I just received one of the University of Michigan’s alumni publications, LSA Magazine (LSA = Literature, Science, and the Arts). A column by LSA dean Terence J. McDonald boasts about Michigan’s performance in college rankings and the university’s general awesomeness. It concludes with this sentence: “And that is why our students will have the best four years of their lives here.”
Isn’t that a strange goal? Shouldn’t college prepare students to have better lives later on? Or is it really all downhill for Wolverines once they set foot off campus, take jobs, start families, and assume the full burden of adulthood?