Stunner: Students flock to warm, beautiful Southern colleges

Here’s a question to ponder: If you could go back to college right now, knowing everything you know, would you do it? Would you spend the next four years at an institution of higher learning, living in a dorm and taking classes … and if you say yes, where would you go?

The sad truth about college, like youth, is that it’s wasted on the young. You arrive in college wide-eyed, you quickly get overwhelmed by the massive sensory input on every level — educational, social, sexual, logistical, financial — and by the time you’ve figured out how to navigate college properly, you’re putting down a deposit on your cap and gown.

Gen Z — born roughly between 1997 and 2012, i.e. the current college generation — has watched all of us millennials, Gen X’ers and Boomers blunder our way through college and decided, nope. Like everything else, Gen Z has decided to speed-run through the awkward bits of college and cut right to the good stuff. The keg beer without the overpumped foam, if you will.

A recent article in Vox delved into a fascinating trend: “Why Gen Z is flocking to SEC universities.” Now, on its face, this might seem like the most obvious of trend pieces — like “Why water quenches your thirst,” or “Why you get hot when you stand in direct sunlight” — but there’s more at work here. And understanding why exactly Gen Z is finding joy in the land of Roll Tide and Go Dawgs might just be a key to understanding what motivates the Youth of Today.

Or we might just be jealous of them. I’ll get to that part, too.

If you’re of a certain age — i.e. out of college for several years, at least — you’ll frame the question of why the Youth are going to Southern colleges in your own terms. Pretty much everyone older than their mid-20s will understand that beautiful collegiate architecture, attractive fellow students and warm locations make up — shocker — an appealing combination all their own that’s all too rare once you leave school.

For nearly a century, Southern institutions have used their hallmarks — football and fine weather — to market themselves to Northeastern students. (Trust me on this.) That trend has only intensified in recent years; as Vox notes, SEC-school undergraduates hailing from the Northeast rose 91 percent from 2014 to 2023. Alabama (pictured above), Tennessee and Ole Miss have all seen their out-of-state enrollments grow by more than 500 percent since 2002.

However, simple stats don’t encompass the matrix that Gen Z applies to every major life decision. Gen Z has grown up almost entirely online, and social media has been a part of their lives since they were in elementary school. They’ve been social media stars for as long as they can remember, either on their own channels or on their parents’ Facebook/Insta feeds. They’ve grown up with “influencer” as a viable, even lucrative, career path, and thus, Vox suggests, they filter every life decision through how it will present to the world on TikTok.

And man, is college made for TikTok-ification, particularly SEC schools. You can start with #RushTok, which has turned sorority rush into an on-the-fly reality show complete with heroes, villains and multiple costume changes. (Alabama pioneered this trend via Bama Rush, a frankly terrible missed opportunity of a documentary that nonetheless showed the rest of the world much of what goes on behind those austere, palatial sorority houses beside Bryant-Denny Stadium.)

Football games, bro-country music, tailgates, fraternity parties, gorgeous old Greek Revival architecture, massive lecture halls, magnolias and pines, abundant sunshine … it’s all perfect set dressing for crafting a highly curated presentation of yourself to the world. This ain’t The Secret History, and it ain’t Animal House, either … college in the 2020s is a sleek, highly branded experience, a four-year exercise where everybody’s marketing something to everybody else.

If you’re reading all this and thinking, these little phone-obsessed idiots are missing the whole point of college, well, yeah … but also, we did too. The thing with college is, those of us who have already gone through it can’t possibly view it with anything approaching objectivity. Oh sure, we can complain that Kids These Days don’t have to work as hard, or they can cheat their way to success by using AI, or they’re the victims of a tightly coordinated network of brainwashing professors, or any other sort of personal philosophical/political blanket we want to throw over these unruly puppies.

(Note: This all presupposes that students can afford to go to college without saddling themselves or their families with mountainous debt, which is a whole separate, and far more maddening, issue.)

Here’s the truth, though, whether we want to admit it or not: We’re all jealous of college students. We’re jealous of the fact that they have their world in front of them, that they’re not burdened with mundane problems like bills and housework and car trouble and such, that their sweet soft skulls are so blissfully free of worry that they can, with a straight face, protest the vegan content of the bowls in the cafeteria or complain that a professor won’t give them an extension on a paper because they’re just dealing with a lot these days.

And I think that’s why so many people get so infuriated at college students acting like dopes, either by fixating on trivialities like social media celebrity or endorsing bone-stupid ideas: because we think, I wouldn’t do that. With the benefit of years or decades of hindsight, we look at today’s college students and wonder why they can’t, you know, act more like we would.

Thing is, they shouldn’t act like us, and we shouldn’t want them to. College shouldn’t be a place for clinging to ideological rigidity, or for acting like you’re already in the real world with all its attendant to-do’s. College is the place where you do stupid things — like exploring ideas and philosophies that have little relevance to the world outside the ivy-covered walls — and you should be allowed to make stupid mistakes along the way.

The problem, of course, is that if you’re curating every element of your life, if you’re always on camera somewhere, then those little stupid mistakes can blow up into reputation- and even career-killing catastrophes. We’ve all done and said things that would earn us a scolding, even a cancellation, from those outside our circle. Shouldn’t today’s college students get a bit of the same grace?

(A bit. Don’t go endorsing white supremacy, kids.)

The job market for college graduates right now is absolutely wretched, a wasteland thanks to economic uncertainty, the rise of AI and the growing dread that the worst lies ahead. So if you’re a college student, why not take four years to enjoy life in a beautiful locale and a warm climate? There are worse things to do with your college years than eject from your hometown and get a taste of Southern hospitality.

Now, if the SEC could just start winning national championships again …

—JayLand Cat, Georgia

This is issue #176 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits: