College: the functional need of an advanced society or an expensive extra-vagance?

1. college as the ultimate (final, most perfect?) school
   1. altogether a very recent development
      1. from elite to mass in the mid 20th-century
   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?
      1. functional needs of post-industrial society requiring more complex skills for the development of the human capital of a nation-state (Universities as vocational schools?)
      2. cultural production of an extravagant form of mass schooling (Boon 1999) with its monuments, rituals, feasts, etc.
   4. where will it end?
      1. more Harvards?
      2. more community colleges?
2. and thus a tool in the reproduction of class/race/gender differences
   1. Human capital (for the state subsidizing colleges and universities) and capital investment (for the individual student taking on loans)
   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.("graduating from college and future earning" economic studies)
   3. But what is it, about college, besides the degree, that makes the difference? What is the curriculum that will make the differences we are concerned with?
      1. liberal education?
      2. skill build up?
      3. everyday experiences?
      4. network development?
      5. the reputation of the college?
   4. 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. Borough of Manhattan Community College
      5. Metropolitan College (a small private college for adults looking for jobs in services)
3. But the American residential college (like all schools) is an everyday practice. It is 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)
      1. the further extravagance of American schooling in its particularities in time and spread across the world.
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 and gender

      types of women
      types of men
      (Holland and Quinn 1987: 82-83)

      (or gender and sexuality?)
   2. being friendly, friendship, love (Moffatt, Sabin)
   3. race (not) talk (in Moffatt case) but possibly also more generally

      Paul Robeson Living-Learning Community at Rutgers, 50 years later

   4. career achievement (academics, skills training) as a non-issue (Moffatt): an ethnographic artifact? a matter of time/class/intellectual interests?
5. .... are also the site of the movement towards settling adult lives:
   1. gendering through career choices, etc.: Holland and Eisenhart
   2. marriage: college choice as narrowing the field of possible spouses (indirectly arranged marriages): a journalistic account (New York Times, March 29, 2018)
   3. and arranging other futures...
6. 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).
   2. Note the absence of any discussion of financing (though mention of "useful" majors in last chapter)
   3. Generalizing ethnographic findings
      1. More on Holland and Eisenhart
      2. Further considerations building on Kalmar's work (Varenne 2014)