Please have the decency to romanticize the black mold you paid $85,000 for

I was halfway through my third mimosa at a lovely little Sunday reset brunch in Tribeca when my niece shoved her phone in my face. On the screen, a tearful eighteen-year-old was packing a sensible duvet into a compact car, abandoning her university dorm just fourteen days into the fall semester.

Apparently, this is a trend. Dozens of these viral TikToks are flooding my feed, documenting a mass exodus of freshmen who have decided that living in a windowless cinderblock cell with a stranger who vapes at four in the morning is somehow bad for their mental health. Call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to paying exorbitant sums of money to be profoundly, character-building-ly miserable?

I simply cannot fathom the entitlement required to look at an eighty-five thousand dollar annual price tag and expect comfort, safety, or even a functioning radiator. A livable indoor climate is simply not a non-negotiable.

My own daughter, for instance, hated her first two weeks at college. She called me in tears, devastated that her roommate was an amateur disc jockey and the dining hall was serving ethically ambiguous poultry. Did I let her come home to our brownstone? Absolutely not. I told her to put in her earplugs, learn to meditate, and remember that her grandfather's name was on the library. She stayed, and now she is a thriving junior who only cries on weekends.

Just last week, I was having dinner at Balthazar with an old friend who serves as the Executive Vice Provost of Student Synergy at a prominent Ivy-adjacent institution. He could barely touch his steak frites. His administration is projecting a catastrophic three percent shortfall in housing revenue because these young people refuse to stick out the semester.

We built them a forty million dollar recreational lazy river, he told me, wiping a tear from his eye. But because the dorms have a slight black mold problem and the meal plan costs more than a mortgage, they claim they are overwhelmed. It is a tragedy of resilience.

He is entirely right, of course. When I attended university in the late eighties, the suffering was the point. We didn't flee to the suburbs the moment we encountered a mildly biohazardous communal bathroom. We stayed. We built character. We developed lifelong coping mechanisms that I still discuss with my therapist twice a week.

These fleeing students claim they are protecting their peace, citing anxiety, homesickness, and the dawning realization that they are taking on six-figure debt to attend large lectures in a glorified recreation center. But what they are actually doing is robbing themselves of a crucial developmental milestone: the sheer, unbroken panic of realizing you are entirely trapped in an abusive relationship with an institution that views you strictly as a walking endowment contribution.

Is it really so much to ask that our youth put their heads down and subsidize the bloated administrative salaries that keep our collegiate ecosystems thriving? Every time a freshman takes their bedding and goes home to community college, another Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Wellness loses their summer home in the Hamptons. It is deeply selfish.

I am perfectly willing to admit that the modern campus is a dystopian financial meat grinder. But leaving after two weeks is simply bad manners. If you are going to bankrupt your family for a piece of paper, the absolute least you can do is have the decency to romanticize the experience. Hang some string lights over the asbestos. Pretend the daily panic attacks are just part of your dark academia aesthetic.

We must ask ourselves what kind of society we are building if we allow eighteen-year-olds to simply walk away from catastrophic financial mistakes while they still have a chance to refund the tuition.

It is time for this generation to step up, unpack those duvets, and accept their rightful place at the bottom of the higher education revenue model. The provost's steak frites are getting cold.