Word: freshmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Those expectations can be especially burdensome when it comes time to choose a course of study. The most popular major, not surprisingly in these practical times, is business. According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, 26% of college freshmen last year declared a business major, with engineering a distant second at 9.4%. Sophomore Mark Rodgers, at the University of Michigan, believed at one point that his parents might cut him off financially if he majored in English. "My parents were pressuring me to be an economics major," he says. "The idea is to have marketable skills when...
...future have stripped some of the levity from the freshman experience. "They're more serious about their education," says Andristine Robinson, associate dean of students at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University. "I see better grades coming out," she says, but she also found that many of last year's freshmen skipped extracurricular activities because they "wanted to get their studies together first." For students who have just survived the brutal college-entrance marathon, this competitive atmosphere is all too familiar. But others, accustomed to being stars in high school, find themselves feeling lost in a crowd of overachievers. Alice Pond wandered...
Faced with such competition and hard work, freshmen may find it hard to make time to play and develop the friendships that are supposed to last through the 50th reunion. "It's a whirlwind," says Pamela Haber, a University of Michigan sophomore. "You make friends, you drop them." Many find that having an entirely new pool of classmates is a greatly liberating experience. Hated nicknames are finally shed, new affectations can be tried on and discarded. "Nobody has to know that you were shy in high school," says Veronica Lawson, 18, a Rhodes sophomore who counsels freshmen. "I tell freshmen...
Unfortunately, for many freshmen this sudden liberation opens the door to indulgent excess. Despite the fact that 18 states have raised the legal drinking age since 1985, alcohol remains an often troublesome fact of campus life. Even if students cannot get into bars, most of them know upperclassmen who can buy alcohol. College officials fear that when students drink in their own rooms, out of the public eye, they are more likely to lose control. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that students find hard liquor easier to conceal than beer, but have had little previous experience with...
Freshman supervisors take some comfort in the fact that drug use seems to be tapering off: 57.6% of the high school seniors graduating in 1986 reported that they had tried an illicit drug, down from 65.6% in 1981. Yet freshmen are considered to be at high risk for drug and alcohol abuse and the academic and disciplinary problems that follow. At the University of New Hampshire, for example, freshmen constitute more than half of all students who end up at the health services for overconsumption of alcohol and drugs. Drinking also makes students more vulnerable to other dangers. Between...