Guest Blogger - Craig Brandon, Author of the Five Year Party

Five Year Party

The ‘College Experience’ Is Not What It Used To Be

By Craig Brandon

Author of The Five-Year Party

One of the reasons parents give for rejecting the distance learning college alternative is that they want their children to participate in the “college experience,” not realizing college campuses have changed significantly during the past decade.

The inconvenient truth is that today’s party school campuses are among the most dangerous places in America, where crimes like assault, robbery, arson, rape and sexual abuse are common. The reason parents are not aware of these problems is that colleges have their own judicial systems, complete with police and courts, where every step and every document is hidden from public disclosure to protect the college’s false image as a bucolic enclave for learning.

While national statistics show that 44 percent of college students are binge drinkers, at party schools they are a clear majority and intoxicated minions roam campuses without any kind of supervision. These campuses are the last places in America where behaviors like drinking yourself into unconsciousness, falling out of windows, vomiting in bathrooms, harassing and assaulting fellow students and forcing them to have sex is accepted and mostly unpunished behavior.

Over half a million college students are injured every year as a result of binge drinking and 1700 of them die. Each year dozens of students are killed by fraternities as part of hazing rituals that require students to be branded with hot irons, beat up by their brothers or forced to drink so much booze that their blood alcohol levels rise to three times the intoxicated levels. Dozens of fraternity pledges die each year from alcohol poisoning. You can learn more about these senseless deaths by checking Internet news reports about Arman Partamian, Jason Wren and Donnie Wade.

Recent reports have found that college freshmen, for example, spend 8.4 hours per week studying and 10.2 hours drinking. Parents, however, are kept in the dark by official privacy policies even when children fail to show up for classes, get arrested, attempt suicide, are treated for mental illness or are taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Party schools insist that their students are adults and therefore responsible for their own actions, even when they clearly are not.

Party school managers go to elaborate lengths to cover up campus crimes. In New York State, a 2008 investigation by the state comptroller’s office found that two-thirds of the campuses of the State University of New York were keeping two sets of books on campus crime. The official, but modified, numbers were posted on the college web site. The other, for internal use only, contained the real numbers, which were a lot higher. The next year the comptroller found the same thing at the City University of New York.

In June 2008, Eastern Michigan University was fined $350,000 for failure to comply with federal disclosure regulations. Their offense? The college tried to cover up the murder of student Laura Dickinson.

According to the Department of Justice, only 37 percent of colleges report crimes in a way that is consistent with the law.The problem is particuarly alarming when it comes to rape and sexual abuse. The Department of Justice estimates that a female college student has one chance in five of being the victim of rape or attempted rape and that 95 percent of rapes are never reported. College counseling centers across the country deal with hundreds of rape and sexual assault victims each year while the official reports on the college web sites list only a few.

Student victims who subscribe to the “stop snitchin’ ” ethics of the gangsta culture are also intimidated into silence rather than risk being ostracized for reporting crimes. This protects student perpetrators who understand that they can get away with their crimes because the college is more interested in keeping them as customers than with justice for victims.

Serious college students deserve a safe place to study and should not have to endure the terrors of party school life, where half the freshmen class drops out without a diploma and only 30 percent graduate in four years. While there are plenty of colleges that are not party schools, parents should consider alternatives such as distance learning if only to protect their children from becoming victims.

Craig Brandon, an award-winning education reporter, taught writing at a college in New England for 12 years and is the author of the new book The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating You Child And What You Can Do About It,” which was published in August 2010.

Interested in learning how your college student can get their college degree without dealing with campus crime? Click here to learn how CollegePlus! can help.

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Guest Blogger - Craig Brandon, Author of the Five Year Party

The ‘College Experience’ Is Not What It Used To Be

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