Buyer's remorse

The big idea running through my mind today, the last day of classes, was that I should have been carrying a stake, hammer, and crucifix in my bag. There should have been an vampire effigy of the semester on the lawn, where we could have rituallly killed off the spring term, make sure it was dead before we left it to rot among the cherry blossoms.
All this makes it sound more gloomy than it was, yet on the T.S. Eliot "Hollow Men" scale, my ending, I have to admit, is all whimpers, no bangs. The papers continue to trickle in like the rainwater dripping from a leaky gutter. It's spring, it's over. And not over. I'll get over it.
I keep hearing from students how sour they are about their college experience. Not everyone, mind you, just enough to raise an eyebrow. Retention is a familiar problem to all colleges, and freshmen are especially prone to drop out or change schools after year one. There's nothing new to report here, and I have no numbers to cite. It's just an artist's hunch that our incoming classes, who are so media saturated and yet so media gullible, don't have the critical faculties to sniff out a bad match. They believe the brochures and the campus tour guides. They drink the punch and sign on, completely unaware of what a college should be offering them. So they learn by living through it, suffering and slogging through the long march of fall and spring. They get to the end and they're walking around stunned, not sure what has happened, trying to process it all. It's happened to me before (cf. grad school), so I guess I'm a little sensitive to the signs of woe. Maybe the hard lesson learned is that college isn't minty toothpaste, a car lease, or clearance rack clothing. It shouldn't be sold that way, and to herd the student/consumers in like happy pack animals isn't the right way to recruit or retain them. It creates resentment and remorse, apathy and bitterness, depression and sputtering desires.