The Coddling Continues

Frankly, easing high school students into college with all the delicacy of extracting an intact soft-boiled egg from a shell is ridiculous. How about a program to ease college graduates into the real world? We can just create a bunch of little cities that pay 22-year-olds great salaries to blog about themselves all day for a year, then toss them into the wild of actual cities and see how they fare. If students at our best universities can't hack sharing space and faculty access with a few students with a couple more years of life experience, then I have some serious fears about our country. Parents, and educators: if you really want to help today's most promising youngsters, how about a year off between high school and college for traveling the world and learning what's really out there, rather than further insulating them from the challenges they will inevitably face later in life? Why are we more interested in creating gentle buffers than truly expanding life experiences? We're going to have to do a lot better than this.