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1 | Situating the Party School
- Northeastern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Situating the Party School Today in the United States there are almost three thousand four- year postsecondary institutions of higher education, enrolling over nine million undergraduate students pursuing bachelor degrees, and more than two million graduate students.1 American universities and colleges range in size from fewer than a thousand students to over fifty thousand students enrolled at any given time. Some of these schools are public or state- funded, and some are private.2 Some have sprawling residential campuses, and some are small commuter schools with no on- campus housing. Whatever students’ preferences , there is surely a college to fit their needs, from small, private, liberal arts colleges to large, public, sports- oriented “party schools.” This chapter provides an overview of the variations of geography and infrastructure at today’s American universities and colleges, and highlights the traits most typical of the American party school. Recall from the introduction that the typical party school (like most of the schools on Princeton Review’s list of top twenty party schools) are large four-year public universities with vast residential campuses located in geographically isolated “college towns.” The purpose of this chapter is to distinguish the party school from among the thousands of other American universities and colleges. It does so by identifying the structural traits that characterize the type of campus and community most welcoming to a party lifestyle. The chapter concludes by delineating what is currently known about crime at U.S. universities and colleges based on official crime statistics, and explains why these numbers provide only a limited scope of a much larger and mostly “hidden” problem. T h e A m e r ic a n C oll e g e a n d C a m pu s American universities and colleges are diverse and vary according to many structural aspects, including size of school and enrollment, type of campus (e.g., residential or commuter), location, and whether they are public or private. Today’s four-year institutions of higher education range in size from 4 Overview admitting fewer than one thousand students to more than fifty thousand, with schools that enroll ten thousand students or more accounting for well over half of total college enrollment (Knapp et al. 2011). Most large universities with enrollments over ten thousand consist of several colleges, usually distinguished by their academic emphasis (e.g., law, engineering, arts and sciences), and are typically spread out upon one or more sprawling campuses . The campuses of these large universities are often open to the general public, and many are integrated into the surrounding communities with no clear boundaries separating university property from the bordering neighborhoods . In contrast, smaller colleges are often situated on more compact campuses, are much more restrictive about access, and usually have clear signage identifying the boundaries of the campus and separating college- owned roads and facilities from public streets (Bromley 2007). U.S. universities and colleges also vary greatly in terms of geographic location, with some schools located in or near densely populated urban or suburban areas, whereas other schools are tucked away in much more remote or rural areas far away from major cities and other large towns.3 Geography tends to influence whether or not students will commute to school (i.e., travel back and forth to campus for classes) or live on or near campus during the academic year. Geography also influences how often students who live on campus travel home on weekends. For instance, at universities and colleges located farthest away from nearby cities, the majority of students will stay on or near campus during a good part of the academic year. It is at these residential schools, often located in isolated college towns, where students tend to party most and where many of today’s party schools are found. In addition to size and geography, another distinction among American universities and colleges is whether they are public or private. According to the Department of Education’s 2010–2011 statistics, just under seven hundred of the three thousand four- year institutions are public institutions, which include research-intensive facilities, land-grant universities (whose primary mission is to serve the state), and regional state universities that focus more on teaching (Gumprecht 2008). Public universities are partially supported by appropriations from the state. And though all public universities were originally established to provide a low- cost education for its own state’s residents, many of these public schools now enroll a sizable proportion of students from outside...