Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

END OF WINTER, just south of the 42nd Parallel — March has been so bitter here you could actually (kind of actually) hear rocks cracking along the shoreline.

A professor cracked too. I was startled when he told students they shouldn’t depend on dreams coming true—not just fantasies about being NFL starters or rock stars—but regular, everyday dreams. A good-enough life would be possible, he said, with work and constancy.

He realized he had violated an unwritten code of educators and took his words back immediately, blaming the winter. He’s a very talented lecturer, I’ve taken 2 of his courses so far. All he needs is better boots.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

“Come come, my dears, you’re safe with me.”

Sometimes during freshman orientations, students are urged to open a checking account they’ve been led to believe is endorsed by their college. It isn’t. Meanwhile unusually nice people (recent grads, khakis and polos) invite newbies to sign up for plastic that carries an APR well above 20%. Apply today and get a lifetime membership at the campus tanning salon! Tell your friends!

Some for-profit colleges have been accused of pushing overpriced loans at kids who qualify for federal subsidized loans. Most education loans can’t be forgiven—oil companies and hedge funds can go bankrupt but students can’t.

The average U.S. college student graduates with slightly less than $30,000 in debt. We’re eating our young.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

A student became difficult in a second-floor, physical-science lab yesterday. Nobody shot him.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Once you slice open the shipping boxes that contain your rental textbooks, you are L.B. Jefferies and you’re deep into Rear Window mode.

Every scholar who has ever rented those books and highlighted the pages stands naked before you.

You identity them first by color: The kid with the pink highlighter, for example, obsesses over specifics; the yellow highlighterer has a thing for overwritten paragraphs; Ms. Orange is all about chapter summaries. You can guess race, ethnicity and gender by underscores in the subculture sidebars. And then there are the kids who violate the margins: “This is total bullshit!” is my favorite.

Campbell Cream of Tomato Soup stains (popular at greek houses) say more about table manners than intellectual capacity. Stiff, warped pages means the book had slipped into bath water.

Start by flipping through the pages to see which highlights vanish after the early chapters, the student has dropped the class or decided to blow it off. Either way you don’t want to use their glyphs as a study guide.

 

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The team struggled frantically. But no matter what they tried his body wouldn’t climb above room temperature. The subject on the gurney remained unresponsive—he refused to breathe. There was zero probability, but they worked on.

Down on the floor it was a different story. As if upon signal, a traumatized accident victim, all splints and tourniquets, rose miraculously and traded places with the paramedic who had been attending her. There were no actual lives or limbs in danger but there was risk and urgency. The students needed to prove their knowledge and deftness to survive as paramedics.

Fire Science Technology (firefighters, emergency responders, paramedics) is one of many certificate programs that can lift a life above the minimum wage. After two or three semesters, the holder of a certificate can be a contender.

Many certificate students go on prosper in the trades, start businesses, create wealth and jobs. Many of them become the intensely motivated, street-savvy, forty-year-old freshmen who ask for nothing but the opportunity to eat your lunch.

The Fire Science instructors were happy to let me hang around. They wanted me to climb on the gurney and take the place of the dummy. They said they would bring me back to life.