I have managed to keep up this blog for over a year without referring to the days when you:

- applied to just three schools

- got into all three

- spent $3K tops per year on tuition

- enrolled in Psychology, Philosophy, Film and a course about Malcolm X

- took over the library

- then, providing you could type, you could find an entry-level job in the field of your choice without anyone ever asking you where you attended college, what you had studied, what your GPA was or how many years it took you to graduate.

Now, of course, everything is different…and the Registration Process seems to have changed just as much as the Admissions Process.  One inevitable earth-friendly innovation is that there is no longer a hard copy of the Schedule of Classes.  Course descriptions are now listed online, but not in a readable way.  (Imagine the Manhattan phone book – You would never read it on the internet the way you would glance through the pages of the real thing.) 

So never again will students get to pore over a thick catalog, crossing out the Nursing and ROTC classes, circling Political Science and Communications, contemplating all the fascinating possibilities that are available.

Because CJ doesn't know what he's missing, he doesn't really care that his school only provides a virtual schedule of classes.  In fact, he barely glanced at the offerings and instead chose his classes with the help of his three upperclass friends by text messages, a phone conversation (!) and even a lunch (!!). 

They gave him advice like "Don't take Calculus, Chemistry or Spanish – they're all too hard." (Too bad those happen to be CJ's strongest subjects.)  Other suggestions involved not signing up for anything before 11 AM, checking out teachers on ratemyprofessor.com and a big hint about an entire department known for its easy A's (can't divulge that one here…would have to kill you.) 

The three upperclassman didn't completely neglect "love of learning" courses.  They each suggested 2-3 life-changing professors, but, alas, their classes all had long waiting lists.

So the Neurotic Parent, who never once helped choose a class for CJ in high school, felt compelled to step in and find some interesting classes.

And in no time I discovered the REAL reason why colleges have stopped printing catalogs: Today's classes all deal with the same common theme - Globalization.  In just a quick look-see, I found 72 classes that point out that It's a Globalized World After All…for instance:

- "Globalization and Domestic Politics" 

- "Labor, Gender and Globalization"

- "Globalization and Public Health Discourse"

- "India in a Global Age"'

- Even a Capstone seminar in Canadian Globalization (Hmm…are the rest of you as surprised as I am that our neighbor to the north has become globalized?) 

Sadly, the Neurotic Parent Institute has determined that CJ's school is not the only institution that has become obsessed with the "G" buzzword.  In a shocking development, a newly-funded NPI study has show that colleges EVERYWHERE are dumping their catalogs supposedly for ecological reasons, but in fact we are experiencing a massive international cover up designed to prevent students from realizing that the majority of college classes are now Globalization-related.  Even universities in China and India and Iceland and Ghana and Dubai and Brazil have jumped on the bandwagon…Wow – I wonder how all those countries decided to do the same thing at the same time.  Maybe there's a class I could take that could explain this unprecedented phenomenon.