I dreamed last night, or rather this morning sometime between 4:15 this morning when I woke up to use the bathroom and 6:35 when alarms started going off, that I was late to class. And this isn’t the first time that I’ve had this dream in the almost 2 years since I graduated from college. Oh, no. I have this dream a lot. And I think it’s pretty weird.
Well, I don’t think that it is ‘weird’ as in unusual, because I know plenty of ex-classmates who also experience this dream on a regular basis. I think that our brains were simply wired for so long to anticipate class-related stresses that when we don’t get that stimulus in the form of a sassy blue-and-white scantron form our brains get a little wonky. But when it comes to my specific dream, I tend to think that it’s a little weird.
First, I don’t like to think of myself as someone whose life stopped when I stopped being able to ride the campus buses for free. In fact, I’m starting to think that people put altogether too much emphasis on college, as both a requirement for future successes and as a transcendental epoch of total personal awesomeness. Obviously I think that going to college is a worthwhile educational experience and a must-have if you love school for the very schoolness of it, like I do. And a degree is, undoubtedly, something that you have for life. But it also sets you up for unrealistic expectations ($$$) and completely fails to set you up (in the liberal arts, particularly) for the harsh unfriendliness of a market flooded with young folks who can do a close-reading of Chaucer but are best suited for answering telephones and making schnazzy spreadsheets.
Don’t get me wrong. College = good. I might even go back to school. But especially with the fee increases (32% this year at my old stomping grounds) I think that it is becoming a very hard thing to justify without insuring a 32% increase in class availability, relevance, and (let’s face it) making it about 32% more challenging to get a B.A.. If it was me, I would want my money’s worth and in the case of college that means 32% more knowledge and 32% less sleep during finals. Somehow, especially in the candy-coated UC system, I don’t see that happening.
It may sound a little materialistic (yipes!) to note, but as the only member of my family with a B.A. I make far-and-away the least amount of money. And I don’t mean since I quit my corporate job; they made more than me when I was pushing paper all about.
Money isn’t the only measure of worth and it sure isn’t the best one, but I think that the UC system would do well to shift a little of the focus away from soul-bending experiences and educational enlightenment via sun-dappled Frisbee games and towards the real financial situation. For one thing, they are inflating the students’ ideas of how quickly they can pay off their loans and credit cards as easily as they are inflating the fees.
So, enough ranting brought on by watching footage of the student protests here in sunny California. My dream went like this: I was late for a class where I had to turn in a paper and my bike had two flat tires. While I was trying to borrow someone’s bike I realized that I hadn’t attended this class once all quarter (this is a common theme in these dreams) and I began to berate myself for my negligence. I finally took off running toward the building where I somehow knew that the class would be meeting, leaving my bike hidden behind a tree. Before I got there, I woke up in a mild panic.
I know that I could push it here, make some reference to dreams of the literal sense and the quickly evaporating possibility of the lower-middle class to achieve collegiate dreams, but I won’t. That would be way too liberal arts-ish.
No comments:
Post a Comment