10 Things Your College Student Won't Tell You

1. “Sure, I’ve cheated. Who hasn’t?”

Cheating has reached an all-time high on college campuses, with 70 percent of students now admitting to some form of it. Incidents involving unsourced material from the Internet in written work quadrupled between 2000 and 2006, yet 77 percent of students don’t consider it cheating or “very serious.” “Some students have justified it to themselves,” says Donald McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. “They’ll say it’s the faculty’s fault if they’re too lazy to stop it.”

Mobile devices exacerbate the problem; students can text-message answers to one another or use camera phones to post exams online. SparkMobile, a service from study-guide publisher SparkNotes, lets students send in text-message queries and get crib notes in seconds. But that’s just one of many such services: GradeSaver.com grants access to sample essays for $6 a month, while RentACoder.com lets computerscience students outsource homework to India for around $20. The companies say their sites weren’t designed to help students cheat, but “it’s impossible to police,” admits RentACoder founder Ian Ippolito.

2. “Studying abroad’ is one big party.”

In 2006 Congress passed a resolution dubbing it the “Year of Study Abroad.” “We want the next generation of adults to be in touch with their national and global citizenship,” says Jessica Townsend Teague, former program manager at the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship. But despite good PR, study-abroad programs are often less than rigorous, and underage drinking is rampant. “It’s necessary for the image of study abroad to shift from a ‘party hearty’ experience to a very serious national priority,” Townsend Teague avers. It’s also a matter of safety: “Students go from being unable to drink legally to countries where alcohol is freeflowing,” says Gary Rhodes, director of the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University. “Some students have died while abroad.”

Schools are doing their part to protect students, requiring better orientation and urging them to avoid countries deemed unsafe by the State Department. But Townsend Teague advises students to think before they act: “Take a moment to be very sober about what we can and cannot do to rescue a student overseas.”

3. “I’d stay here forever if you’d pay for it.”

Brian Bordeau graduated in 2006 from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He says it wasn’t a big deal, but admits everyone else thought it was—he’d been in school for seven years. “Honestly, I’d rather come to school again next fall,” he says. “I really like it here.”

Bordeau isn’t alone: Just 53 percent of students enrolled in standard undergraduate programs get their bachelor’s degree within five years. Changing majors, transferring schools, and good old slacking off can all result in extended enrollment. One of the obvious downsides is the added financial burden of an extra year or two in school. But there are hidden costs, too. “You lose a lot of money in loan interest and forgone wages by taking that fifth or six year to finish,” says Jacqueline King, director of the American Council on Education’s Center for Policy Analysis. If you plan to pay your child’s way through college, King suggests setting a firm timetable. When Bordeau was forced to take out loans to pay for tuition during his sixth year, he began to buckle down and hit the books. The final year, “I paid for it,” he says. “That motivated me to finish.”