Moved to Pullman, WA about a year ago. Drugs, alcohol, partying, and apathy towards school appear to be widespread on campus

WSU is a notorious drinking school. This is well-known in the PNW.

So many variables come into play here. An interesting take on current university life, but that's just one university, in one state, from one point of view, without a juxtaposition of your own experiences, with the bias of your opinion.

With that said, assuming that you are noticing a legitimate trend, are you surprised society is evolving? Or just evolving so poorly? Lots of angles to look at this from.

1. College students brag about how much they party, and the students who don’t party much don’t talk about it

2. With the $15 minimum wage it’s almost impossible to get full time temporary work without a college degree

3. Weed is a huge problem on the west coast but it’s not pervasive everywhere

4. People of your grandparents’ generation partied really hard too

5. Go visit Annapolis, West Point or BYU if you want to see kids who don’t party

Drugs, alcohol, partying, and apathy towards school appear to be widespread on campus

Yep. Back when I was a postdoc at Penn State (2001), I remember running across a lady at a random food place in rural Southern PA, and she agreed with my conclusion that mostly college was delaying reality and partying for 4 years.

Why did you expect different?

Pullman is a sh*thole. There’s nothing to do there but smoke, drink and screw. What did you expect?

What a miserable place to live.

Par for course wrote:

Drugs, alcohol, partying, and apathy towards school appear to be widespread on campus

Yep. Back when I was a postdoc at Penn State (2001), I remember running across a lady at a random food place in rural Southern PA, and she agreed with my conclusion that mostly college was delaying reality and partying for 4 years.

Why did you expect different?

I did know many 'students' in which college really was a 4 year, daddy-pays-the-bills, delaying of adulthood but that was absolutely not the norm. University of Texas, late 70's/early 80's.

What I described is my direct observation (and direct observations of others), not anyone bragging about how much they party.

As I said, I went to State U in a different state, and while there was partying there too, overall it was nothing like here.

Lead author Prof Susan Sawyer, director of the centre for adolescent health at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, writes: “Although many adult legal privileges start at age 18 years, the adoption of adult roles and responsibilities generally occurs later.”

She says delayed partnering, parenting and economic independence means the “semi-dependency” that characterises adolescence has expanded.

http://bbc.com/news/health-42732442

The modern American college experience is a funded-by-someone-else daycare. One you can go off to, screw around for a few years, get patted on the back by your family when you return for Christmas, and return to the playground. It has absolutely nothing to do with education or thought; this transition took place when college became equated with the "thing you do in order to get a good job." All my life, teachers were telling everyone in class, "go to college so you can make lotsa money!" No, everyone in the country has bought in, the universities provide very little, get very rich, and so do the bankers, who hand out all those loans. Then you graduate with an STD, a piece of paper with a stamp, a mountain of debt, and supposed prospects of getting a good job. And what's that good job? Some lame ass, meaningless, 9-5, in a cubicle, and ugly pleated khakis. Congrats.

Pink Floyd got it best,

Come in here, dear boy have a cigar

you're gonna go far

you're gonna fly high

you're never gonna die,

you're gonna make it if you try

there gonna love you

Devil Dog wrote:

No, everyone in the country has bought in, the universities provide very little, get very rich, and so do the bankers, who hand out all those loans.

The overwhelming majority of student loans come from the Department of Education or Sallie Mae (a government sponsored entity). Like the housing bubble, it's always the government - acting supposedly with good intentions - that adds the fuel to the fire.

Unlike the housing bubble (or stock market bubble), there is no obvious "crash mechanism" in place due to the lack of collateral and the non-dischargeable clause.

I have a few ideas about how this ends and none of them are good.

-Krispy

The overwhelming majority of student loans come from the Department of Education or Sallie Mae (a government sponsored entity). Like the housing bubble, it's always the government - acting supposedly with good intentions - that adds the fuel to the fire.

...

I have a few ideas about how this ends and none of them are good.

The Affordable Care Act reconciliation process at work again...

In Washington, WSU is well known as a right-wing, brain-dead, bro party school that cranks out pleated khaki wearin' middle managers by the case.

Yup. I go to UofI and it's the same way. We're in the middle of actual nowhere dude, people don't have anything g to do so they just get blasted all the time.

Moved to Pullman, WA about a year ago.

So you shoulder most of the blame for this situation yourself.

I don't think OP is too far off.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/sep/07/father-of-injured-wsu-student-nobody-should-be-abl/

"Matthew Gray was three days into his freshman year at Washington State University when he fell out the window of his second-story dorm room.

Police said the 18-year-old had been drinking, like many of his peers, although the circumstances of the fall remain unclear. In the early hours of Aug. 24, he was airlifted to Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane with skull fractures and other injuries. He remained in a coma Wednesday at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, his hometown.

Gray is one of dozens of WSU students who have been injured in falls from balconies, roofs and windows. The falls have occurred at university residence halls as well as off-campus apartments and Greek houses. Most involve alcohol.

Now, Gray’s father is demanding that WSU add safety features to windows on campus. In an interview Wednesday, Jim Gray acknowledged his son was drunk but said that’s beside the point."

Colleges actually differ to a great extent in the seriousness of the students. My experience has been that the more competitive state schools have more serious students than the expensive private schools. I have been surprised by even the competitive expensive private schools. A serious student can do well there because so many of these fellow students are preoccupied with partying.

Spokane and everything near it has always been meth/crackhead central.

FrenchDawg wrote:

Yup. I go to UofI and it's the same way. We're in the middle of actual nowhere dude, people don't have anything g to do so they just get blasted all the time.

I have heard that so much, but I disagree. I go xc skiing in the winter, lots of hiking in WA and ID in the summer, running the Palouse is actually quite good, lots of live music downtown in Moscow, farmer's market in the summer, different events going on with the universities, lots of intelligent and educated people from the two small university towns, etc. Spokane and CDA don't have a ton going on, but it's easy to go up there for a concert or something too. Most undergrads and people who went here that I've talked to never even went up Moscow Mountain a single time in the four years they lived here. They never once went to Elk River. Some never even went to Palouse Falls. They just got drunk all the time. It's much more the culture than the environment. There are way worse places to go to school as far as that goes.