I’m not sure which is better. It is a huge change to go from an academic grad program to a professional grad program. Having now experienced both, I think I have a better understanding of how there is a place for both. But woe unto the student who ends up thinking they are one when they are in another. I wish I could have shipped some of my former students at Buffalo off to QU–they would have been much happier.

But yes, at times QU feels a lot less like a university campus than many I’ve been on…

Interesting to me because the Ivy attitude and treatment was precisely the kind of treatment that I received at SUNY Potsdam back in my undergrad days there. Orientation week began with a packed seminar room for all entering freshmen where Dean DelGiudice, a PhD in Poly Sci and tenure holder, informed us quite sternly over a presentation on transparencies (the days before PowerPoint) that college was NOT meant to give us a job, college was meant to teach us how to think. If we wanted a job out of college, we were all in the wrong place and should quit now and go to trade school.

13 years later, going back to school at QU for the Masters in ICM, I was absolutely stunned at how college had changed. The students all looked the same. Exactly the same. I later attributed it to the lack of any sort of Arts program in QU… we’ve got ourselves a Law School on campus, but no Theater department, Music department, or Art department of note.

I think that the problems of entitlement are more generational than the article mentions might be better assigned to generational attitudes… the Millennials are mostly the children of the Boomers, and the Baby Boom never really came to grips with concepts of needing discipline themselves, let alone for their children. The attitude of entitlement seems to be endemic to all millennials, not just those in Ivy League schools… at least as far as my own limited exposure to them has confirmed. I’ve watched a revolving door of interns and new hires who come in, can’t deal with a standard work week and flake out, walking off the job because they “can’t handle the stress” of showing up on a schedule all the time. Anecdotes from friends in other non-corporate professions reveals similar ‘entry problems’, like temper tantrums at being told that flip-flops are not allowed, for example.

Interestingly enough, I saw my own fears of failure and my own need to ‘normalize’ addressed in the article as well. The notes about medicating for normalcy hit home for me. But then, I’ve already been wrestling with thoughts about the future and how to pay off the investment in the Master’s I’m almost done making without ‘wasting’ the degree. Definitely a good read. I think there are a number of things in it which have broader causes and implications, though. But still good. Topical. Relevant.

Give me a decent public University any day. At least in public universities, you don’t have to worry about the “voluntary suspension of the Bill of Rights” nonsense. QU’s student activist club for Gay and Lesbian supporters have tales from student organizers who lost their financial aid because of their leadership in an “undesirable” club and daring to speak out and question the president of the college.