Funny--That's where I happen to be currently working.

And a school whose population is two-thirds graduate students is certainly far enough outside the mainstream that it shouldn't be considered representative of the university experience.

I thought we all agreed that the current generation of students are corporate drones in training but that we would not hold it against them since it was obviously the result of poor parenting by feckless boomers.

There are plenty---even too many---opportunities to hang out with awesome, talented people at college. That's part of the problem: students have a hard time figuring out which opportunities to pursue in the limited time they have.

Sam,

I regret to inform you that college has been degraded from what it was in the '60s, because people your age haven't, for no particular reason, taken over the administration building while totally zonked on acid.

I presume that projectile vomiting hasn't changed overly much.

Perlstein, too, attended the University of Chicago, so presumably he is well aware of its atypicality.

I tend to agree with the point about Chicago. I wanted to do Berkeley. The editor wanted me to do the place I was familiar with, Chicago, and they were offering serious bank, so I rolled with it.

The editor wanted me to do the place I was familiar with, Chicago, and they were offering serious bank, so I rolled with it.

Man, the 60's were awesome. No one ever sold out for the cash back then.

Well that's cool, cause I'm here at Uchicago for the summer.

It is indeed an atypical place, and it is atypically academic - my home university is not nearly as intense as this one.

Q. I also wonder if this ideal 1960s college scenario of hanging out with famous jazz musicians and authors was ever a big part of most people's college experience. Did the "bucolic images of a mystic world apart, where 18-year-olds discover themselves for the first time in a heady atmosphere of cultural and intellectual tumult" ever reflect reality? A. No. Sex, drugs, rock and roll and ample doses of anti-war demonstrations were more the norm.

I got that mystic world apart-total immersion in High Culture and an initiation into the intelligencia as well as sex and drugs (which enhanced reading George Herbert and listening to Mozart). Most of my students are nice kids but utterly dull of soul. They don't get consuming High Culture is just more pleasure on top of sex, drugs and shopping.

I'm a U of C grad (AB 1978), and much of what Perlstein describes is utterly foreign to my experience. I don't remember any jazz sessions; the place was notable for its lack of artistic culture, other than a lot of excellent film societies, and the surrounding neighborhood was totally dead, other than the referenced Medici. (I've visited since, and the neighborhood is definitely more upscale now.) A lot of the students (including me) were indeed miserable, but that was because we all wanted to go to grad/professional school, and we were worried (rightly) that we would be penalized by Chicago's punitive grading system. (This isn't sour grapes on my part; I did get in, and have a PhD and 2 masters degrees.) We spent almost all our time studying; first year language classes assigned writings in the language on the very first day of class (when we presumably didn't yet know the language). Many of the professors treated the students with thinly veiled contempt, and the president proclaimed while I was there: "you can have a university without students, but not one without an administration," which certainly made us feel valued and welcome. I almost did leave, but changed my mind due to a boyfriend, which I count as possibly the worst decision of my life. I've never given a dime to the place, and I've heard that's not at all unusual. It's definitely not a typical college at all, fortunately.

"Many of the professors treated the students with thinly veiled contempt, and the president proclaimed while I was there: "you can have a university without students, but not one without an administration," which certainly made us feel valued and welcome."

LOL-- He's right but he's not doing his job. The job of the administration is to hide the fact that an overwhelming majority of the faculty think exactly that.

"It's definitely not a typical college at all, fortunately."

Yeah. Most schools do a better job of hiding it than that!

Rick's point is probably enhanced, not reduced, by his use of the University of Chicago (I'm GSB '03) - in most other schools the contrast would be less (Stanford in 1992 is pretty much the way it is now, for instance). UChicago was always one of the most outlier schools in insisting on a very abstract and probably too-high minded focus on liberal arts academics.

Ok, so what happened to college? It's not surprising: students in the 1960s didn't worry about life after college precisely because they didn't have to - the economy was both so good and so egalitarian that it made only minor difference what you did in college. Most corporations hired college students primarily in large internal training programs - it didn't make a vast difference if you'd had a particular internship, coursework, etc. The pay differentials between most white-collar jobs wasn't much. The government had a lot of job openings as well that were preferentially kept open for grads of high-ranking liberal arts schools.

This was generally true of all students in developed economies worldwide during the period.

What happened was:

1. the elite jobs in the US economy shifted from managerial positions in Fortune 500 companies to many fewer positions primarily on Wall Street.
2. Fortune 500 companies abolished their training programs.
3. Most business schools began to demand at minimum 3 years of work experience to get in (i.e., in the worst case, before 1982 or so, a liberal arts grad from a top liberal arts school, if unable to find any job, would simply go directly to graduate business school, since they took people directly from undergrad)
4. The government largely abolished most of the preferential programs for liberal-arts grads.
5. The academic job market collapsed.

all of which leading to:

pretty much the only remaining obtainable well-paying jobs for recent liberal arts grads by the mid-1980s were a handful of (comparatively) tiny investment banks and consulting firms. Fortune 500 corporations had shut down the training programs and generally wouldn't hire liberal arts grads at all (unless they had done multiple internships).