College students are adults

Please treat them like adults

The protests happening at Columbia University and many other colleges around the country are making headlines. On any objective measure of the most important stories in the world today, these protests would rank towards the bottom. But this is what people are talking about, so I’ll use the opportunity to rant about one of my pet peeves: I hate it when people call college students “kids.” They’re not kids. They’re adults.

Not all of them are adults, of course. There are a few stray geniuses who skipped a few grades and ended up in college young. Terence Tao got his masters at 16. Most college students aren’t Terence Tao. In the US, and most other countries, a standard course of primary and secondary education runs from ages 6 to 18. When you start school is gated by age. You start first grade at age 6, second grade at 7, and so on up to starting senior year of high school at 17. If you go right to college after graduating high school, you start when you’re 18 years old. That’s the legal age of majority. The overwhelming majority of college students are, legally, adults.

Of course, it doesn’t matter much what word we use to refer to college students. I’m sure I’ve called my college students “kids” a few times. (Mea culpa!) What annoys me is the idea that we should treat college students like kids. They’re not kids, they’re adults. Now, of course, they’re young adults, and just getting used to the whole “being an adult” thing, and so it makes sense to cut them some slack from time to time. But part of being an adult is taking responsibility for your own actions. Sometimes, the best way to teach a young adult how to be an adult is to not cut them any slack.

This matters because plenty of young adults aren’t college students. Plenty of people don’t have the grades or the money or there wherewithal to attend college. About half of all 18-year-olds go to college. The rest do other things; mostly, they get entry-level jobs. And these young adults are absolutely treated like adults. If they fuck up at work, they get fired. If they break the law, they are charged. Life comes at you fast, and you navigate it as best you can.

College works different, though. If you fuck up, the worst thing that happens to you is you fail the class and you have to take it again. And with grade inflation rampant, it’s getting harder and harder to fail. (Professors hate failing students. They’ll appeal to the dean and it’ll be a whole thing, and the only reward you get for going through the rigmarole is that the student you fail will give you a shitty teaching evaluation and then you don’t get tenure.) And if you break the law on campus, no one calls the cops unless you’re doing something really crazy. The call goes to campus security, and the matter is handled discretely by university administration. It’s actually really hard to fuck up your life when you’re a college student. Why all this forbearance? “Because they’re just kids.” No, they’re not.

This is relevant in the case of the protests on campuses now. The police have been called in several cases, and the overwhelming response that I see from most academics is that this is wrong. Now: of course it is wrong to arrest people on the basis of their protected speech. Obviously. But universities have rules that set (legal) time, place, and manner restrictions on speech. If you set up an encampment that interferes with the regular operations of the university in a significant way, the university is entirely within its rights to call the police to clear away the encampment. There might be pragmatic reasons not to do so; the Columbia protests were set into overdrive when the cops were called the first time. But there’s nothing wrong with calling the cops to clear out an encampment.

As a thought experiment: what if the people setting up the encampment were not college students but were, instead, a bunch of 18-to-22 year-old townies setting up tents on a university lawn that’s officially open to the public, and from there proceeded to harass students on the way to class? After the university administration asked them to leave several times, and warned them that the police would be called if they didn’t, no one would bat an eye when the cops showed up and started making arrests and charging misdemeanors. But if it’s college students doing the same? Bad form to call the cops. Best to handle it in house. They’re just kids, after all.

When I make this argument, someone always brings up studies that show that brain development continues until approximately age 25. While college students might be legally adults, they’re still not fully mentally mature, and that’s why we should cut them some slack. I take that point seriously, although setting the age of legal majority to 25 would have lots of downstream effects that the people making this argument should really think through. (What does this say about pedophilia laws? Is porn featuring 24-year-olds “child porn?” Or, like, should a 24-year-old be able to apply for a bank loan without a parent co-signing? Why or why not?) But if you want to raise the age of legal majority for everyone, then ok, maybe, I’m happy to have this conversation.

But what I’m vehemently against is the status quo, where the official legal age of majority is 18, but where the rule that usually gets followed in practice is that you gain the responsibilities of an adult when you complete your formal education. This system sets a different standard of behavior for young people who go to college and those who don’t. That’s patently unfair.

Worse than that, it’s unjust. The “kids” who go to college aren’t, by and large, the most academically gifted people in the country. They’re a combination of the smart and the wealthy. Being able to send your (adult) child to a university where they’re treated gently and gradually eased into adulthood is one of the great privileges of the upper classes. College is a way of securing a better future for your kids not just because a degree is required for many desirable jobs, but because college students are not held to the same standards of responsibility as non-college students, and are punished much more leniently for minor instances of anti-social behavior. Humans do tend to be more reckless and irrational in their late teens and early 20s. The wealthy shield their kids from themselves during that time by putting them on college campuses where they are treated gently: adulthood with training wheels.

I’m not saying that we should be more willing to ruin the lives of college students when they make mistakes. I’m just saying that we should hold college students to the same standards to which we hold their peers who finished their formal education with high school. Some forbearance might be appropriate when dealing with everyone in their late teens and early 20s. But that’s a forbearance that we should decide to extend to all young adults as young adults. And if it’s not a forbearance we’re willing to extend to a non-college student, we shouldn’t extent it to college students.

If you’re a 22-year-old college senior, you’re not a kid anymore. You’re an adult, and we should expect you to act like it.