First Year Blues

Are first years still stuck in their last year of high school?
I can’t help but notice that a whole lot of first years, primarily girls have not yet fully embraced the fact that they are in university! I always seem to pass by a little group of girls talking about how things were in high school or the various characters that were found at their respective high schools!
Sadly these same sentiments echo into the academic sphere. People seem to complain so much about how much they are getting. Well what did you expect? No one here is going to force you to do work, we are expected to mature enough to handle the work load and do what is expected of them academically. University generally means that one has progressed from the stringent regulated existence of high school into the adult sphere of university education. Possibly, students are not yet mature enough to understand the responsibility of being in entire control of their behaviour and academic life. This may be an issue that the ministry of education must look into or reassess. Maybe, adding one extra year before Metric before they are allowed to get into university.
Ok. Fair enough some people are well into the university system and are indeed thriving in the system. They are managing with all the work and balancing it with all the partying and still meeting deadlines. The efforts by others are almost futile. Case in point a certain individual who once lived in C.B. (Cullen Bowels), left at the end of second term simply because he just could not manage the workload. This is a classic case of someone who just could not handle the pressures of university. He lost all of his D.P.’s for all of his subjects. I personally think that he could not have been adequately prepared for all of the requirements that Rhodes demanded of him. It’s quite a complicated issue in the sense that how does the university assess the level of maturity or readiness of their students? What criteria can they establish from just an application form? How can Rhodes expect to assess the readiness of students purely on the basis of a piece of paper? Possibly Rhodes could try find some means of assessing students before they arrive at Rhodes. Possibly by channeling students and assessing them by age. This may seem a little radical however; it seems that this may improve the number of dropouts that they experience over the first year. It is rather strange that we are all expected to have a level of maturity when we enter university; however, this is not the case.
I expect that as the university is expanding, Rhodes must find ways to cater the varying ages and levels of maturity expected from first years. Although this may not seem as a major issue for most, for me it has struck a chord because I really do not expect people to be incapacitated by the workload as well as the social obligations expected from friendships. It is a stringent process of understanding and appreciating the individual needs of Rhodes students.