Are you getting your educational money’s worth? Are you
convinced that the annual cost of sending your child to college —
probably higher than your first-ever year’s salary — is in some
way improving his mind and character? Well, depending on your
definition of improvement, you may be right. Or incredibly
wrong.
Short generations ago, sending kids to college was an easy
choice. Your child either did or did not demonstrate the
willingness and capability required to learn at the university
level. This meant that he was prepared to hunker down to study in a
serious manner in order to secure the education needed for a
pre-chosen profession. If this was not the case, he got off his
duff and found some other kind of work for which a degree was not
needed.
If he was one of the few who did go off to college, he was
expected to devote the majority of his time to his studies with
perhaps some time spent on athletics or other school-related
activities. But if his family was not very well financially
endowed, he would work part-time to help out with the bills. And,
if he was an exceptionally gifted at juggling all of this, he might
enjoy some leisure time hoisting a few beers while singing the
Whippenpoof Song or seeing how many of his fellows could fit into a
phone booth.
Those days, as they say, are long gone. In modern America, a
college degree is now almost a given, a birthright for the nearly
two-thirds of all high school graduates who go on to higher
education. And while many students still attend college to pursue a
specific career, too many view it as an extended version of high
school; living carefree lives on their parents’ dollar, only with a
lot less supervision and a lot more fun.
Although overshadowed by the injustice they received at the
hands of political hack Mike Nifong, the unsavory exploits of the
Duke Lacrosse team were pooh-poohed by many as being typical of
college life. And while binge drinking on college campuses has become
almost an afterthought in the past few decades, it is the explosion
of sexual activity on campus that should cause the most concern for
parents.
Two recent stories detail what seems to be the declared major
for many students: hooking up. The first deals with a study commissioned by Trojan
brand condoms to determine which schools best promote “sexual
health.” Given the study’s sponsor, one doesn’t have to be a
genius, or even a college grad, to figure out what that means. One
of the factors that differentiated the top-ranked schools was the
availability of “free contraception including condom
distribution.”
After all, everyone knows that in order to be “sexually healthy”
when engaging in what is naturally designed as a life-giving
function, one must be “protected” from the results of that very
function. This type of thinking equates pregnancy with AIDS,
herpes, syphilis and other sexually-transmitted diseases and
conveniently ignores the fact that most of these maladies were the
product of the sexual revolution promulgated primarily on college
campuses in the 1960s. Any thinking person would surmise that the
remedy for all of this would be less pre-marital sex instead of
more, but as P.J. O’Rourke said, “Seriousness is stupidity sent to
college.”
So, when you send your kids to college, they must be armed with
the necessary tools. And so you pony up thousands of dollars for
tuition, provide for housing, buy all the required textbooks,
purchase scads of electronic devices like PCs, IPODs and cell
phones and pack little Johnnie or Jane off to school with their own
credit cards. But what if the monetary demands of academic life are
such that they cannot afford “protection”?
Well then, of course, the government must step in. Which brings
us to the second story concerning “sexual health” on
campus. It seems that, although college dudes may have recourse to
free condoms, the cost of protection for dude-ettes has become more
problematic — you guessed it — due to the evil machinations of
the Bush Administration. Cuts to Medicaid have apparently caused
manufacturers of birth control to stop offering discounts to
colleges and universities. Erudite New York Congresswoman Carolyn
Maloney explains the coming catastrophic consequences:
It will mean that more college women will become
pregnant in an unwanted pregnancy during their college student
years. It will mean that many will have to drop out of school or
face an abortion. It is a difficult situation to put college women
in.
A better situation for many college-bound young ladies might be one
in which they cross their legs upon arriving at school and keep
them that way until they graduate. But of course this would negate
the need for the numerous college programs designed to promote
promiscuity and ready students for a lifetime of random and rampant
sex: the very reason you slaved all your life to send them off to
college.
But it could be worse. You could be paying a ton of do-re-mi to
Columbia University to help finance the lunatic ravings of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or similar anti-American
brainwashing by liberal faculties. But at least they’ll be
“sexually healthy.”
