RE: The essay to follow.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I recall one clown who came to class. Immediately leaned his desk
back against the wall (last row) and slept during nearly every lecture
in the entire semester. One older lady (presumably with her
mothering instincts coming out) wanted to know why I let "that boy"
do that. My response was that he is an adult and if he wants to spend
his money coming here to sleep - so be it. He bombed the tests and
flunked the final. Then a week after grades were posted I got a call at
home from the Dean and he said the "boy" and his mother were in his
office and wanted me to raise his F to a D. I gave the dean a SITREP
on the deal and said NO DICE - the grade stands and if the school
wants to raise his grade I won't sign off on it. I never heard anymore
about it. ( I checked later ... the "F" stood)

Damned old Chiefs --- expecting performance. Harumph!!

Anyway - in my military mind - the following essay is excellent. I
especially like where he says "go in the military"

Sid

===============================================

College Daze

by Charles Murray

Source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0901/032.html

Instead of helping high school grads grow up, colleges prolong
childhood.

College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky
majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A.
close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is
more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to
make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges
are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity.

Once upon a time college was a halfway house for practicing how to
be a grown-up. Students couldn't count on the dean of students to
make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they wanted to avoid
getting kicked out, they had to weigh the potential consequences of
their actions, just as in adult life. The student-teacher relationship
was more distant and less nurturing than in high school, and more
like the employee-supervisor relationship awaiting them after
graduation. Students had to accept that they no longer got hugs for
trying hard. If they didn't get the job done, they were flunked with as
little ceremony as they would be fired by an employer.

This apprenticeship in adulthood has been gutted.

The light workload alone can make college today a joke. The most
recent data say that students self-report only about 14 hours per
week spent studying (the true figure is presumably lower). The
definition of "weekend" has sprawled to the point that, as a Duke
administrator put it, "We've run out of classroom space between 10
a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday."

The demanding professor is close to being extinct. Due dates for
papers are commonly extended when the student just can't get it
done by then. Many professors permit quizzes or even final exams to
be made up if missed--missed not because of an emergency at home
or a fever of 104, but just, sort of, like, missed. At many schools
student evaluations of professors are now systematically collected
and used as part of the tenure decision process. Warm and
sympathetic is in. Strict and demanding is out.

Professors are under pressure to accommodate students even when
it comes to right and wrong answers. Talk to any college teacher and
you will hear bemused accounts of encounters with students who
think that the teacher's criticisms of their work are "just your
opinion," no more valid than the student's opinion, as well as stories
of students who make serious trouble for teachers who refuse to
adjust their grades.

Meanwhile, colleges today take pride in making life at college as
warm and comfy as life with Mom and Dad. It used to be that the girls
had housemothers to do bed checks and the guys might have a
proctor living on the dorm corridor, and otherwise students were on
their own. No longer. Colleges now have large bureaucracies of "res
life staff" ("res" for residential) charged with responding to any
scrape that our little darlings might suffer. Barrett Seaman, whose
book Binge is the indispensable guide to this new college world,
found that his alma mater, Hamilton (1,700 students), now has 26 full-
time people to manage student issues that in the 1960s were handled
by only 3. Hamilton is not exceptional.

And so this heretical thought for parents of high school students
nearing graduation: If you want your child to grow up responsible and
independent, sequester the college tuition money. Encourage your
child to join the military, work abroad as a volunteer for some worthy
cause or just move to a different city, get a real job and support
himself for a few years.

There's no intellectual loss in delaying college. On the contrary, your
child will probably gain from the wait. Plato and Tolstoy were not
writing for kids. The real danger lies in raising children who reach
their 20s still thinking like children. The years after high school are
for learning how to be a grown-up. Today's colleges are terrible
places to do it.
-----------------------
Charles Murray is a W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths For
Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality