After growing up and dealing with lies your parents told you, next up is college. College is an institute for higher learning. Many say that college is the best experience that you can have in your life. High school seniors across the country worry about being accepted into their #1 school of choice. In making their college choices, students visit their prospective college campuses. Colleges give out housing tours, classroom tours, as well as hype up their amenities and their upstanding student body; all to convince you to attend. When you show up for your first semester, things aren’t what they seemed to be when you took that tour. What happened? They lied. What lies do they tell us to make us want to attend?
1.) Our food is great. You need a dining membership
You thought high school cafeteria food was bad? Well the university cafeteria is just as bad! When you first check out the cafeteria while on your open house, the food looks, smells & tastes great, making your mouth water with anticipation of a semester filled with this stuff. It’s all just a trap though, once the parents are impressed and have signed off on a membership, the food declines exponentially. You have to go though, because you can’t possibly waste your parents money, right? Just don’t go on taco night. You don’t need their plan either, as the chances are there are 50 million restaurants within a 10 mile radius of campus.
2.) Buy your textbooks from the campus bookstore online to avoid the lines
In the first week of class, you can be guaranteed three things:
1 – You won’t find parking
2 – You will read a lot of syllabi
3 – You will be waiting in long lines for everything (parking decals and textbooks)
Oh what’s that? You can buy textbooks online from the bookstore to avoid lines? Well, that’s a relief. Now you’ll just have to wait in line with all the other people who bought their textbooks online.
3.) Living on campus makes for amazing experiences and happy campers
Ok, there’s nothing wrong with living on campus. I lived on campus myself for my first two years in college. However, the little pamphlet they give you on housing tours and the pictures on housing websites are greatly exaggerated. You’ll never sit there awkwardly with your roommate just smiling while working on homework in a room that doesn’t have anything out of place and is mysteriously clean. The rooms in the pictures are also decorated in a suspect way — girl rooms have hip flowers and polka dots along with pictures of their “friends” (which are just copied and pasted from Google) and guy rooms have sports posters and hats lining the wall. It’s all a lie. You will never decorate your room like that. They need to show rooms with holes in the wall from all the thumbtacks and dirty laundry scattered about.
4.) Our student-teacher ratio is low compared to other colleges
Sure, the classes in your senior year may have a small class size but the university officials forget to tell you that your freshman classes will be populated with 300 other people. And you know the horror story professors tell you: “Take a good look at your classmates now, because half of them will be gone by next week.” Yeah, right. You’ll still recognize the same people by their annoying questions and their desire to pass out exams to help the professor.
5.) Our students come from all over the country
Statistically, this may be true. Honestly though, are you going to run into someone from Montana, Alaska, Hawaii, or Idaho (unless you are in that state already, obviously)? Most of the people you run into are from YOUR state because either they couldn’t afford going out to an out of state college or they didn’t want to move too far from home.
