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1. college as the ultimate (final, most perfect) high school
   1. altogether a recent development
   2. the current final stage in the tightly controlled, highly scripted, and massively consequential institutions of the (democratic, liberal, Euro-American, industrialized, capitalistic, modern, post-modern, 20th-century) times we have all been inhabiting at least since the 1940s (G.I. Bill) in the United States, the 1960s in Europe (and still in the future in many parts of the world)
   3. What is this all about?
   4. where will it end?
2. college and class
   1. Imagine what produces the distinctions between (in New York State for example)
      1. Columbia University (NYU, Cornell)
      2. the State University of New York
      3. the City University of New York
      4. Hostos College
      5. Borough of Manhattan Community College
      6. Metropolitcan College
   2. the college degree as predictor of life career economic success and the multiplication of "black box" research: colleges makes a large difference (though varying in specific economic moments). This is established. But what is it, about college, besides the degree, that makes the difference
      1. liberal education?
      2. skill build up?
      3. everyday experiences?
      4. network development?
      5. the reputation of the college?
   3. college as everyday practice
3. the American residential college as a space/time for withdrawal from family, peers, localities
   1. (relate to the "men's houses" and other places of temporary abode at many institutionalized moments ("cultures") in human society.)
   2. note that much of this is not quite true of the large urban non-residential colleges, and is mostly not true of many European societies (thus the need for "comparative schooling" investigation)
4. pushing the sense that residential colleges are somehow designed to be a setting where late adolescents/young adults can experiment (learn, practice) with interpersonal relationships within a safe (?) environment. What would that be?
   1. sexuality, being friendly, friendship, love (Moffatt, Sabin)
   2. achievement of gender positioning (role): Holland and Eisenhart
   3. career achievement (academics, skills training) as a non-issue: an ethnographic artifact?
5. methodological note
   1. on "living in a dorm" and figuring what to report on:
      1. noticing "that which is marked as happening" (e.g. fights at parties, relationships)
      2. and being blinded to everything else (e.g. academics).

Some questions
StudyPlace conversation
how might one relate Page's work on the stratification of high school to the stratification of colleges much is written about the utility of "a college education" for future earnings; is this a matter of "learning" or a matter of permissible discrimination through credentialing? or both? how might one study, ethnographically, the relationship between college curriculum and the state?>