"Hacking" College
Recent reflection on the relationship between large language models and a time-tested recipe for college essays led me to renew my acquaintance with works that explain ways that students can “hack college.” Some of these offer tips on life as a full-time dorm-dwelling parent-paid college student. Others focus on ways that part-time students, already occupied with jobs, spouses, and children, can amass college credits as cheaply, quickly, and painlessly as possible.
The articles, blogs, books, websites, and video channels that make up this hackiverse cover a great deal of ground. Nonetheless, whether they treat undergraduate studies as a four-year debutante ball or a grim exercise in dodging the distractors that haunt multiple-choice tests, the authors of works of this genre agree that college is a realm unto itself. To put things another way, they all begin with the assumption that things that students do while enrolled in a university enjoy no necessary connection to scholarship, let alone the life of the mind.