So You Want to Be a Dropout

BY TOM MAYER

YOU are in the middle of a pre-exam-period dead week frantically studying rocks for the imminent five-hour identification final in elementary geology, when suddenly you decide you don’t give a damn anymore. It simply isn’t worth the effort; you’re going to fail no matter what you do. You haven’t studied all term because the course was dull and the professor a fraud, and now it’s too late.

But geology isn’t your only problem. Recently you’ve decided that your friends are shallow, juvenile, and phony; your roommate snores, steals your razor blades, and leaves his dirty underwear on the armchair; and to cap it all, your girlfriend, Cynthia, has been seen repeatedly necking in a red Mustang with a lacrosse player from a rival fraternity. You feel hemmed in, harried, harassed; you haven’t shaved for a month, bathed for ten days, eaten anything but Dexamil since day before yesterday, or slept in a week. You need peace and quiet and lots of it. If you look at five more rocks, you’ll snap. They’ll put you in the nut house, but you’11 be so far gone they’ll never be able to put you back together. You’ve got to get out. Out, out, OUT.

But how? Your mind churns wildly. Then, in a moment of revelation, you remember that the mechanics of dropping out are simple. Nothing to it. Most colleges are glad to be rid of you. Overcrowded classes, lack of dormitory space, not enough laboratory equipment. At the big state universities you’re nothing but a number anyway. All you have to do is tell your adviser you want to take some time off to think it over. But tell him you’re going to be gone only a year, or a semester, even though at the moment you’re planning to emigrate to Zululand. Never burn bridges.

If your grades are in shape, there shouldn’t be any problem. The worst that could happen is that you’d have to talk to a junior dean, explain to him that classwork has lost its kinetic excitement, that you feel under intense pressure and want your life to be inner-directed. You don’t feel that you’re doing the college experience justice, so you want to take some time out to re-examine your values.

The dean brushes a graying but boyish shock of hair off his forehead, taps his mahogany desk top with his fingernails, fills his pipe, sucks on it a few times, lights it, and tells you that your problem is fairly common. Many students suffer from your brand of malaise; it’s become an integral aspect of higher education; the university understands and sympathizes. You’re welcome to take off as much time as you want; the only things you should do are tell your draft board and let the university know when you want to come back. You thank the dean, shake his hand, and leave his office dwelling happily on your forthcoming year in Europe, African safari, beach shack at Malibu, or muscle-building job among the colorful he-men on a pulling unit in the West Texas oil fields.

The real problems of dropping out are not, you reflect, connected with university rules or administration attitudes. As a matter of fact, the university has been surprisingly understanding. Perhaps you’ve been doing it an injustice all along. But your parents are going to be quite something else. If they’re liberal, urban, well educated, psychiatryoriented, reasonably hip, relatively modern types — people who read the New Republic, have a family psychoanalyst, and worked as volunteers for Adlai Stevenson — the chances are you won’t have much trouble when you break the news. A sigh from Mother, a suppressed grunt from Dad. They want you to be sure you know what you’re doing, in much the same way that they wanted you to be sure you knew what you were doing last summer when you went to Mississippi, but once you convince them your head’s screwed on right, that you merely want some time to find yourself, Dad says he’s with you all the way and Mother nods agreement.

But God help you if Dad’s a dirt farmer, insurance salesman, bean picker, truck driver, Republican, corporation executive, or mechanical engineer. He’ll probably hit the ceiling. He’s been spending a lot of money, maybe as much as three thousand dollars a year, to keep you in school; he’s given you every opportunity, and you turn around and throw it in his face. You try to reason with him by saying that you only want some time to think. That, he replies, is what you go to college for. But, you say, I couldn’t do any constructive thinking at college because there were too many pressures. I want to be inner-directed. Pressures, says your father. You think a corporation executive doesn’t have pressures? Hell, yes, he has pressures. You gotta live with pressures.

Or Dad and Mother may be deeply hurt. They genuinely don’t understand. They both came from poor families; they never went to college themselves: it’s been a financial handicap all their lives. They’ve worked so desperately to put you in a position where you’ll have some choice in life. They can’t understand what went wrong. They drink nothing stronger than beer; they took you to church when you were young; Dad spent all his spare time with you — remember that fishing trip to Lake Chicahoocha when you were eight? — they’ve loved you more than anything else in the world: where did they make their mistake? But, you say, I’m only planning to take a year off, not turn Communist or something. But why?, cries your mother. Yes, says your father, why? Don’t we have a right to know?

So you try to explain that at college you were spinning your wheels. College ought to be a place where you do creative things with your abilities, not just dreary routines. There wasn’t time to think or pursue your own interests.

Your father says he doesn’t know anything about dreary routines, only that when he was a kid growing up back in the thirties, when things were really tough, a kid was lucky to be in college at all. A college kid had a job, a good job, waiting for him when he got out. Aha, you say. But not anymore. Now you’ve got to go on to graduate school, to business school, or medical school, or law school, or veterinary school. You’ve got to have an M.A. or a Ph.D. to teach even. You have to be sure before you get in so deeply. Your father says he hadn’t thought of it that way, and you think maybe you’re getting somewhere; however, your mother begins to cry hysterically, and that ends the conversation.

As always, arguing with your parents leaves you in a state of fist-clenched frustration. You are never able to express yourself fully to them. How do you explain motivations that are so subtle and deeply rooted that often you are not clearly aware of them yourself?

DROPPING out probably reflects a good deal more than mere distaste for routines, slovenly roommates, and elementary geology; in reality, it may be a manifestation of some such psychological problem as a lifelong struggle to break out of a family pattern — perhaps you were forced to go to Dad’s prep school, and Dad’s college, and the prospect of graduation and living at home and going into the family investment firm or dry-goods business or grocery-store chain or optical company is more than you can stand. Possibly you went to an inadequate public high school, and in your freshman year at an Ivy League college you found yourself so ill prepared, overworked, socially inept, and plain scared that you developed a serious sense of inferiority. Everyone seemed wittier and more intelligent and better adjusted than you, so that life at college devolved into an infinite series of real and imagined humiliations. Or perhaps you came to college after four or more years at prep school and found that nothing stimulated you, that on the whole your college teachers were inferior to prep school masters, and that since college courses tended to be dull and superficial, the excitement and purpose had gone out of learning. Or you might be in love and get married, but either because you are poor or because your parents refuse to support you, you have to leave school and begin to earn a living. Or, sadly, you may have gotten a girl pregnant. Or perhaps you are dead earnest about pursuing a career in which a college education is of no substantial value. Professional athletes, entertainers, actors, musicians might fall into this category.

The point is that beneath your irritation with the surfaces of college life, you suspect some flaw in your own personality or background, or else you feel that attending college is essentially a frivolous and time-wasting undertaking. For you, even if you don’t plan to depart college permanently, dropping out is a serious business; it seems a sharp and fateful departure from the norm of your generation, and it involves a major decision, arrived at by you, and by you alone, after a great deal of self-examination.

Finally, however, no matter why you left, or say you left, you get settled into your new job or apartment or marriage and begin life on the outside. Your parents have been reconciled to the inevitable or have disowned you; the draft board is breathing down your neck, but you’re stalling them; in short, you ought to be happier than ever before. No papers, no classes, no pressures. Time to think. Time to set your life in order, decide what you really think about Zen, what ought to be done in Vietnam, how to handle De Gaulle, how to stop police brutality in New York.

You sink into a pattern of sleep and independent study, or travel, or begin an exciting relevant job, and everything ought to be fine, but predictably enough, it isn’t. Roughnecking turns out to be much harder than studying rocks, your African safari didn’t pan out, or your year in Europe is off because your father won’t finance it. He says he’ll be glad to teach you the glue business from the bottom up, but he’ll be damned if he’ll ante up good dollars for you to waste playing around with a bunch of screwballs and perverts in a lousy city like Paris. He’s only been to Europe once, as a guest of the goddamn government, but you can take it from him, there’s nothing there but a bunch of perverts and bedbugs.

Even your social life is awful. You’ve been away from home for a while; you’ve lost contact with most of your old friends from high school, and those you still know seem changed. Or maybe you’ve changed, but anyway, there’s nobody to talk to, you never have interesting discussions, and the girls are strictly bad news. They wear too much makeup, and most of the good-looking ones are married or have moved away or are in college. You remember faithless Cynthia longingly.

Time drags. You are not so innocent as to think that college will be a bed of roses when you get back, but at least things happened there. Or perhaps you’ve become intrigued with the glue business but realize you need more chemistry before you can come up with any significant innovations. Several nights you’ve stayed late down in the vat room fooling around with a new formula for heatresistant, cold-resistant, spit-resistant, sweet-andsour-tasting, water-repellent stamp stickum, but after several explosions and one fire, you’re modest enough and sufficiently objective to admit that you simply haven’t got the background.

Of course there’s always the possibility that you’ll be one of the dropouts who stays out, in which case you may become a plumber or electrician or mechanic or brush salesman, or you might join the Army, or start a window-washing service. You might even make good. Perhaps you’ll be like Dr. Edwin Land, who left Harvard, invented the Polaroid camera, and made about forty million dollars in the process. Or Sandy Koufax, who left the University of Cincinnati, went into the major leagues, and improved the curve ball. Or perhaps you’ll be a writer or a painter. You always thought you were deeper, more talented, more given to reflection and philosophy than your contemporaries, and when you write your first short story — a delicate and melancholy tale about the time your greataunt Gertrude had hepatitis — and sell it to the New Yorker for $462.15, you feel that truly you have a future in the arts. The social stigma attached to spending your life without a degree is something you are sure you can overcome; in fact, if you are at all successful, being a dropout has considerable reverse snob appeal.

But the chances are that out of boredom or fresh enthusiasm or new interests or the blunt realization that degrees mean more money, you’ll return to college willingly. You’ll go back with reservations and misgivings: you’ll know that college hasn’t changed, and perhaps in your heart of hearts you’ll still believe that you could and should be doing something better, something less nebulous and more important — but you will go back. Your friends will be pleased, your parents will be ecstatic. Soon you’ll be settled back in the old groove: classes, labs, fraternity parties, exams, rushing, football games, quizzes, papers, and Cynthia, or someone like her. It will be almost as if you’d never been away, except that late in those all-night bull sessions, when the jocks have gone to bed and you’re tired of talking girls and the conversation turns to serious topics like values and meaning and significance, you’ll be a man of experience, an intellect to be reckoned with.