I found the talk Professor Schwartz gave about college life to be one of the most interesting Rose café events I attended so far. Professor Schwartz spoke from many chapter of his book, How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning, about the many dynamics of college life. I found many of his points to be very relatable as a college student here. One facet he spoke about was financial aid and the cost if education. An interesting fact he mentioned was that almost half of Cornell students receive financial aid with a package averaging 25,000 dollars. I found this interesting as I wondered how this statistic was evident in campus life. A little less than half of students receive on average a little less than half off on tuition. I feel like this is a discrepancy I noticed here on campus in manifest ways.
Another aspect Professor Schwartz spoke about was the affect and influence of fraternity and sorority life on campus. He mentioned that he thought greek life will be relatively obsolete in the future and believed that people who join greek life often assimilate into their organizations. I found this interesting and feel that I have noticed it to an extent, but a benefit of greek organizations is that it allows for students to find a place on campus that they belong. Greek organizations sometime help form a person’s college identity and allow for them to have a place they can call their home away from home.
I was also at this event! He definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about financial aid here at Cornell. I don’t remember why he thought that Greek life would become obsolete in the future, but I remember him being very opposed to frats/sororities as well.
I think it is interested that he mentioned that the Greek system will be obsolete in years to come. I do not agree; the Greek system provides housing to a decent portion of the student population. If Cornell were to remove the Greek system, I would imagine that they would have to implement more on-campus housing to accommodate all of those students.
I think that the Greek system is a very controversial topic among a lot of people. Many people stereotype all fraternities as party frats when this is not always the case. In addition, I agree with you when you said that the Greek system helps people find a place for them to fit in. However, I think that the best part of the Greek system is that it allows people to make their own decision about joining. If I do not want to be apart of the Greek system, then I do not have to be. However, just because I do not want to join, does not mean that it won’t be there for the people that do.
Professor Schwartz made a lot of bold predictions that day. One that goes beyond what you said above about financial aid is that he thinks schools like Harvard and Stanford will not have any tuition within 15 years. This claim seems hard to believe, but I know those schools try to and have the means to accommodate students as much as possible, so they can select the ones they want without worrying about them being able to pay. We’ll have to wait and see.