Skating through college

My old roommate thought he was getting a first rate education. He was an artist. Not with paints or clay or words or music. His canvas was college. His medium: slacking. \nHe vegetated in our room so often last semester the dust mites nearly called pest control. I was living with a room fixture, another frat-house furnishing to be willed to the next generation of tipsy tenants with the rest of the wall hangings. Naturally, the posters were getting jealous.\nClasses never daunted him. Rarely was there a block of class time when he was not in our room playing video games with John, the guy who lived across the hall, and John, the spokesman of their favorite game: Madden 2003.\nYou'd think his grades would have suffered, but the lounger quickly discovered he could earn good grades by cramming just a few days before tests with study guides and assigned readings. True to this method, his attendance record is now a pretentious legend; he attended just one class session between Easter and finals. His marks spoke for themselves -- a surprising four A's and a B+. He was proud.\nHopefully, his teachers weren't.\nFew have ever slacked so well, yet no one can claim total innocence when it comes to class attendance. Almost every college student has felt the urge to forego that last class of a tedious educational day or dreaded the thought of an AI's voice piercing through an early morning hangover. If my slacker roommate proved anything last semester, it was that most class schedules can handle the occasional ditching.\nYet he was far from the first person to learn the loopholes of large universities. Each year thousands of IU students breeze through college on paid vacations, obtaining the same degrees as other graduates, passing silently through the bowels of higher education, leaving traces of odd, vagrant odors in beer-soaked basements, dissipating like farts in the wind.\nIU English and American studies professor Murray Sperber, a longtime critic of large universities, points to a "faculty/student nonaggression pact," in which "big-time (universities) handle their undergraduate education problem by establishing a truce between faculty who want to spend a minimum amount of time on undergraduate teaching and students who want to obtain a degree as easily as possible" (Beer and Circus, p. 113). \nTeachers teach less, and students are often left to teach themselves. My roommate knew this.\nProbably, his parents didn't.\nThe benefits of ditching class simply outweighed the consequences. His transcript still reads like that of a model student.\nShould he be proud of it? It is certainly an impressive rap-sheet for anyone skating through a semester of college, or the biggest waste of 12-grand since Kobe Bryant bought his gold encrusted edition of the "Scarlet Letter."\nMaybe he should have just sent away for the Sally Struthers home education business/finance kit. \nIt would certainly have been more economical for his parents than spending $25,000 a year on the best study guides money can buy. For that amount of money the University should have made his professors force material down his throat with a plunger during classes, bludgeoning him with textbooks if he even thought about ditching. \nBut that's just wishful thinking.\nFor now my old roommate is still a model student, but only on paper. His parents assume he's learning something. They shouldn't. His professors thought they were teaching him. They weren't. And he thinks a degree is as good as an education.\nIt isn't.