A Better Way: Part 3

Create true living-learning environments

Residence hall life must be far more organized. Many, if not most, freshmen are living away from home for the first time. Put all these newly liberated, often scared, kids in one hall with little structure, and you have a prescription for failure. So many freshmen end up living an Animal-House existence or, overwhelmed by it, sit depressed in their dorm rooms. Colleges should provide a rich array of residence hall programs during evenings and weekends, some of which would be required. Some faculty would live among the students. Drugs and underage drinking, a major cause of problems in dorms, currently winked at by many colleges, should be strictly prohibited. If colleges care at all about their students, they cannot brush aside the fact that 42% of all college students binge drink. A once-a-year no-anti-drinking seminar is not enough. The truly caring college would create a dorm culture satisfying enough that alcohol abuse would become, for most students, superfluous.