I suppose with College Sunday already behind us, and because I am beginning to see the yearly, rising tide of students searching for perfect letters of recommendation and trying to write perfect college essays in order to get into that perfect college, The New York Times devoted their entire Sunday Magazine to all things concerning post-secondary academia. I have included a link, as well as some excerpts, to one of the standouts below. Also, be sure to check out the College Essay section, where students responded to a previously published article in the Times titled “What’s the Matter With College?” The controversial winner wrote an essay titled “The Posteverything Generation,” which may be too grounded in vague postmodern theory for its own good.
“Don’t Worry, Be Students” by Jacques Steinberg
As for the importance of the college ranking, which high school students often factor into their decision of which colleges they want to attend, Steinberg reports:
Five years after graduating, about one-third at each university said that the rankings seemed “less important” to them now than they did in high school.
He also notes:
To an astonishing degree, recent graduates surveyed by The New York Times Poll said that they are satisfied with the choices they made about where to go to college and with the educations they received. That seems to hold true whether they went to big schools or small schools, costly private colleges or somewhat more affordable public universities, their first-choice school or their fourth.
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One of the comments on that winning essay:
“The last sentence of the opening paragraph reads like a parody of college-age writing. Ouch.”
I can’t exactly talk like I know a lot about college-age writing, but that comment seems to have nailed the issue there…
I also like how another reader calls us the ["XYZ or whatever] generation of Couch-Potato Protests.