Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

These kids are smarter than me. Much smarter. There’s been a large and measurable rise in IQ scores over the past half century—if the Flynn effect is to be believed. This generation grew up in a world that manages and digests knowledge in more productive ways.

So you can imagine how wapperjawed I was when a bright young student yelled for the attention of her professor using only his last name. Kimberly, nooooooo!

Maybe book smarts aren’t enough. Maybe a gap year spent in any kind of employment involving cooking fat would helpful.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

This hallway is a lovers lane.

Many mornings before classes, young couples sit on couches in the nooks that stretch down the hallway. There’s just enough room for two people. There is an illusion of privacy.

While working with the immigrant parents of kids like these, I’ve learned that their cultures have very different ideas about courtship and marriage. It’s possible that the half hour or so young people steal together here is one of the few private moments they enjoy without supervision.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

There are kids here who spent years rushing home from high school before the evenings turned dangerous. Parents got home too late for schoolwork. They’ve never been to Awards Night.

They look through a fence built around them and wonder if life on the other side is only for kids richer and luckier than them.

Community colleges provide acetylene and oxygen, and when students get the mixture just right, they burn through metal. Tuition is relatively inexpensive by 4-year college standards. With hard work and luck, they’ll finally transfer to a university. They’ll need those goggles every step of the way.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

There is a group of nicely turned-out kids you would expect to find at prestigious universities rather than at a community college.

Some of them have confided to me (a safe uncle that won’t lecture them) that they had botched high school; others have limped home after a semester or two at college. This is way traumatic for the children of high-expectation zip codes. Community colleges offer a path to redemption—and older students particularly embrace the gift of a do-over.

You and I will meet these kids again. One of them may stabilize our vital signs on the way to an emergency room, another may ping the OS that allows us to control a car when we are deep into our dotage.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

The rumors of today’s college students being relentless sexual predators are categorically false. I feel safe here.