What World Is College Preparing This Student For?

A college education has value. It has more than academic value (assuming the student earned a degree in a subject that is reasonably marketable). College teaches students how to manage their time, how to get along with a roommate, hopefully how to balance a checkbook and manage consumer credit, and many other useful skills that they will take into the world when they graduate. Ideally it also helps students become adults that will function well in society. Well, the following article leads me to wonder about that last sentence.

Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about an Oberlin College student who complained about the people who installed a radiator in his dormitory.

The article reports:

A student at an $80,000-a-year ultra-liberal Oberlin College in Ohio claimed in an op-ed that he was left ‘angry, scared, and confused’ because ‘cisgender men’ installed a radiator in his ‘safe space’ dormitory.

Peter Fray-Witzer, a student enrolled at Oberlin College, posted an article in Friday’s edition of The Oberlin Review in which he takes school administrators to task for giving him short notice about the installation.

Fray-Witzer writes that he asked a campus official if he could be exempt from having a radiator installed in his room so as to avoid the ‘intrusion.’

He also complains that he felt ‘mildly violated’ and ‘a little peeved’ when the contractors returned to his dorm room the next day to ‘check the insulation.’

I truly wonder how this person in going to function in the real world after he graduates from college. The majority of people in the real world are cisgender. The majority of people in the real world do not care what gender he is or was. The majority of people in the real world are not a threat to him. If he actually intends to be a contributing member of society, I suggest he seek therapy. If a radiator installation is this traumatic to him, what will he ever do if he lives in a house or apartment that needs some sort of maintenance? Is he comfortable taking his car to a dealership or buying a car?

It is obvious that this young man’s college experience is not preparing him for life in the real world. Is he the exception or the rule?