Something interesting has happened at Enema U. We lost a whole bunch of
students. Specifically, somewhere
between a gob lot and a shit ton of students have just wandered off. While the university is currently between
semesters, as of right now, there are somewhere over....well....thousands and
thousands of students who did not bother to enroll for next semester.
Maybe they forgot? They
were here last semester, and while they may come back next semester, where are
they right now?
If we assume that they are not coming back, I wonder
why? I might come up with a few possible
reasons....'Course, I'm just a poor dumb ol' country boy, so I'm probably
wrong.
Maybe the students have just have given up hope of ever finding a
job in a state that has systematically stifled all expansion of the business
sector for decades. During a recession,
university enrollment frequently increases since students are wary of entering
a weak job market. If the recession
continues, eventually the students just give up and quit trying. I know of more than one waitress in town with
a master's degree.
Could it be that the students are not as happy at Enema U as they
might be? Little things might be the
problem--like the food. While other
universities are attracting students by serving great food at reasonable
prices, Enema U has leased out its cafeterias to a corporation that specializes
in providing food for prisons, airports, and universities. While I have no direct evidence, I presume
that since people at prisons can't leave and the people at airports eventually
escape....well, I suppose our food is better than in the prisons and a little
worse than at the airports.
Or, maybe, it is the tuition--we keep raising it and raising it,
while we give buckets of the money to support an athletic program that does
little more than let our administration relive the 1960's. Every week, the steadily declining attendance
at the games proves to everyone not yearning for the revival of the sock hop
that the world has changed and the center of campus life is no longer
located between goalposts.
Then, again, perhaps the students are worried about
financing. No one seems to know for
certain whether federal funds will continue to finance grants and loans. Even the funding derived from the state
lottery seems to be in question. (There
is a quick fix for the lottery: since
the proceeds go to education, why not let the elementary school kids sell the
tickets door-to-door? Lottery tickets
would be preferable to the magazines, cookies, and assorted crapola the little
rug rats are currently selling.)
Possibly the students are AWOL because we offer fewer
weekend college or night classes. Then,
couple that with a shortage of classrooms, and it is getting increasingly hard
for the students to take the courses they want at the times they want to take
them. We have recently built a lot of
new buildings on campus, but since no one in Administration ever got hired away
by a bigger university for building more classrooms, we have wisely built
things like a new abattoir for faculty meetings---and the new set of coaches'
offices to replace the previous new set of coaches' offices.
Who knows why the students are missing? There seems to be some kind of
an election and the students are voting with their feet. Something has to be done, and soon--I'm too
old and lazy to find honest work. I have
a suggestion to motivate the administration, but first you get this
week's history lesson.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Persian king, Xerxes I,
decided to invade Greece. He assembled
an immense army and and marched them through what today we would call
Turkey. When he got to the
Hellespont--the strait that separates Asia from Europe--he ordered a bridge
built across it. Before his army could
cross to the other side, a storm destroyed the bridge.
Enraged, Xerxes ordered the strait to be whipped and that
iron restraints to be thrown into the water.
Presumably, the 300 lashes and iron chains would both punish and
restrain the waves from future mischief.
With the unruly water properly humbled, Xerxes ordered the bridge
rebuilt.
With this in mind, and to properly motivate the administration, I
am announcing the Xerxes Prize for Administrative Excellence. I will be accepting nominations in the weeks
to come.
So you're saying that enrollment is down at a school that cares only marginally more about its student body than it does its professors (some of which I know of have a second job). Enrollment is down for a generation that has been called lazy and unmotivated, because they only have part time jobs, by some of the people that put this country into the economic mess that we are in? I mean don't get me wrong, who wouldn't want to go to school, get a degree, probably go into debt that is in the 5 figure range so that they could work 2 part time jobs that pay enough to live in your parents basement and afford the car note from the buy here pay here place on the corner because they can't get credit because they have no history and banks are so scared to give new lines that unless your score is somewhere above 700 you can't get a loan big enough to buy that big mac form the very students that have become disenchanted with the idea of secondary education. Or maybe they really are just lazy and will enroll the first week of classes. I suppose the University could give a 10% discount for enrolling early.
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