Towns They Dont Want to Leave

Can freedom be a terrible thing?  Maybe, according to Ethan Watters, author of “Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment.  “This generation doesn’t know what to do with its own freedom,” Watters told The New York Times.  As the average age of marriage continues to rise, the length of time that college graduates live alone before starting a family is unprecedented.  People now have 10, even 15 years where nothing much is expected of them.”  And parents who pay health insurance and help pay the rent “unwittingly encourage a few extra years of idealism.”

And since they have the luxury, why leave college?  Just get another degree.  And when that’s done, why leave a college town?  You, too, can become a “stay-behind graduate,” holding multiple jobs, living with multiple friends in a cosmopolitan college town with intellectual amenities, music, ethnic restaurants, libraries, but also an “almost surreal cultural cohesion” – small towns without small mindedness.

College towns are, as one geographer Blake Gumprecht called them, “paradise for misfits” where one can maintain the creativity and idealism you enjoyed in college.

  

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