Though culture has changed, higher education still the same process of discovery

It's that time again. All over the United States, a fresh crop of high school seniors are heading off to some college campus to pursue a "higher" education.

Here on our campus at College of DuPage, I've noticed a number of earnest students who have come early to familiarize themselves with our campus. Today I watched two of them stroll our long hallways with their heads down - trained on their smartphones. Yet they never tripped or stumbled or bumped into a bench - almost as if they had sonar. How do they do that? As I watched them, I couldn't help but consider how much things have changed since I was a college freshman and how different my experience was.

On a hot August morning in 1979, I moved from a small Iowa town into Burge Hall, or "The Zoo," a dorm that housed 1,000 freshmen at the University of Iowa. My "cage" was a 10-by-12 foot room, where I would live with two other bewildered teenagers. As my parents and I pulled boxes out of our car, I remember two songs drifting from the open windows of the dorms: "Imagine," by John Lennon, and "Lonesome Loser," by the Little River Band. That day, overwhelmed and unsure, I identified more with the latter.

The two films everyone was watching then were Apocalypse Now, a gruesome critique of the Vietnam War, and Animal House, a raunchy fraternity romp that had all of us freshmen excited. Today, if I mentioned Apocalypse Now, or Vietnam, in the classes I teach, some of my students would be clueless. The same for Animal House and its star, John Belushi, even though he's an alum of our college. My students are as far from Vietnam and Belushi as I was from World War II and Groucho Marx. Most were toddlers when 9/11 happened. They have different wars, and senses of humor, and shorter attention spans. They tweet and Skype and swipe while treading in a sea of a thousand choices - of iTunes and YouTube videos and Netflix movies.

On my dorm floor every night at 6:30 p.m., Alan Alda's voice and the laugh track from M*A*S*H seeped through all the half-closed doors. We huddled around our 10-inch TV screens for 30 minutes before heading to the cafeteria, and the steaming silver vats of mashed potatoes and chicken-fried steak and buttered carrots that awaited us, and which I loved.

There was no obesity epidemic or concern about diabetes. There were two kinds of coffee - regular and decaf. No Starbucks or Sumatra or "a dark Columbian with chocolate notes." After dinner, if we hit the bars, there were two kinds of beer: regular and light. No red ales or IPAs with a "radical hoppy finish."

We had fewer choices. If less is more, maybe that's a good thing. Though we also had less flavor, and less diversity - in cuisine and culture and communication.

Today my students can access whatever movie or TV show they want whenever they want it. They can binge watch an entire season of a favorite show in one weekend, or watch a movie between classes. They do this on their phones - a magical device that is a library, camera, alarm clock-calendar, scanner, GPS map and a hundred other things. The devices are very smart, and addictive.

There was, of course, no parallel technology during my college years. We had plug-in immobile phones, and we plunked away on typewriters that had arms and bells. We called our parents "long distance" on Sunday after 5 p.m., when rates were low. What did we talk about? What I remember is my getting my first ever "C" -- in World Politics. Mom: "Don't worry, you're just starting out. College isn't easy." Dad: "I thought that was going to be your major. Will this affect your Pell Grant?"

Or maybe we discussed the news: Three Mile Island exploding, or the Soviets invading Afghanistan, or the 47 American hostages still huddled in Iran, waiting. Back then the geopolitical and environmental debacles seemed dangerous, but less dire in that slower, less-crowded world.

You could be in only one place at one time: only in your dorm room or the library or in class. Reality was not virtual. Yet college was still the same confusing rite of passage, the same struggle to figure out who you are and what matters - and how to balance a social life with a social conscience, how to party like John Belushi yet imagine like John Lennon.

For me, the imagining was part of what made it "higher" education. But I didn't understand that then, nor that college, like writing and life, is a process of discovery marked by as many detours as arrivals. I didn't know that an essential part of a good education is simply finding the courage to follow what you love and to believe it will lead you where you need to go.

That's the hard part, and it hasn't changed much over the years.

How much is it worth? A lot. But you don't know that until long after you've graduated.

Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.