones. blech.
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Xantippe
Guest
Several years ago, we did a year living as a family in a duplex apartment in a college student neighborhood/slum (long story, but we were waiting for our house sellers to get out of a house). Here’s some of what I learned:
–you can leave your trash containers on the curb all week
–not everybody understands the recycling rules that are printed on the container
–some undergraduates are terrible pet owners
–dog poop is extremely durable
–some undergraduates are don’t understand the fact that any filth that they generate does not spontaneously disappear
I sometimes think that college exists because we really don’t know what else to do with 18-22-year-olds (other than use them to fight world wars).
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EasterJoy
Guest
There is that pressure in some dorms, but as Xantippe put it the students who don’t want that and know it won’t automatically be sucked into it. They will find life in a dorm full of that kind of thing very repugnant, though.
If you hear a dorm is a “party dorm,” run fast the other way. It’s gonna be a zoo.
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Xantippe
Guest
Oh, and you may find yourself out on the sidewalk pretty often in the middle of the night, because somebody is going to pull the fire alarm.
(That is, come to think of it, probably the worst feature of dormitory life.)
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EasterJoy
Guest
People used to have to live with their parents until they married and then had to entertain adults in their homes and probably become parents themselves soon after they married. There were many humorous stories about the horrible cooking and homemaking mistakes of young brides and some degree of shame among those who couldn’t cook. (Young executives and their wives sometimes even had to exhibit an ability to host their professional superiors and their wives as a sign they were ready to advance into the ranks of senior members of the business world!)
I don’t know when Peter Pan took over the culture, but the time when young people decided it was selling out to start acting like an adult instead of a child who was inexplicably allowed in bars is when the wheels came off. Our extended childhood has not been such a great thing. Some of the old ways of doing things…good riddance. Why should a family ever have to host one of the parents’ bosses at home? When some of it was lost, though, there was culture lost, too, not to mention morality. (I am referring to giving people the advantages of adulthood without expecting them to be mature as moral agents, too.)
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HouseArrest
Guest
I am not sure if there is another situation in life that mirrors university life as it is today. Why do we send our kids to the edge of a cliff and expect them not to fall off?
Here you go, 18 year olds. Let’s send you far away from home to live with others that are as immature as you are, give you minimal supervision and rules, plus a difficult task to complete. Good luck!
Be prepared, and decide how hedonistic you want to act. We are sure if you don’t want to act hedonistic at all, you can find yourself a quiet place to stay and study. We aren’t a bit worried about temptation. You can do it. For the rest of you, participate in sex week, where we will lie to you about how happy all this free sex will make you.
When my husband goes on a business trip, does he share a room with the secretary? No, it is inappropriate. Do I find a great deal on a beach vacation at a nudist colony? Look away, kids. Nothing to see here. Just swim in the ocean, that is what we are here for. Oh, you looked? You can either see the sand or the bodies. You must have come for the bodies.
Why are we doing this? Why are we paying for this?
I can’t for the life of me find it now, but there is an article that was published soon after the UVA/Rolling Stone article debacle describing how life at UVA and most universities used to be. It described a much more controlled dorm life for all undergraduates.
One of the articles from the Cardinal Newman Society invited Catholic colleges to reconsider their dorm visitation policies to encourage chastity. I think it is a great idea.
The schools that currently have restricted visitation also have chastity talks and education on marriage and family. It is also readily available, and students do not need to go searching for it. Some of the kids who need it most are going to need it to be right out in front of them.
I will post that article if I can locate it.
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HouseArrest
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EasterJoy
Guest
They might want to re-word that: Change the residence hall visitation policy in order to prevent on-campus acquaintance rape. The secular world does not understand chastity, but at least they are waking up and starting to understand the pervasiveness of on-campus rape and sexual assault.
The other thing they need to do is to penalize any drunkenness or possession of illegal substances on campus. Students old enough to drink may drink, but if they don’t drink responsibly they need to be diverted into some substance-abuse prevention program.
When they stop tolerating intoxication and stop allowing fraternization in dorms, they’ll be getting serious about preventing on-campus rape. Until then, their tolerance of current conditions is pandering lip-service that guarantees the rapists will keep committing their devastating crimes.
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Vanny
Guest
The sexual revolution in general has been devastating to women.
Men and children, too.
a lot of people under 40 can’t see it.
The sexual revolution has torn apart the family.
Men and children, too.
a lot of people under 40 can’t see it.
The sexual revolution has torn apart the family.
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edwest2
Guest
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Xantippe
Guest
- Colleges vary a lot in terms of local culture and subcultures on campus vary a lot. And, contrary to rumor, even the worst ones don’t have open bar orgies every Friday at 3. Anybody who goes to college expecting that is going to be disappointed.
- A lot of families don’t have much choice about sending kids to college. I’m from a small town in rural WA. The closest 4-year colleges were a four-hour drive one-way. Had I stayed at home, there’s no path I know of for living in my home town and being happily and respectably married with children, there being no way to do that–and I certainly would never have met my husband or had the kids I have without leaving home. When I’m visiting my home town, I hear story after story of awful marital trainwrecks among blue collar families–it’s just a mess.
- Any group consisting mainly of young people can be problematic, not just college. I did the Peace Corps–good people, but a lot of heavy drinking. In the military, there are famously a lot of temptations available to the young enlisted man (just look off-base). Likewise, I hear that there tends to be a lot of partying among National Park trail crews and summer fire crews (lots of down-time with not much to do). There’s nothing uniquely terrible about college, and it does offer the benefit of offering education and a path to economic independence.
- Sexual temptation isn’t only found on campus. Your supermarket checkstand offers some, and internet porn and shady “dating” apps are if anything worse, and available with just a few clicks. An evening spent alone at home with a cell phone or internet may not be that wholesome, even if mom and dad are just a few feet away.
- There aren’t a lot of co-ed dorm roommate situations that I know of.
- I don’t know of any nudist campuses.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Martinez
sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-Berkeley-s-Naked-Guy-met-a-tragic-end-3232119.php
- You have to go actively looking for trouble–namely off-campus parties. I lived in dorms for 3 out of 4 years and saw maybe a single beer in the dorms the whole time there, but I wasn’t looking.
- Colleges are VERY concerned about excessive underage drinking. I’ve seen some very good education campaigns (for example, about how much the average student actually drinks–less than people think, eating a good meal before drinking, etc). Here’s some info on the use of social norms in college safe drinking campaigns:
“Research shows that the perception of the norms is the most influential factor, yet the norm is so terribly misperceived. What’s driving the risk behavior is the erroneous perception that most others out there are engaging in high-risk behavior.”
mystudentbody.com/General/Article.aspx?id=4353&from=Library
mystudentbody.com/General/Article.aspx?id=4435&from=Home
Come to think of it, that reminds me a lot of the Harvard sex data–it’s a relatively small number of students really racking up the numbers.
It’s actually kind of a big deal to be able to point out the numbers and say–no, everybody isn’t doing it.
Again, I’ve been on and around college campuses virtually my entire adult life–including four years living in a big dorm on a major Catholic university. In fact, the college where my husband currently teaches has limited dorm visiting hours.
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