On Monday, the New York Times ran an article highlighting the various ways colleges handle helicopter parents who are helping their children move in to their new dorms. More specifically, college deans and orientation leaders are finding that they must be more explicit when telling parents that their presence is not required for the remainder of orientation.

This raises an interesting question: why might parents feel incentivized to stick around after schlepping and then arranging all of their child’s gear from the likes of Ikea, Bed Bath and Beyond, et ceteta? A blog post that same day, from the New York Times Economix blog team provided an intriguing, yet plausible answer.

The blog cites a recently published report from Sallie Mae and Gallup, noting that “on average parents pay, from their income and savings, for 37 percent of the total cost of attending college.”

Couple that with the associated emotional concerns of moving a child into school, and it becomes clear why parents feel compelled to return after day one of orientation. Parents, like any smart investor, want to ensure that they are not wasting funds on their child's education.

So high school students, while your folks might want to stick around because they cannot bare the thought of not seeing you the next day, understand that they are making sure that you, as the student, are making the best use of their hard earned dollars.

What's a for-profit college? Think DeVry and University of Pheonix. These schools offer a range of degrees (think X-ray technician certifications to master's degrees) and are run by private, profit-seeking companies or groups, which makes them an easy target for public criticism.

However, this list focused on the traditional institutions that rack up the most student debt, as a large part of the U.S.'s college-going culture seeks admission to these revered schools. It's important to note that these prestigious universities, also, do not leave students' wallets unscathed. Here's the list, via Gawker:

1) New York University: $659 million
2) University of Southern California: $631 million
3) Penn State University: $590 million
4) Ohio State University: $560 million
5) University of Minnesota: $495 million
6) Arizona State University: $479 million
7) University of Texas: $474 million
8) Michigan State University: $433 million
9) Indiana University– Purdue University: $421 million
10) Rutgers: $398 million

It all comes down to the same basic question in the end. What's an education worth?

In America, the answer to that question often comes in the forms of decades-long repayment plans to student loan agencies.  Fortunately, more and more programs that aim to educate students about student debt are beginning to sprout up. Check out the student loan resources we've cited in recent articles about student debt.

For now, all we can do is educate and spread the word about managing student debt, since higher education isn't free. If it was, for-profit schools wouldn't even have a chance.

But despite what any of them say… how do we compare to ourselves?

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released statistics reflecting the 50 states by percentage of residents aged 25–34 who hold a college degree. I instantly thought about the dozens of annoying under-employed Census representatives who've banged on my door over the past few months trying to get me to fess up to the ethnicity of my next-door neighbor who no longer lives there. Clearly, the Census is unable to track those who go unnacounted for–many of which do not hold college degrees–so I was instantly skeptical of the stats.

Instant cynicism aside, the results are thought-provoking. And if Statistics 101 taught me anything, a sampling is indicative of a larger population. The Chronicle of Higher Education, the ivory tower of all that is sacred and holy in academic news, prettified the numbers with a lovely interactive chart, which you can play with and view by clicking here.

Here's a screenshot of my finagling with it:

Alright, let's take a look at my sampling. Obviously, Washing DC with its inflation of political employment has a high college diploma rate. 63%! Can't complain. And Massachussettes harbors the most colleges per capita in the entire country, so it's not a surprise that over half the state population has completed college. However, these two regions are the only ones in the U.S. with more than 50% college graduation rate (in the 25–34 age bracket). Yikes.

The next state on the list–my German ancestor's homeland of grand old prarie-laden North Dakota–comes barreling into third place, with a nearly 50% college-degree rate. I really dig this, because not only does NoDak also hold the most millionaires per capita in the U.S., but these education stats show that the tons of hard-working famers, engineers and other industrial workers way up north truly value education. Educated farmers in this state, we have. More cows than people? Perhaps…

California. An underwhelming 35.9% hold college degrees. And that's only based on the people reached by the U.S. Census. It's safe to say that California perhaps holds the largest amount of undocumented citizens, and it's safer to say that these are the very same people who slip by Census workers. Regardless, this number is too low already. Thankfully, organizations like BetterGrads and others are seeking to change this.

And finally, just to report on the lowest number I came across… Arkansas came peeking in at 25.9%. Surely our states can provide college educations to more than half the population! One quarter is just not cutting it.

Take a stab at this map (literally) by visiting the interactive version at the Chronicle and drop pins on states you'd like to compare. Maybe you'll be surprised, or perhaps dissapointed, at the results. Either way, this is a clear indicator that pro-college organizations have a lot of work to do to get those numbers up.

As for me, maybe I should stop being so hard on Census workers…

But higher education is not about money, not at the heart of it. Higher education is about learning to think, and while the ability to think is not as tangible as a cold, hard paycheck, saying “No way!” to college is saying “No way!” to a lifetime of both financial and cultural growth.

This is not an easy pill to swallow amidst today's recession: many economic indicators show that college may not be the savviest financial investment for the immediate here and now. Average starting salaries for college graduates have dropped, down nearly $1,000 from a year ago. Student loan debts are ever growing. To top it off, employers are increasingly reluctant to tap into the recent-college-grad talent pool when hiring, from 79 percent in 2007 to a projected 44 percent this year. And that talent pool is supposed to be more talented, no? So jobs are in short supply, and the jobs that are out there aren’t paying as well as they could or should. Factor in the overall cost of obtaining one’s degree, and the odds of being instantly gratified post-college (financially speaking) are less than favorable. For one, this writer’s first job out of college was waiting tables for not even minimum wage.

Yet the most telling statistic still remains in the pro-college camp: those with higher education are more consistently employed than those without. What’s more, workers with bachelor’s degrees earn an average of $26,000 more per year than those with only high-school diplomas. So while the wounds of debt are still fresh after graduation day, with some patience, a bachelor’s degree does in fact promote financial growth.

Still, financial growth is not the point. What I learned from college was not that waiting tables doesn’t pay—who doesn’t know that?—but that there is further to go, always. There are symphonies to be written, theorems to be proved, histories to be learned and taught. Cultural growth. As Rebecca Mead writes in The New Yorker last week, higher education exists to “nurture critical thought; to expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind… ”

Anyone can be programmed to wait tables—no fancy degree required. But the ability to think critically is what separates man from machine. The ability to think critically is what promotes, what Mead calls, an “engaged citizenry.” It’s the difference between waiting tables indefinitely (as the listless, unengaged citizen) and waiting tables transitionally. So while that medieval philosophy class I took never came in handy as I was wiping down counters, at least not in the What-Do-I-Use-On-This-Mustard-Stain kind of way, it challenged me to engage the world, to question the world, to grow.

No, the gratification may not be instantaneous. Far too many overqualified college graduates are waiting tables in ill-fitting aprons, or stocking bookshelves for minimum wage, or selling hot dogs to tourists, working to pay back student loans. But when it comes to financial and cultural growth, college is still the best bet out there. Because in the end, the ability to think is far more profitable than the ability to be programmed, no matter how much it may cost.

Peter Sheehy
San Francisco, California

The author earned his BA in English and Music from Fordham University, and more recently his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. His short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines across the country, including The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Madison Review, Inkwell, and Storyglossia. He now lives and writes in San Francisco.

"Why College?" is a series of op-ed articles written by Better Grads staff and guest contributors about why we chose to continue educa tion after high school, how we got there, and glimpses into what we learned. To begin at Part 1 in the series, click here.

He describes a student  who cannot understand how to write an essay outside of the standard five-paragraph formula that we learn in elementary and middle school. He observes that many students seem unable to conceptualize a piece of writing that does not follow this general organization. He is concerned that this is about more than an inability to think outside the proverbial box—it reflects an inability to think. Or as I would put it, think independently or organically.

As a writing advisor at Oxy, I definitely saw this problem many times. It’s actually really hard to break out of that formula once it’s been drilled into our heads since we were single-digit years old—I struggled with it myself and worked with several students who had great ideas but could not take them from the starter structure to a more advanced, college-level structure. I agree with Smigelski that by implying that the beginning of learning the writing process is, in a way, the end, we risk limiting students’ capacity to develop their own unique writing styles that start with organic thought processes. I worked with students who would literally say that they had such-and-such idea for a paper but couldn’t fit it into the traditional structure—totally frustrating! I’m a huge proponent of freewriting, brainstorming, and any other term that basically refers to working out ideas and questions on paper, unfettered from restricting formulas that were never meant to constrain our individual thoughts.

Smigelski’s article made me think of a related issue in higher education today: literature, or the lack thereof. I really, really, really wish that I’d taken more than one literature class in college. And I really, really, really wish that my college had somehow required it. While I appreciate the “box” approach to college requirements (i.e. checking off something in each box/category instead of requiring an identical curriculum for everyone), I feel that it let me get away with an insufficient literary education. I took one English literature class and a few Spanish literature classes (que fueron magníficas) but I regret not taking a class that would have exposed me to some specific genre of classic literature, be it Twain or Tolstoy. I love to read and I firmly believe that no matter what a student’s academic interests may be, everyone’s writing and critical thinking skills can benefit from literary discussion. So I agree with much of what Smigelski said even if my own experience leaves me regretting something he does not include.

Moreover, the main way that my college evaluated writing was with a graded essay at the end of our freshman year after two semesters of writing-based “core classes” on topics from across the academic spectrum. Again, while I appreciate the individual choice that this system permitted, I know that more emphasis could have been put on the actual art of writing. I loved both of my core classes, but I think of them largely in terms of their subject matter rather than as writing courses. A simple test that, honestly, wasn’t that hard to pass cannot shed light on this issue.

While I don’t agree with all of Smigelski’s anecdotes and evidence for his argument, I do agree that universities need to teach writing in a way that values individual thought and reflection over the systematic approach that so many of us learn early in life. It serves a purpose—getting the ball rolling, learning a semblance of structure—but professors need to push it aside in favor of varied writing techniques that allow students to develop their own critical thought and analysis abilities.

PS: I strongly recommend headings as a way of organizing a longer paper without interrupting its flow. Just saying.

How did your college approach the teaching of writing? What would you change?

"Plan B" details many reasons why some high school students may be better off pursuing a vocational course or apprenticeship rather than a college degree. Included among these are the high cost of time and money that goes toward college education, the urgent need for workers in many fast growing industries like nursing and customer service that require specific skill sets but not a college degree, and the fact that some students are "unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree" or "may not be ready to do so" and would benefit from more "credible alternatives."

Professor Richard K. Vedder, an economist at Ohio University who advocates for the need for multiple pathways to college and career, likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor's degrees. He offers this interesting tidbit as evidence that a B.A. or B.S. may not be the best investment for many individuals based on their current profession.

I believe that the transformation of vocational education from the perceived domicile of the under-achieving that many in our parents' generation grew up to know, to the rigorous and skills-focused Career Technical Education of today is one of the benchmark achievements of public education in the last twenty years. The multiple pathways approach is the right one, and I applaud all efforts toward creating "credible alternatives".

But what the article misses, alarmingly, is that many students who veer toward a more vocational path are not necessarily desiring to do so. The article assumes occupational destiny where it does not exist, and exonerates colleges from their share of the responsibility.

Let's be real: a sizable percentage of those 'over-educated' mail carriers had a difficult time finding jobs after graduation or did not find a suitable profession that connected to what they studied in college, found an opportunity to carry mail, realized that the money (and fresh air) was pretty good, and stuck with it. Were these students less qualified, ambitious, or knowledgeable than their peers? If there is evidence for this, it is not presented in the "Plan B" article.

And so the question becomes: what happens between graduation and now that would shift the immediate occupational focus of the average 3.2 GPA liberal arts student from writing or marketing to carrying mail or waitering/waitressing?

Life happens. We all need to earn money and make a living somehow. And after a few years on a job, whatever the job, and finding that you have a knack for it, the value of security and self-worth may overshadow the more uncertain career path. We find meaning in other places, like raising a good family and giving to our communities. And soon, $50K a year as a mail carrier sounds pretty good over the idea of starting out at $50 per article as a writer.

Is this a bad thing? In one sense no, as I believe the successful life is better measured by character and impact on the people you love rather than career. However, I believe hordes of 20-somethings leave their alma maters, find difficulty in the job market, and settle professionally, putting their career dreams on the shelves for the next generation to consider.

This can be ameliorated, at least in part. The onus is on colleges to better understand the needs of students after graduation and in transition. The undergraduate years mark the shift between schooling and career for most of us. It's not enough to equip graduates with "transferable skills" and wish them the best. College could do a much better job supporting their students' professional aspirations.

Alumni networks tend to fill the gaps and serve as makeshift and pragmatic career centers. But even the most robust network is not enough. Focused and realistic career planning, translating each major to a set of skills and professions, instructional support about how to utilize online professional sites like LinkedIn, and teaching students how to leverage relationships with faculty and alumni into career opportunities would go a long way.

Teaching students how to apply for jobs and how to market themselves to potential employers after graduation should be included as part and parcel of the college education. It's at least as important as understanding Plato's Forms and why Marxist experiments have failed.

I am lucky to have had the best mom I could have asked for: warm-hearted, bright and cheerful, a friend of my friends, willing to stand up against any foe or obstacle for my younger brother and I, so funny in that silly mom-kind-of-way, graceful, tender, college-educated, an older adult teacher and friend to the elderly and disabled, compassionate and caring for all people and animules (as she would say it), always supportive, always by my side, and always, always loving.

I took a moment on this day to thank God for my mom, who, aside for life itself, I consider my life's greatest blessing. And while she is no longer with me but in spirit, my good fortune of 23 years and one month with my mom Joan set me on my life's course.

The apple often doesn't fall far from the tree. We all know that adage. For better or for worse, our moms (and dads) make a big difference in our college and career success. According to a 2001 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, college enrollment rates vary considerably with parents’ educational attainment, even when other factors are taken into account.

In 1999, 82 percent of students whose parents held a bachelor’s degree or higher enrolled in college immediately after finishing high school. The rates were much lower for those whose parents had completed high school but not college (54 percent) and even lower for those whose parents had less than a high school diploma (36 percent).

In "Getting a Boost Up the Ladder of Success," the economist/comic/writer Ben Stein cites the influence of his parents and their social coterie of movers and shakers as the preeminent reason for his professional and personal success: "almost everything I have I can trace back to my father and mother. To their efforts, to who they were, to their character." With refreshing candor, Stein draws a straight arrow from his background to each one of his achievements:

And because I had grown up around economics, I just assumed that I could learn it and assimilate it, and so I had confidence in my abilities in the field. This led to my getting good grades and helped me get into Yale Law School and Yale’s graduate school, where I studied with still more friends of my parents, like Henry Wallich and James Tobin.

How did I get my start as a performer in front of the camera? Well, here we go again. It was from a chain of connections I made starting in 1973 at a Yom Kippur breaking of the fast at the home of William Safire, then a Nixon speech writer and fast friend — and later pallbearer — of my father’s. His wife, Helene, was a close friend of my mother’s.

Stein, as I have also done thus far, flits without mention between the importance of the resume of your parents and the actual parenting quality of your parents. It should be noted in unambiguous terms that whether your parents are well-educated professionals or not does not determine whether they are wonderful, whether they instilled you with the work ethic, confidence, character, etc. you need to achieve any dream. Social connections and the letters P, h, and D after your parents' names far from guarantee that you grew up in a happy, supportive, or loving home.

Nevertheless, having well-educated, well-connected parents who are high up on the professional ladder clearly helps a lot in many regards. So what to do if you lack this type of brute luck?

What if you don’t have a well-connected father? What if you don’t have a well-connected mother? What if you don’t have a father at all? What if you are an immigrant without any connections, with parents who barely speak English, if at all? What do you do? What if you are a young man or woman who has some talent and ambition but little or no idea of how to get onto the ladder? To tell you the truth, I am not at all sure what you do.

Yet all is not for naught.

But I do know that there is a large class of baby boomers who have done well in their financial lives. They are retiring now and looking for things to do to help the community that gave so much to them.

In other words, Ben Stein knows the importance of mentors, and the opportunity for working or recently-retired professionals to make a tangible difference in the lives of many of us. You need a good mentor. I need a good mentor. Most of us could use a good mentor (or two). Whether or not you won the parent lottery, chances are you aren't as disposed to follow in your parents' footsteps as Stein was. Are we to believe that the host of Win Ben Stein's Money would have skipped economics altogether had his parents been musicians or lawyers? Regardless, there is a value for all of us to have a mentor or two in our near-to-peer group or chosen profession.  Fortunately, there are many good men and women — educated, successful in their professions and marked by strong characters — who are willing to help.

So, reach out. Find a mentor. A recently retired baby boomer. A college student or young professional (as we offer through BetterGrads). Introduce yourself. Send an email. Make a call. Be brave, and go for it. For as we know, for better or worse, the apple often doesn't fall far from the tree. But on this day after Mother's Day — the day after you counted your blessings, thanked your mom, and celebrated moms everywhere — show your mom your thanks by finding a mentor or being a mentor for someone in need. Do this and I'm sure your mom would be proud.

If you're in the 18–24 age bracket and have submitted your contact information in any way shape or form to an educational institution, your response to the above questions is likely: "What solicitations? I lined the cat box with them."

I can vouch for this phenomenon. Not even a month after taking a certain college admissions exam, I was bombarded with spiffy university "viewbooks," thick packets detailing the benefits of vocational school, and e-mails explaining why I should pack up and move across the country to major in some obscure field. It was overwhelming. A bit flattering for the first second-and-a-half, but definitely overwhelming.

Like coupons, credit card offers and salacious e-mails from V1agra, I brushed the phenomenon off as another meaningless facet of modern-day marketing.

…but then I came across this opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Seth Godin, suggests that perhaps colleges and universities solicit so many applicants so they can reject more applicants, and thus, get ranked higher on such totem poles of truth as the U.S. News & World Report. Godin notes, "Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?"

While this sounds like a low blow, colleges and universities have always been in competition to be revered as the most prestigious, most resourceful, most successful-people-churner-outer. But does the explosion of e-marketing materials and increasingly shinier pamphlets dilute the quality of the education itself?

Some radicals would say yes, higher education is turning into a conglomeration of mass marketing targeted at mass audiences with a goal of delivering mass audience-ready information to chew three times and spit out. Conservatives on the issue would likely say no, higher education would never do such a thing as compromise quality for the recognition that quantity brings.

I would say that perhaps it's not so much of a charged issue as it simply is an issue of change. Everything's changing in these post-2000 years. Print publications are losing relevancy, toddlers are texting their moms when they're hungry, and no one even cares that Britney is crazy anymore. The world is opening up, and so is the scope of education.

Godin also points out that things that used to matter a lot for school prestige don't matter as much anymore, such as the size of a school's library. With Internet databases housing nearly every article you'd ever need for that senior thesis paper, Dewey Decimal fanatics are losing club members fast.

"Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue," Godin's article notes. "One reason to go to college was to get access. Today that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things that students take away from college are interactions with great minds … and non-class activities that shape them as people."

Well put, Godin. My speech & debate team days are much more valuable to me than how my school's admissions stats ranked against other state schools across the same latitude.

Perhaps the age-old institutions of lore still provide the highest quality education available in this country, but perhaps other means of accessing information and the way institutions present themselves needs to be reevaluated. Because if we don't keep reevaluating education, it becomes history.

And you can already major in that.

I was not convinced, but the memory sticks with me as similar stories have emerged and the topic also pertains to the larger issue of gender-neutral campus housing on college campuses. My own experience involved living in co-ed buildings in which the hallways were designated by gender, but roommates were same-sex only. This seemed typical to me and it worked out fine—while I don’t think I would have minded living in co-ed hallways, I definitely would not have been okay with co-ed bathrooms. I already found the shared bathrooms (for the first three years, typically a dozen or so women sharing a 4-stall restroom) to get crowded and messy at times, and let’s be honest, sometimes kind of awkward. A co-ed bathroom—especially with the number of students usually sharing in a typical dorm—would not be my style, but I understand why it’s favored by many students.

Beyond co-ed bathrooms, gender-neutral campus housing has become a significant issue on many college campuses. My own college has addressed it, Syracuse University offers gender-neutral suites, and Columbia University recently saw a movement to institute a policy—and that’s just a few examples.

After students at the Barnard College (which is all women) unsuccessfully tried to gain gender-neutral housing, students at their affiliate Columbia University took up the cause last fall. Sarah Weiss, a senior at Columbia, reached out to the LGBTQ community on campus to develop a gender-neutral housing policy that would be feasible for the university to implement.

“This was about creating a safe space for students who identify with the LGBTQ community, who might not feel comfortable either living with an individual of the same gender” or living within the traditional male-female binary, Weiss explained.

Although the LGBTQ community led the efforts, Weiss emphasized that gender-neutral housing is in no way limited in who it benefits—many students have expressed an interest in living with a roommate of a different gender regardless of sexual orientation. It is, as Weiss explains, simply about “creating safe living spaces” for all students.

Students worked together to propose a workable plan for gender-neutral housing at Columbia and met with a range of university administrators, including the college deans. The deans requested further details from the students, which led to the formation of a task force that has worked throughout this semester to further develop the policy plan. One issue was where the policy would be implemented—a single building? Campus-wide? After much deliberation, the students determined that campus-wide gender-neutral housing would be best because keeping the policy to individual floors or buildings would be “isolating,” Weiss explained. The students are now hopeful that a pilot program for gender-neutral campus housing will be implemented at Columbia for the 2010–2011 academic year.

In my view, the debate over gender-neutral housing on college campuses is significant for a couple of reasons. First, since the LGBTQ community has driven the debate on many campuses, it’s an important signal of the overall role played by students identifying as LGBTQ on college campuses. However, since gender-neutral housing is widely supported beyond the LGBTQ community, I think that its rising prominence speaks to a heightened involvement of university students in their schools' and campuses' lives. Students are taking a very active role in examining the policies that shape their college experiences—I think that we’re going to see more universities look at gender-neutral housing among many other initiatives that matter to students.

Enter The Cronk of Higher Education, a satirical news site about ridiculous issues in higher education, overblown academic conferences and fake intern/slave-wanted advertisements. In short, it's The Onion with a PhD in post-post-modernist structuralism in Beowulf. The movie.

Fake article topics range from tech-savvy colleges that admit students via Evite and college fairs that draw 3,000 parents … and zero students. From revered professors emerita to jaded school administration staff to the broke PhD going on a 6th year of candidacy, The Cronk sheds a lighter, more ironic light on academic culture than the iron gates of higher ed usually allow through.

"I daydream about someone taking one of our articles to a staff meeting in order to ask 'Do we act like this?' " said Cronk founder and author Leah Wescott, the pen name of a seasoned academic employee somewhere out in universityland. "We're hoping to provide a safe way for [academic] professionals to look in the mirror. We also throw in some gratuitous stories about helicopter parents and millennial students so we can all feel superior."

(helicopter parents – stage moms who write their kids' college essays)

(millennial — Generation Y, or people born in the 80s, 90s and 2000s)

Sincerity aside, The Cronk has snark down to a perfectly-crossed t. The name itself is a play on words based on the well-established Chronicle of Higher Education, the self-proclaimed leading "source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators." The Cronk proclaims differently, per a succinct mission statement:

The Cronk of Higher Education is a satirical publication hellbent on generating intelligent dialogue and healthy laughs about the world of college and universities.

*Disclaimer
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t.

**Another Disclaimer
This website is a work of satire. Names, characters, settings, businesses and incidents portrayed are not to be taken seriously. It’s humor! Items submitted to CronkNews for publishing will be used at the sole discretion of the editors. All rights reserved.

Noting that the site's primary readers are the butt of the jokes themselves, Wescott hasn't yet encountered too many hurt feelings from those parodied in the often outlandish articles. "So far, we've steered clear of haters, but it's only a matter of time before they come gunning for us," predicts Wescott. "If you've ever read comment threads on Internet education blogs, they can become absolutely vicious."

And they are. Just yesterday, a New York Times article titled "Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College" sparked many long winded, verbose, book-length, pedantic, overly-wordy comments opening with such harsh jabs as "Admissions officers are idiots." Ouch. Perhaps Wescott would frame the whole shebang as "Logg State Univ. Study Finds New Cause for Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Marginalized Populations with Large Vocabularies." Or perhaps I may work on my titling skills before trying to submit an article to The Cronk.

The good-natured ability to laugh at oneself is at The Cronk's core, especially when it comes to short fuses and long CVs. I'm eager to see how wider audiences will respond as the site gains more traction on the Web.

Here are some of my top Cronk picks:

Staff Member Marries the Rules in Campus Chapel
(Because if something's written down, it must be very important.)

CronkNews Seeks Summer Intern
(Salary competitive with other unpaid intern positions, free instant coffee and free toilet paper. 2-ply!)

A call for conference program proposals about a wide range of topics, including: diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, GLBT diversity, generational diversity, diverse diversity…
(Did I mention they want diversity?)

Perhaps The Cronk won't go viral with the intensity of CollegeHumor, and perhaps the humor is a bit high-brow and pedantic in itself, as many undergraduate students may not be familiar with the world of academic conferences, for example. But if The Cronk is spreading some eyebrow-raising humor to the curmudgeon that is often the face of higher learning, I'm all for it.