Hail And Beware, Freshmen

By Nancy R. Gibbs

Ah, to be a freshman again. An entire year with nothing to do except sample the privileges of being an adult without the responsibilities. A chance to major in chemistry but dabble in art history, to try out for intramural water polo, to sing Cole Porter fight songs at the football game, to meet the diverse and intriguing group of people that high school and summer camp never quite delivered. Frat parties, water fights and spring in Daytona Beach. Through that gauzy nostalgic haze, many college graduates remember all the glories of freshman year, and problems no more weighty than getting up for an 8:30 class, doing their own laundry and trying to identify the meat at dinner.

This year, however, as the class of 1992 flocks to college campuses, some hard adult choices are mixed in with all the pleasures and opportunities. In an age of $18,000-a-year college bills, many students feel pressured from the start to select a major that is not only meaningful but also marketable. Some must allocate time for a 20-hour-a-week job, as well as early morning classes and late-night study sessions. Alcohol and drugs remain an omnipresent lure and danger made more enticing than ever as stress levels soar. And the challenge of dating in the safe-sex era has shadowed even the illusion of a lighthearted passage to adulthood.

The graduates of the '90s promise to be a different breed from the carefree cutups of the '50s, the earnest rebels of the late '60s or even the button- down bankers-to-be of the '80s. "They're coming to us a lot tougher and less innocent than previous generations," says Marilyn Katz, dean of studies and student life at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. "They're not wrapped in as much cotton batting." At the University of Southern California, Economics Professor Kenneth Taylor is concerned that today's students are overwhelmed by "more choices than they have ever had in the past. Students are expected to determine their life-style at a very young age."

The class of 1992 will need every bit of its inherent toughness to cope with challenges of the next few months -- some of them familiar, but others new and unexpected. Homesickness, for example, has always played a part in the adjustment process, but for the growing number of freshmen whose families have been torn by separations or divorces, moving away may be particularly painful. Children in such families are often cast as comforters, confidants and caretakers of their parents as well as of their siblings. "Many of them feel really responsible for their parents," says Katz, "which makes the whole separation issue much harder."

For other new students, the greatest challenge is simply getting used to the independence that gleamed so brightly in the distance while they were in high school. "Being an adult all of a sudden was hard," recalls Harvard Sophomore Jonathan Cohn, 18, "balancing my own checkbook, making my own plane reservations." Some students struggle for the first time with managing their money. Others, like Craig Rich, a theater major at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, found that "one of the hardest things was waking up in the morning. You didn't have Mom there banging on the door."

Many students find that they can move away from their parents, but not from their expectations. Although Mom and Dad may have been students during the wild and woolly '60s, they are often no less caught up with achievement than their children. The students are the first to notice the double standard: "I worked and they didn't," says Prudence Cumberbatch, 19, a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, as she compares her freshman experience with that of her parents. "They partied and had fun and I didn't. And they said, 'Please don't do what we did.' "

Those expectations can be especially burdensome when it comes time to choose a course of study. The most popular major, not surprisingly in these practical times, is business. According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, 26% of college freshmen last year declared a business major, with engineering a distant second at 9.4%. Sophomore Mark Rodgers, at the University of Michigan, believed at one point that his parents might cut him off financially if he majored in English. "My parents were pressuring me to be an economics major," he says. "The idea is to have marketable skills when you get out of school. It's job, job, job."

Students' obsession with career preparation is not merely a matter of too much greed or too little imagination. "I think it's because they're more worldly," explains Frederic Schroeder, dean of students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "Students come to us now with a much wider range of experiences and a much better sense of the world through the media. It's natural that they should come with different expectations than students who came out of more sheltered environments 20 or 30 years ago."

This purposefulness and focus on the future have stripped some of the levity from the freshman experience. "They're more serious about their education," says Andristine Robinson, associate dean of students at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University. "I see better grades coming out," she says, but she also found that many of last year's freshmen skipped extracurricular activities because they "wanted to get their studies together first." For students who have just survived the brutal college-entrance marathon, this competitive atmosphere is all too familiar. But others, accustomed to being stars in high school, find themselves feeling lost in a crowd of overachievers. Alice Pond wandered into her first class of the year at Rhodes College in Memphis two weeks ago and, she reports, "half the people were like valedictorians of their high school class!"

Faced with such competition and hard work, freshmen may find it hard to make time to play and develop the friendships that are supposed to last through the 50th reunion. "It's a whirlwind," says Pamela Haber, a University of Michigan sophomore. "You make friends, you drop them." Many find that having an entirely new pool of classmates is a greatly liberating experience. Hated nicknames are finally shed, new affectations can be tried on and discarded. "Nobody has to know that you were shy in high school," says Veronica Lawson, 18, a Rhodes sophomore who counsels freshmen. "I tell freshmen that this is a new beginning for them, and to let go and make the most of it."

Unfortunately, for many freshmen this sudden liberation opens the door to indulgent excess. Despite the fact that 18 states have raised the legal drinking age since 1985, alcohol remains an often troublesome fact of campus life. Even if students cannot get into bars, most of them know upperclassmen who can buy alcohol. College officials fear that when students drink in their own rooms, out of the public eye, they are more likely to lose control. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that students find hard liquor easier to conceal than beer, but have had little previous experience with it.

Freshman supervisors take some comfort in the fact that drug use seems to be tapering off: 57.6% of the high school seniors graduating in 1986 reported that they had tried an illicit drug, down from 65.6% in 1981. Yet freshmen are considered to be at high risk for drug and alcohol abuse and the academic and disciplinary problems that follow. At the University of New Hampshire, for example, freshmen constitute more than half of all students who end up at the health services for overconsumption of alcohol and drugs. Drinking also makes students more vulnerable to other dangers. Between 70% and 80% of all acquaintance rapes at U.N.H. are alcohol-related. "Freshmen are at high risk for acquaintance rape," says Kathleen Gildea-Dinzeo, a health-education counselor, "because there's a lot of going out to parties, wanting to meet people and not being sure of boundaries."

For those who are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of new people to meet and new mores to learn, the fraternity and sorority system seems to offer safe haven: about 62% of all freshmen pledge. While some fraternities are still centers of Animal House-style saturnalias, many others have been forced by the new laws to clean up their activities. A number have instituted "dry rush" at parties, eliminating the heavy alcohol factor. Even the theme parties that once had such titles as "Beer with the Bros" have changed. Now fraternities sponsor barbecues, volleyball tournaments and even "Tradition Nights," at which alumni speak to the chapter about career opportunities.

The struggle to be accepted and find one's circle of friends can be especially hard for minority students, gays, foreign students and others who do not quite fit the model of Gidget Goes to College. Some campus officials are alarmed by the growing evidence of racism among today's students. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst became infamous for racial tension when an October 1986 brawl injured ten students. Now U. Mass.-Amherst freshmen are shown a video about racism and abusive behavior, and this fall's new students' convocation will include remarks concerning the "celebration of differences."

Perhaps the most complex aspect of social intercourse for incoming freshmen is the age-old conundrum of how to cope with sex on campus. "The first time I saw a boy leave a girl's room one morning, I was shocked," admits Tulane Sophomore Maggie Crocker, "but by the end of the semester it was no big deal." But today's freshmen, unlike their parents' free-love generation, are bombarded by advice and admonitions about responsible behavior and safe sex in the age of AIDS. "People are more careful about with whom they get involved," says Retha Pompey, 19, a sophomore at Lincoln. "They ask more questions, like 'Who have you been with? How long have you been sexually active?' " College officials are trying to encourage the cautious approach: condom dispensers have been installed in dorms, and some health services give them out free. "We are increasingly aware that while we can't go back to the in loco parentis role of old, there is a strong public expectation that we do have a responsibility," says Stayton Wood, dean of students at Rutgers in New Brunswick, N.J. Faced with so much information and advice, students admit to some changing attitudes. "I have gone from the basic male attitude of 'Who cares?' " says incoming Sarah Lawrence Freshman Olin Moore, "to one of 'You better slow down or you're going to end up dying from some strange disease.' "

) Finally, students with an ambitious course schedule, enticing extracurricular activities and an exhausting social life find that holding down a part-time job can just about do them in. More than two-thirds of all students at private colleges receive some kind of financial help, and many work during term time to earn extra money. "You can almost sense the kind of despair that can create," says Marc Steinberg, an academic counselor at the University of Michigan. Resentments can spring up between students who must scramble for pocket change and those who can easily go out on weekends and take lavish vacations. "People who don't have that kind of money become isolated from those other kinds of people," says Steinberg. "While their friends are out having a good time, they're staffing the pizza parlors."

Perhaps the best and the worst thing about freshman year is that it does not last forever. Just about the time the vast majority of students master the tricks and tactics of freshman life, they are promoted into sophomore seriousness. Most of them find themselves better equipped to confront the obstacles and opportunities that follow. The great challenge of freshman year is learning to adapt and manage change; if that lesson can be mastered, the others are usually far less painful. "It took me a while," says Lafayette Sophomore Rick Piatt, "but I had the time of my life. I had a chance to be who I wanted to be." Now there's the start of an education.

With reporting by Brooke Masters/New York, with other bureaus